Jungian Archetypes Applied to African Traditions: The Child, Àbíkú

The baby was eight days old and had already tasted salt. At a naming ceremony in a friend's front room in south London, someone touched a grain to the child's lip, then a drop of honey, then water, then a smear of palm oil. Each thing said something about the life ahead: that it would have bite, that it would have sweetness, that it would need calm. Nobody explained the sequence. It explained itself.

I keep returning to that room when I think about Jungian archetypes applied to African traditions, because the room already held a complete theory of the child, and it did not need mine. The relationship between Carl Jung's Child archetype and the African concepts it gets compared to is not descent and not borrowing. Jung did not take the Child from Yoruba thought, and Yoruba thought did not need Jung to arrive at it. What links them is a shared observation — that a person can decline to grow, and that the decline has a recognisable shape — described twice, in two vocabularies, by people who were never in the room together.

That is a smaller claim than the ones usually made. It is also the only one I can defend.

Two vocabularies, one observation

Jung's Child is a figure of beginnings. In the essay he wrote with the classicist Karl Kerényi around 1940, the child is abandoned, exposed, smaller than everything that threatens it, and somehow not destroyed — a symbol, he argued, of the whole self a person has not yet become. Alongside it sits a darker relative: the puer aeternus, the eternal boy, a name borrowed from Ovid and developed at length by Jung's colleague Marie-Louise von Franz. The puer is the person who keeps the child's openness past the point where openness serves them. Every commitment is provisional. The real life is always the next one.

Here is the part that has to be said before anything else. Jung travelled to Kenya and Uganda in 1925, spent time on Mount Elgon, watched people greet the sunrise, and wrote the experience up as a glimpse of humanity's psychic dawn — as if the people in front of him were living in his own past. That framing is wrong, and it was wrong then. A Zurich analyst standing in the highlands of colonial Kenya did not find the childhood of the mind; he found adults with a cosmology as worked-out as his own. A decade later in Johannesburg, the analyst Wulf Sachs published Black Hamlet, an account of his sessions with John Chavafambira, a Manyika healer, and the book is now read less as psychology than as a record of how hard it was for European depth psychology to see an African intellectual as a peer.

So applying Jung's archetypes to African traditions carries a hazard built into the tools. Used carelessly, the frame turns Yoruba, Igbo, Akan, and Dogon thought into raw material — evidence for a European theory rather than theory in its own right. Used carefully, it does one useful thing: it puts two accounts of the same human problem side by side and lets each show what the other misses. What follows tries for the second. I have less room than the subject deserves, and I have left out more traditions than I have included.

First, the child arrives owed something

In Yoruba tradition, a person arrives already carrying a destiny. Orí — literally the head, and understood as the inner head, the part of a person that is most truly them — is chosen before birth, and àyànmọ́ is what that choice sets in motion. Scholars of Ifá, Wándé Abímbọ́lá foremost among them, treat orí not as folklore but as a full theory of personhood: the self is double, an outer life lived in the world and an inner head that the outer life is meant to catch up with.

That second half matters. Orí is not a script. It is a potential that can be missed. Versions differ by lineage and by diviner on how much is fixed, and Ifá verses are full of characters who choose well and then live badly, or choose poorly and are helped. But the structure is consistent: you begin owed something by yourself.

Jung's Child works similarly and arrives at it from the other end. For him the child image surfaces in adults — in dreams, in art, at the point where a life has gone rigid — and it announces a self that has not yet been lived. Both accounts say the same odd thing: the earliest thing in you is also the thing furthest ahead of you.

Then the household claims the child

A potential nobody claims stays potential. This is where the two vocabularies begin to separate, and it happens early.

Among the Yoruba, the naming ceremony — ìkómọjáde, the bringing-out of the child — gathers a household around a new person and gives them a name that is an argument about who they are and what the family has just been through. The tasting rite I watched is one common form; households differ on which items appear, and some include kola, bitter kola, alligator pepper, sugarcane, or fish. Among the Akan of Ghana, the outdooring on the eighth day performs a related function. In both, the child does not become a person alone. Personhood is conferred, witnessed, and owed back.

Jung's individuation has no equivalent step. It is famously interior work, and although he insisted it was not narcissism, it can be pursued in a study, alone, for years. Set that against the Yoruba idea of ìwà — character, conduct, the shape of a person as others encounter it, summarised in the proverb ìwà l'ẹwà, character is beauty. Ìwà cannot be assessed privately. It is visible only in how you treat people. Two theories of growth, and they disagree about who is qualified to say whether growth has occurred.

Then growth is offered, and it costs something

Every tradition that takes maturity seriously has a moment where it is offered on terms. Initiation, in the many forms it takes across the continent and among initiating lineages in the diaspora, is that moment — a passage in which the person who comes out is understood not to be the person who went in. I am not going to describe how any of it is done. That belongs to the lineages that hold it, and this is not the place to hand out other people's ceremonies.

What can be said is the logic. The offer of growth always includes a loss. Something has to be handed over: a name, a status, an old set of permissions, the version of yourself everyone was used to. Jung reached the same conclusion by a different road, describing the second half of life as a series of small deaths that the ego resists because it cannot see what is on the other side of them.

This is the hinge of the whole comparison. Growth is not addition. It is exchange. And an exchange can be declined.

Then, sometimes, the child refuses

Àbíkú — roughly ah-BEE-koo, "born to die" — is the Yoruba name for a child who comes and does not stay. In the common understanding, such a child belongs to a company of spirit companions and has made an agreement with them to return early. A household that has buried several infants may come to understand it as the same child arriving and leaving again. Among the Igbo of southeastern Nigeria, ọgbanje names a closely related figure; in many accounts an ọgbanje is bound to the spirit world by a hidden object, the iyi-uwa, and a dibia, a diviner-healer, may be asked to find it so the tie can be broken.

Two Nigerian poets wrote poems called "Abiku" in the 1960s, and they disagree in a way that is worth sitting with. J. P. Clark's speaks to the child, coaxing, exhausted, asking it to stay this time. Wole Soyinka's is the child speaking, and it is not sorry. In one telling the household pleads; in another the returning one has its own terms and states them.

Set the puer aeternus beside that. The eternal boy also declines the exchange. He keeps the options open, keeps the potential unspent, and reads every attempt to pin him down as a small death — which, in his own terms, it is. Von Franz's point was that the refusal feels like freedom from inside and looks like paralysis from outside, and that the gap between those two views is where the suffering lives.

The resemblance is real, and it is a resemblance of function, not of origin. Both traditions noticed a person who will not complete the trade, and both refused to treat it as simple weakness.

Side by side

What the refusal costs, and who pays

Jung's answer is that the individual pays. The unlived life accumulates; the person arrives at fifty with the same three unfinished projects and a growing suspicion that something was owed.

The African accounts are not organised around the individual at all. When a household understands a child as àbíkú, the suffering being named is the household's. There are graves. There is a mother who has done this before. Whatever else the concept is doing, it is holding grief in a form that can be spoken about, and that is a different job from diagnosing a stalled personality.

The most striking image of arrested completion I know is Dogon, and it comes with a warning. In the cosmology that Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen published from Mali in the mid-twentieth century, the being called Ogo — the pale fox, Yurugu — breaks out of the cosmic womb before he is finished, seizing his own creation ahead of time, and is therefore incomplete forever. Everything disordered in the world follows from that impatience. It is a devastating idea: the refusal is not of growth but of timing, and the punishment is being permanently almost.

And here scholars genuinely disagree, so I will name the positions rather than pick one. Griaule presented this material as Dogon esoteric knowledge, taught to him over decades. The Dutch anthropologist Walter van Beek, working in the same villages in the 1980s, could not find it, and argued in 1991 that the system as published owes more to the interview relationship than to Dogon tradition. Others hold that Griaule recorded something real held by a small number of elders. What is not in dispute is that the published version has been quoted for seventy years, often by people who never learned it was contested. I use Ogo here as an idea that has circulated, not as a settled fact about what the Dogon of Mali teach.

Then comes the return, or it doesn't

The last step in the mechanism is repair, and this is where African traditions are, to my reading, more generous than the Jungian account.

The Akan of Ghana carry an adinkra symbol called sankofa — a bird with its head turned back, or a stylised heart — from a proverb meaning roughly that there is no taboo in going back for what you forgot. Going back is not regression. It is a legitimate direction of travel.

Among the Yoruba, when one of a pair of twins dies, a carved figure — ère ìbejì — may be made and kept, and in many households it is washed, fed, and dressed alongside the living twin. Care continues for a child who did not grow. Read coldly, that is a practice for holding something unfinished without pretending it finished.

And in Haiti, the Marasa, the divine twins, are served in Vodou houses as children are served: sweets, attention, and a place near the beginning of things. They are not a degraded copy of Yoruba or Fon twin veneration. They are what that veneration became after the Middle Passage, among people who kept it alive under conditions designed to end it. Treating diaspora practice as a diluted version of a mainland original gets the history backwards, and it insults the people who did the keeping.

Where the connection ends

Four differences a careful reader should not blur.

Grief is not metaphor. Àbíkú and ọgbanje name recurring child death in real families. Some researchers have connected that pattern in affected households to sickle cell disease. Reading these words only as psychological allegory quietly converts other people's buried children into a figure of speech about your own stalled ambitions.

The unit is different. Jung's Child lives inside one psyche. Àbíkú is a relationship between a child, a household, a lineage, and a company of spirits. You cannot shrink the second into the first without losing most of what it says.

Growth is owed to different judges. Individuation is validated internally. Ìwà is validated by the people you live among. A person could complete a Jungian analysis and still be, in Yoruba terms, of poor character.

These are present-tense words. Ọgbanje is not an artefact. It is used now, including by writers such as Akwaeke Emezi, whose novel Freshwater takes the concept seriously as a description of self rather than as a symptom to be explained away. They are working inside a tradition, not reporting on one.

And underneath all four, the question of authority. The frame invites you to treat African material as evidence for a European theory. Reverse it, and orí is a theory of the divided self, ìwà a theory of moral development, sankofa a theory of productive return — none of which require Jung to be legible. He is one voice in the conversation. He is not the room.

Names and terms

• Orí (Yoruba) — the inner head; the destiny-bearing part of a person, chosen before birth.
• Ìwà (Yoruba) — character as others experience it; the measure of a person's conduct.
• Ìkómọjáde (Yoruba) — the ceremony bringing a new child out and naming them.
• Àbíkú (Yoruba, ah-BEE-koo) — "born to die"; a child understood to come and leave repeatedly.
• Ọgbanje (Igbo) — a closely related figure; a child bound to the spirit world.
• Iyi-uwa (Igbo) — the hidden object said to tie an ọgbanje to that world.
• Ère ìbejì (Yoruba) — a carved figure made and cared for when one twin dies.
• Marasa (Haitian Vodou) — the divine twins, served with the attention given to children.
• Sankofa (Akan, Ghana) — go back and fetch it; an adinkra symbol and a proverb.
• Puer aeternus (Latin, via Jungian psychology) — the eternal boy; the adult who will not trade openness for commitment.

One last thing

Sɛ wo werɛ fi na wosankɔfa a yenkyi — among the Akan of Ghana, it is no taboo to go back for what you forgot.

I keep a two-column note in the same document I draft these pieces in. The left column holds what I believed about a tradition when I started writing about it. The right holds what a source, a scholar, or a reader corrected. The àbíkú entry has four lines in the right column now. The fourth took me longest to write down, because it says that for about a year I had been treating other people's dead children as a useful metaphor for my own unfinished projects. I have left the left column visible. Deleting it is the version of this I would not be able to defend.