Mayor Griffin Lotson’s homecoming: When the water flows back to its source
Water, it is said, always finds its way back to the source. It may travel through rough terrains, meander through valleys, or tumble down rocky slopes, but it never forgets where it began. In many ways, this timeless law of nature captures the poetic rhythm of Griffin Lotson’s remarkable homecoming, a journey that bridges continents, centuries, and consciousness. From the sacred soil of Eri, the cradle of the Igbo race, to the historic hills of Nsukka, the ancestral water has returned to its spring.
In October and November 2025, two great institutions – the ancient throne of His Majesty, Eze Dr. Chukwuemeka Eri (Eze Di Gboo, Ezeora 34th, Eze Akajiovo Igbo), and the modern citadel of learning, the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN) – will stand as twin altars of memory and meaning. Each, in its own way, will celebrate the return of one of Igbo’s long-lost sons – Commissioner Griffin Lotson, Vice Chairman (Emeritus) of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission, USA, and Mayor Pro Tem of Darien, Georgia. Lotson’s transatlantic journey from Saint Simons Island, Georgia to Obu Gad, Eri, and onward to Princess Alexandra Auditorium, UNN, is not merely ceremonial. It is metaphysical. It is historical. It is restorative. It is, quite literally, the water returning to its ancestral spring.
On Friday, 31 October 2025, under the royal gaze of Eze Akajiovo, the World Eri Festival Symposium unfolded under the deeply reflective theme: “The historical, geographical, anthropological, biblical, and migration as valid foundational social factors in resolving the common human ancestral features between Jewish/Igbo origin and the Igbo of the East and West of the Niger Rivers of Nigeria.” This theme, complex yet evocative, invites us to look at the Igbo story not through the fog of myth but through the clear lenses of evidence and history. In my keynote lecture at the Symposium, I offered what I called “The Five Pillars of Origins” – a synthesis of historical, geographical, anthropological, biblical, and migratory perspectives that illuminate the long arc of the Igbo journey.
The historical pillar draws from archaeological and archival evidence – from Lejja iron smelting industry that dated back to over 2000 BCE and Igbo Ukwu excavations that revealed intricate bronze art predating Europe’s renaissance, to colonial records that confirm early Igbo settlement patterns across the Lower Niger basin. History testifies that Ndigbo are not latecomers to civilization; they are its quiet architects. The geographical pillar explains the natural logic of dispersion. The rivers Niger, Benue, and Cross created both bridges and boundaries, enabling trade, contact, and cultural diffusion. Geography, as always, shaped destiny, determining where communities settled, traded, or migrated in search of survival.
The anthropological pillar brings into focus the living patterns of Igbo social organization, acephalous systems of governance, communal land tenure, and egalitarian kinship structures that mirror democratic traditions long before colonial modernity arrived. The Igbo do not merely inhabit a space; they embody a civilization. The biblical pillar enters where faith and memory converge. Scholars and tradition-bearers have long drawn parallels between the ancient Israelites and the Igbo, from naming conventions to ritual observances. While the scriptures do not serve as historical proof, they offer spiritual resonance, a testimony of shared moral and metaphysical ancestry. And finally, the migration pillar traces the movement of people and ideas across time and space. From the trans-Saharan to the transatlantic, the Igbo story is one of resilience under pressure and identity in motion. The forced migrations of the 16th to 19th centuries scattered Igbo sons and daughters across the New World; yet, even in bondage, they preserved fragments of their ancestral rhythm.
It is within this historical grid that Griffin Lotson’s homecoming acquires symbolic power. As a descendant of the Gullah Geechee people, those African Americans who preserved deep linguistic and cultural ties to their African origins, Lotson stands today as a living testimony of continuity. The Gullah Geechee Corridor, stretching from North Carolina to Florida, is an open-air museum of African survival. In its folklore, language, and spirituality, one can still hear the echoes of the Niger, the Cross, and the Imo rivers. When Lotson traced his ancestral roots to the Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria, it was as though history itself exhaled; the long-dammed water had found its path home. At Obu Gad, Eze Akajiovo, custodian of the sacred Ovo Eri and the living memory of the progenitor Eri, confered a chieftaincy title upon Lotson. This gesture is more than symbolic hospitality; it is a spiritual restoration, a recognition that history’s broken links can be mended by cultural will and ancestral faith.
If Eri is the spiritual cradle, then Nsukka is the intellectual citadel of Igbo civilization. On Tuesday, 4 November 2025, the Faculty of Arts Distinguished Guest Lecture Series at the Princess Alexandra Auditorium, UNN, will host Griffin Lotson as he delivers his lecture titled: “Nigeria (Igbo) and USA (Gullah Geechee) Cultural Connections.” The lecture will gather distinguished figures – Engr. Kayode Olubumni Ojo, Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of the Governing Council (Special Guest of Honour); Prof. Simon Uchenna Ortuanya, the 16th Vice-Chancellor (Chief Host); Prof. Roseline Ijeoma Okorji, Dean of the Faculty of Arts (Host); and Dr. Nwachukwu Anakwenze, Onowu Regent of Abagana and CEO of Mercy Medical Group, LA (Chairman).
As Principal Investigator of the Pat Ikechukwu Ndukwe Sociolinguistics Laboratory (PINSLAB) Research Group, Directorate of Research, UNN, I am humbled to facilitate this bridge between diaspora scholarship and homeland memory. It is not merely an academic event; it is a pilgrimage of ideas, a scholarly communion between the ancestors and the academy. In a world that often commodifies identity, UNN’s Distinguished Guest Lecture Series reclaims it as a site of dialogue, research, and cultural renewal. It affirms the University’s motto, “To Restore the Dignity of Man,” by restoring the dignity of memory, the kind that links Nsukka’s hills to Eri’s valley, and Nigeria’s present to its diasporic past.
Griffin Lotson’s presence in Nsukka is more than an academic courtesy. It is cultural diplomacy in its purest form, a dialogue between history and destiny. It symbolizes the meeting point between two civilizations scarred by displacement yet united by resilience. The Gullah Geechee and the Igbo share a common ethos – the rhythm of freedom, the defiance of erasure, the insistence on identity. From Igbo Landing on St. Simons Island, where captured ancestors chose death over slavery, to the postcolonial struggles in the Niger Delta and beyond, the same indomitable spirit flows through time. This reconnection also challenges Nigeria’s internal contradictions. For too long, the Igbo have been treated as the rejected stone of the national edifice. Yet, like that very stone, they have become the cornerstone of creative energy, enterprise, and cultural depth. Lotson’s return, and UNN’s embrace, invite the Nigerian nation to rethink its moral geography – to see in the Igbo not a threat, but a treasure.
The twin events of Eri’s World Cultural Festival and UNN’s Distinguished Guest Lecture mark a convergence of tradition and scholarship – the spiritual and the cerebral wings of Igbo civilization. One speaks through ritual and heritage, the other through research and discourse. Together, they forge a new front in the global conversation about African identity and the politics of memory. The symbolism is profound: At Eri, Lotson reconnects with his roots. At Nsukka, he reconnects with his reason. Between both, the Igbo world reconnects with its redemptive destiny. In this union of the sacred and the scholarly, the water completes its course, flowing homeward to nourish both tradition and intellect. And as it does, it carries a message for Ndigbo everywhere: our unity is not in uniformity but in shared remembrance.
From Eri’s valley to Nsukka’s hills, from Bonny Harbour’s slave camps to St. Simons Island’s shore, we now see the same ancestral rhythm pulsing beneath different skies. History calls; geography answers; anthropology interprets; scripture sanctifies; migration completes the circle. And in that circle stands the human heart, beating with one eternal name: Igbo – Ndigbo – Ndị gboo (the treasured relic of cosmic spark). The water has indeed returned to its source, not as a stream of nostalgia but as a river of renewal. Eri remembers. Nsukka responds. And the world, once more, listens.
But what does it mean, truly, for water to find its source? It is more than the poetry of return. It is the philosophy of becoming — the realization that the past is not a destination left behind but a living compass guiding the future. When Griffin Lotson retraces the arc from St. Simons to Eri and from Eri to Nsukka, he embodies the timeless proverb that the river that forgets its source will dry up before its time. In his footsteps, we find the deeper logic of our own continuity: that memory is not mere remembrance, but responsibility. Every civilization renews itself at the confluence of its memory and imagination. The World Eri Festival reminds us that our myths are not dead relics; they are living archives of human experience, encoded in stories, songs, and sacred spaces. The University of Nigeria Nsukka extends that archive into the realm of ideas — transforming oral heritage into academic dialogue, and ancestral wisdom into intellectual capital. Between Eri’s sacred grove and Nsukka’s academic citadel lies the bridge that connects tradition and modernity, faith and reason, heritage and humanity.
This homecoming, then, is not only Griffin Lotson’s; it is ours too. It is the return of dignity to memory, of scholarship to ancestry, of language to meaning. It is the reunion of scattered fragments of a once-whole story now retold in harmony. If Eri represents the beginning and Nsukka the becoming, then their meeting in this season signifies renewal, the cyclical truth that what goes around, comes around not in vengeance but in vision. The ancient Igbos believed that what the gods hold in trust cannot be lost to humanity. This, perhaps, is the quiet message of these twin ceremonies. Despite centuries of dislocation, the spark of identity survives the tempest of time. It flickers still in Gullah prayers, in Geechee songs, in the rhythmic idioms of survival and faith. It flickers still in Nsukka’s classrooms, in the scholarly quest to reconnect broken genealogies and reimagine the African self beyond the shadow of colonial epistemologies.
And so, as we stand at this historic confluence, we realize that our story – the Igbo story – is not one of victimhood but of victory; not of endings but of eternal beginnings. The slave ship and the scholar’s podium are separated by centuries, yet they form two ends of the same dialogue between exile and return, between silence and rediscovery. If the valley of Eri represents remembrance, and the hill of Nsukka stands for reflection, then the ocean that lies between them – the Atlantic – becomes a metaphor for resilience. Across that ocean flowed tears, but across it also flows now a renewed fellowship, a rediscovered fraternity of the spirit.
In the end, all roads lead home, and home is not a place on a map but a rhythm in the soul. The water has indeed returned to its source, clearer, deeper, wiser. The circle has closed, not to end the story but to begin a new chapter. And so we may intone again, with reverent confidence: Eri remembers. Nsukka responds. The world listens – and learns. For in the echo of that listening, humanity finds again what it once almost forgot, that we are, all of us, tributaries of one vast river of life, flowing endlessly toward meaning, carrying within us the eternal current of Ndị gboo, the first people, the living memory of mankind.
As we prepare for these two monumental events – the World Eri Festival Symposium, which held successfully on last Friday and the Faculty of Arts Distinguished Guest Lecture Series, which comes up on Tuesday 4 November 2025 – we are reminded that our collective future depends on our ability to remember, reconnect, and reinvent. Griffin Lotson’s return symbolizes a convergence of fragmented histories and a rebirth of pan-Igbo consciousness. May these twin events – one at the cradle of our civilization, the other at the cradle of our intellectual tradition – inspire a new resolve among Ndigbo to stand united, purposeful, and forward-looking. For in tracing our origins, we rediscover our destiny.
.Prof. Agbedo writes from the University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN)
