Biography
Solomon Kwaghko, originally from Gboko in Benue State, Nigeria, served for over a decade as a minister with the Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA), engaging communities deeply affected by ecological disruption and Christian persecution. These experiences shape his commitment to homiletics that gives voice to suffering, resilience, and the sacredness of threatened environments. Now pursuing advance theological studies at Yale Divinity School, Solomon explores how preaching, religious imagination, and ecological consciousness can foster healing and mobilize faith communities to confront the intertwined challenges facing vulnerable people and their lands.
Paper Abstract
Employing Shawn Wilson’s Indigenous research paradigm which upholds a relational methodology grounded in ceremonial accountability and holistic inter-being, this paper centers Tiv greeting rituals as living roots for relational accountability and ecological restoration amid environmental crises. Unlike the Western “hello” or “hi,” Tiv salutations embody reflective existentialism: morning greetings ask “U nder nena?” (“How did you wake up?”), expressing gratitude for surviving night’s liminal threshold, while afternoon inquiries pose “U pande nena?” (“How have you faded?”), acknowledging each day as a subtraction from finite lifespan. These verbal gestures are not casual but philosophical acts, cultivating temporal humility and intentional presence. This reflective way of being shaped Tiv ancestors’ ecological industriousness. Guided by mortality-aware mindfulness, they cultivated resilient agroforestry systems such as oranges, mangoes, palm groves, and yam fields which is harmonized with Central Nigeria’s savanna rhythms. Such place-based wisdom sustained communities through seasonal cycles, embedding reciprocity with land and kin. Today, climate disruption and cultural erosion threaten this rootedness, severing humans from embodied knowing and natural attunement.
Drawing on the theme “Return to the Roots: How We Move Forward,” I argue that reimagining Tiv greetings offers dynamic tools for relational accountability and ecological healing, not mere nostalgia. When harnessed ethically, digital technologies can amplify and export these wisdoms through apps, or virtual exchanges, preserving oral traditions while fostering global dialogue. Ultimately, Tiv greetings reveal that everything needed for relational accountability, temporal awareness, communal care, ecological reciprocity lies “below our feet” in ancestral soil. By ethically integrating technology as a servant of place-based praxis, we tether hope to intercommunions of spirituality, community, and land, moving forward by returning.