Keeping the Mbari spirit alive

CHUKS OLUIGBO

As you walk into the premises of the Imo State Council for Arts and Culture (ISCAC), also called Mbari Cultural Centre, located on Mbari Street, Owerri, the state capital, keep your eyes to the left. The first sight you behold is a shrine-like hut housing sculpted images, and the impression you immediately get is that this must be a place for idol worship. But you’re wrong. That shrine-like hut is actually Mbari house and the images in there are not for worship.

 

Mbari house, also called 'house of the gods'

“Mbari in Igbo culture is not an idol for worship. It is just an art form that has its origin very deep in Igbo cultural and religious beliefs and practices,” Ash Okoro, one-time director of ISCAC, tells me as I sit in his office in 2009.

The council, he says, is saddled with the primary responsibility of preserving and fostering Igbo arts and culture, documenting same, and propagating same through performing arts, visual arts, fine and applied arts, print documentation and video documentation. The Mbari house is all part of this preservation process.

Mbari, often described as ‘art as sacrifice’ or ‘art as propitiation’, dates back to remote antiquity. It is a visual art form that has its origins in Igboland, South-east Nigeria, particularly among the Owerri people. Mbari house, usually a large open-sided square shelter that contains many life-sized, painted figures, is a sacred house constructed as a propitiatory rite.

"Mbari was a celebration through art of the world and of life lived in it. It was performed by the community on command by its presiding deity, usually the Earth goddess, Ala, who combined two formidable roles in the Igbo pantheon as fountain of creativity in the world and custodian of the moral order in human society," wrote the late Chinua Achebe in his essay on Mbari.

Herbert M. Cole, art historian, in his review Art and Life among the Owerri Igbo, also describes Mbari as “one of the most fascinating artistic phenomena in tropical Africa” and the process of erecting an Mbari as rich in tradition and ritual, marked by body painting, drumming, dancing, singing and chanting.

Okoro concurs, adding that while mud sculptures could be found in other parts of Nigeria, they are quite different from Mbari. Mbari is specific to Igbo people, and it also has its own peculiar history, he says.

“Prior to the advent of Western civilisation, Igbo people, as indeed the rest of pre-literate African peoples, did not have any knowledge of modern medicine as it exists today. At the same time, there was no good knowledge of the causes and effects of many of the existing diseases that often took their toll on the people, such as influenza, swollen stomach, etc. Medical practice was shrouded in mysticism, and outbreak of epidemic of any form was usually attributed to the anger of a particular god whom the people must have offended grievously. In such cases, the elders would go to the diviner (Afa or Udo) to find out the cause of the outbreak, and the oracle would tell them to go and appease the Earth goddess (Ala). The process of pacification was through the erection of Mbari (Igba Mbari),” Okoro tells me.

When this happened, he says, craftsmen and women were selected to perform the function of erecting an Mbari. These selected people (Ndi Mbari) were taken to a secluded area far off from the vicinity of the village, usually near a forest, where they were kept in an enclosure fenced round with the palm leaves (Mgbala). Within this enclosure, and throughout the time it took to erect the Mbari, these craftspeople lived a normal community life, relating with one another, and even procreating.

Erection of Mbari was a tedious task, he says, and it took upwards of eight to ten years to finish one Mbari. Children who were born within the Mbari enclave had the word ‘Ibari’ attached to their names.

Within the time it took to erect an Mbari, Okoro tells me that no member of the affected community was allowed to go into the Mbari enclave. And ‘Ndi Mbari’ themselves did not leave the enclave in the daytime because no member of the community was expected to see them within this period, nor were they supposed to have any interaction with the community. For that period, they were literarily sacrificed to the gods for the restoration of the health of the people. They only went out at night, bearing their hurricane lanterns, into the forests to gather materials needed for their job.

He explains that the anthill was the major material used in erecting the Mbari, not the red earth as many people suppose. “Unknown to many people in these modern times, including even researchers, the material used in erecting Mbari was not the red earth. It was the anthill. Of course, anthills were everywhere then. It was easy to gather the anthill mud in large quantities. With the anthill mud, water and other materials, the craftsmen moulded images representing various gods and goddesses, and so on. They also used the anthill mud to smoothen the surface of the images, and then used white chalk (Nzu) and certain leaves to decorate them,” he adds.

The images in an Mbari house depended on the oracle’s prescriptions. Typically, however, there were images of various prominent deities that inhabit the traditional Igbo cosmic system. These include Ala (the Earth goddess and goddess of fertility), Amadioha (the god of thunder), Ogwugwu (the god of the forest), Nwaorie (the goddess of Nwaorie River), Ahiajoku (the god of harvest), etc. Closely attached to each deity were images of animals such as monkeys, rams, snakes and owls. In Igbo mythology, these animals were believed to represent errand spirits or mystical messengers of the deities.

In the Mbari house as preserved at the Mbari Cultural Centre, in addition to the above, there are also images of Ikoro, the Igbo traditional instrument for communicating messages; unusual creatures such as the ostrich (Enyi Nnunu); a certain tall figure representing Alakuko, purportedly the tallest man in Igboland, a name said to have been given to him by a white man who once visited the eastern part of Nigeria; ‘Onye afo toro’, a man whose stomach became distended because he committed an abomination against Ala, etc.

When the Mbari had been fully erected, Okoro says what followed was ‘Iya Mbari’, a religious festival of dedication and handover of the Mbari to the gods as demanded by the oracle. “It was a big celebration usually accompanied by merriment and festivities which involved every member of the community – the common people, traditional rulers, titled people, etc. Once the ceremony was over, no member of the community went back to the Mbari house.”

In other words, an essential part of the tradition was its ephemeral nature. After the ritual was complete, going in or even looking at the Mbari house was considered taboo. The building was not maintained and decayed in the elements.

Okoro regrets that this Mbari tradition was discontinued, saying a unique art form would have evolved from it that would have been acknowledged the world over. “What we have now at the council are mere replications of the original Mbari, and they are courtesy of Rev. Fr. Dr. Ifeanyi Anozie, the first director of the Arts Council. Though a Catholic priest, he understood the importance of this aspect of the Igbo art form and worked hard to resuscitate it, otherwise we would have lost everything,” he adds.

But I am told there are still remnants of the ancient Mbari tradition in some parts of the old Owerri. My search takes me to Emohe, Emii, Owerri North LGA of the state, in the home of Okenze Duru E. U. Oparaocha, where I encounter an Mbari house dedicated to Ala-Ovu.

At the Mbari house in the Oparaocha residence, a small hut roofed with corrugated iron zinc, a long bamboo pole crossed over two-pronged stumps on either side forms a fence at the entrance. Before he allows me entry, he points to a small basket in front of the place and informs me that I have to make an offering before going in. “It is the tradition here,” he tells me.

Inside the Mbari, which is dedicated to Ala-Ovu, Mother god of land of Emohe, there’s an array of different colourful images, all of them beautiful and artistic. Oparaocha tells me these different images represent the various arms of Ala-Ovu, the Mother god. He adds that even though they look modern, the images were actually erected from the traditional material for Mbari, that is, anthill.

“Our people say that a god that is not wealthy does not deserve Mbari. Our own god here is wealthy and so had Mbari in the past. When I became the high priest, I erected Mbari for her as a continuation of that inherited tradition,” Oparaocha, who says  he is the traditional prime minister of Emii and the high priest of the Mother god of land of Emohe, Emii, tells me as I sit in the veranda in front of his bungalow.

Mbari, Oparaocha says, has its origin in remote antiquity. The one in his compound, the one of whom he is the high priest, was preserved and handed down from father to son across the generations until it got to him through his father.

“My forefathers did it, but in the process of relocating from one settlement to another because there were no permanent residences, they abandoned the ones they built in their old habitations, and those areas have now become farmlands.”

He says the present Mbari was built by him in 1950, adding that as long as he lives, he will continue to preserve the inheritance. “I will never destroy our hard-earned history, custom and tradition. Mbari is part of our rich history,” he says.

But even though Mbari tradition as practised by the ancients has not been sustained, it is good to note that over the years, artists have drawn inspiration from the Mbari tradition. The first Mbari Club was founded in Ibadan in 1961 by a group of young writers with the help of Ulli Beier, then a teacher at the University of Ibadan. It was called Mbari Artists and Writers Club and was a place for new writers, dramatists and artists to meet and perform their work. The Ibadan club operated an art gallery and theatre and published works by Nigerian artists as well as Black Orpheus, a journal of African and African-American literature. Among its earliest members were Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.

“The Mbari Club drew on the aesthetics of organic dissolution and degeneration represented by the Mbari art of the Ibo of southern Nigeria, who created works of art only to let them decay and decompose, awaiting another season of creation,” writes Toyin Adepoju, in Encyclopaedia of the African Diaspora: Origins, Experiences and Culture edited by Carole Boyce Davies.

“Coming to birth in the flux of the pre-independence and immediate post-independence in Nigeria, it brought together a constellation of artists whose work embodied the quality of transformation embodied by the aesthetic of creation, decay and regeneration evoked by the Mbari tradition. It did this in terms of imaginative reconfiguration and transmutation of indigenous African forms within a matrix constituted by the creative conflict of cultures engendered by the colonial experience, which was reworked by the artists into development of novel discursive forms,” Adepoju adds.

Currently, there is Mbari Literary Society (MLS) domiciled in Owerri. The society prides itself as “an independent society of like-minded writers and creative artists – poets, dramatists, novelists, critics, essayists, performing artists, etc.”

In 2010, MLS, which until recently held its weekly reading/critique sessions at the Mbari Cultural Centre, launched an anthology of poems aptly titled Aja Mbari (Mbari Sacrifice). The anthology was described in a review as “not only a showpiece that displays the colours and contours, warring and workings of young creative minds of this generation; it is also an offering at the shrine of creativity: a true sacrifice of words” at the Mbari shrine.