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.

Don’t blame the Nigerian journalist

CHUKS OLUIGBO

Let’s create a scenario. Ojoma Akpoma, a journalist who reports Real Estate for a newspaper, lives in Badagry area of Lagos. He would have loved to live in a place like Ikeja, which is close to his office, or at least somewhere more central, like Surulere, but the rents there are rather too expensive for his meagre means. He has no car. He has no laptop. He has no camera. His office did not provide any of these things for him. He has been struggling to save money to at least buy himself a personal computer and a camera to facilitate his work, but his monthly salary is too meagre that he can hardly save up enough. Worse still, he has not been paid in the last five months.

So, when he hears this morning that a building has collapsed at Ojota, Ojoma, a conscientious journalist, is desirous of getting to the site so as to file in a firsthand report for tomorrow’s publication, but he is constrained. It will cost him at least six hours and about N1,200 in transport fare to and fro, factoring in the Lagos traffic. Can he afford that huge cost?

While he contemplates this, his phone beeps. He checks. It is an SMS from a real estate developer inviting him to an exhibition at a hotel in Festac Town. He thinks about it. It will take him about one and a half hours to get to Festac, plus transport cost of about N600 to and fro. He will have the opportunity of meeting CEOs or top shots of some real estate firms from whom he can get interviews and possible leads. There will also be other advantages. More importantly, he won’t go home empty-handed – there will also be an envelope to say “thank you for honouring our invitation”, which will somehow make up for the unpaid salaries and take care of transport fare and other expenditures.

Now if you were Ojoma, which of the above two matters would you attend to? I guess the choice is not a very hard one. If we’re honest, we will agree that the answer is quite straightforward.

Ojoma’s tale is all too familiar. Every day the average Nigerian journalist walks this kind of tight rope. He is employed by a media organisation that does not care much about his welfare. He is poorly remunerated, and even the meagre salary agreed upon by his organisation is not promptly paid. He is expected to provide for himself all the tools he needs to work effectively – laptop, camera, car, etc. Nobody sponsors his editorial trips, but he is expected to file in news and reports of things happening in the sector he covers, no matter where it is happening. He is expected to investigate crime without funding in a tough terrain like Nigeria where access to information is at its lowest ebb; where people are less than willing to volunteer information to any broke-arse journalist poke-nosing into other people’s affairs; where there is no form of insurance cover in case of any danger to life; and where there is absence of legal framework to protect the journalist in case of threat to life in the course of duty. If he dies in the process, all his employer will probably do is take out a quarter page of obituary and deeply regret the passage of so-and-so who died in active service. That’s all. And his family will be left forlorn, having lost their breadwinner, because even the little monthly deductions from his salary in the form of pension are not remitted to the appropriate pension fund administrator.

That is why I sense ultra-insensitivity whenever I hear or read people say, and write, that the Nigerian journalist is not doing enough, is not properly playing his role as the voice of the masses and watchdog of society – without recourse to the tight corner that the Nigerian journalist finds himself, without reference to the harsh environment he operates in. Here are samplers:

“Unlike the 1960s through the 1980s, news coverage is getting weaker and weaker. And many a times, critical examination of people and events are missing. In addition, you don’t see strong investigative journalism anymore. What passes for news, many a time, looks like government-dictated public service announcement. And many editorials are nothing but apologies and infantile opposing viewpoints. Except on few instances, commentaries and opinion pieces by some columnists are dull and dumb. It is as if some are afraid to speak their mind; afraid to offend; afraid to lose favour; and afraid to push the envelope,” wrote Sabella Abidde in The Punch of July 25, 2012.

“Sadder is the fact that journalists, like the general population, seem to have a very short attention span. For instance, the press may report on a very juicy scandal on Monday; but a week or two later, it moves to the next scandal with no follow-up of previous events. Therefore, unscrupulous politicians have got used to weathering the storm for a few days or a few weeks — confidently knowing that ‘all would be forgotten soon’. And the rate at which the media forget, or become disinterested, is alarming and discouraging,” Abidde wrote in the article entitled ‘Journalism in contemporary Nigeria’.

Similarly, Lawrence Nwobu, in another article, observed that Nigerian journalists have since become seasoned hypocrites and opportunists who send critical anti-government articles from their stables on a regular basis only to end up jumping into the same government at the slightest opportunity. “Once in government, they become apologists of the same government they had spent years criticising. This has had the effect of diminishing any pressure such critical articles could ordinarily have exerted on the government as every journalist is now seen as a rabble-rousing opportunist hypocrite who is only criticising because he has not been offered a position in government,” Nwobu wrote.

By Jove, do these critics expect anything different? Doing so would mean pushing their optimism too far. Yes, the Nigerian media used to have “a number of fearless, very bright, and forthright journalists” who could put their lives on the line for the good of society, but all that changed when the Nigerian journalist realised that Nigeria has a terribly bad character. He realised the futility of his activism; that even those he is fighting for will turn around and blame him if in the process he runs into trouble with powerful elements in the society. Now he sees no harm in joining the same government he has criticised in the past, especially since his criticisms aren’t even getting anywhere and the citizens he is staking his life for see him as a rabble-rouser.

 

Put simply, the present-day Nigerian journalist is a victim of societal influence, much like other professions. He is a product of the society he lives in. He is no different from the Nigerian police, military, customs and other agencies of government, even the judiciary which is considered as the last hope of the common man. He operates within the same harsh economic environment. He has responsibilities. He aspires for better life. He desires to own a home in Lagos or Abuja and ride in a good car. And he also wants to stay alive – or at least ensure that even if he dies in the line of duty, his dependants won’t start life from scratch.

Like every other struggling Nigerian citizen, the Nigerian journalist is like a man trying to extinguish an inferno with his bare hands. In the process, he is also being cautious not to get his fingers burnt.

The real task before the Igbo

CHUKS OLUIGBO

Sometimes I wonder whether the Igbo people truly understand the enormous developmental challenges facing Igboland as a whole. As a concerned Igbo son, I have in several articles harped on the need for the Igbo people who are scattered in all parts of Nigeria (and the world) to begin to think of how to develop their homeland so that our children at home will engage themselves meaningfully without necessarily having to migrate to Lagos or Abuja. Igbo contribution to the development of the various cities where they have settled is not in doubt. Ironically, Igboland remains a backwater.

Recently again, precisely on September 26, 2013, Babatunde Fashola, Lagos State governor, re-iterated this point during the 25th anniversary of Aka Ikenga in Lagos. While tendering “an unqualified and unreserved apology” to the Igbo people over his government’s relocation of some destitute said to be of Anambra origin from Lagos to their home state months earlier, Governor Fashola said: “Why should people feel compelled to emigrate from one place to the other? Is there one part of this country that is less endowed, whether in human or natural resource? Is that the problem? Is it the case that perhaps some parts are so endowed but not adequately managed? Those are the honest debates that we must have…. How can development be so difficult in the part of Nigeria that gave us Ike Nwachukwu, Chinua Achebe, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Odumegwu Ojukwu, Alex Ekwueme and so on, how can development be so difficult in that part of this country? I think those are the real issues.”

Unfortunately, not a few Igbo people who viewed the development as a great triumph for the Igbo nation went to town to brag about their victory. They perceived the governor’s action only as a conciliatory move aimed at boosting the chances of his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), and its candidate, Chris Ngige, in the November 16, 2013 governorship election in Anambra State. The said Ngige was one of the earliest people to come out, following the ‘deportation’, to defend the action of Lagos State government.

And so, rather than address the real issues, rather than seek answers to the governor’s questions on how to develop the South-East to stem the tide of these migratory movements from the region into not only Lagos but other parts of the country as well, even the deadly North-East zone, these over-bloated Igbo egos concentrated on the governor’s apology, fanning themselves and boasting of how they would have dealt with the APC at the polls if Fashola hadn’t apologised. Obviously, they didn’t get the underlying message in the governor’s apology.

It was, however, cheering to read, few days later, that Ohanaeze Ndigbo, the apex Igbo socio-cultural organisation, themed the 2013 World Igbo Day celebration ‘Uplift Igboland, Think Home, Ndigbo’. World Igbo Day is marked on September 29 every year. Speaking at last year’s event which held at Michael Okpara Square, Enugu, Gary Enwo-Igariwey, the president general of Ohanaeze, again recapped this rather over-flogged issue of developing the home front.

“Ndigbo are endowed with enormous human and natural resources and can on their own recreate Abuja or Lagos in Igboland. We have as a people achieved tremendous feats in all we have set our minds on. As individuals, we have made great strides in all fields of endeavour. Our recovery from a three-year civil war is legendary. Many nations of the world who went through our experience still bear the marks of defeat and war. What we have lacked is collective action,” Enwo-Igariwey was quoted as saying.

“We can recreate these achievements and direct them towards uplifting Igboland. As a people, we have burst the rims of the space, Nigeria, and poured out to all corners of the world. In all of these places, we have left marks of success in all fields. In this country, we have taken all corners as home and have made our contributions, building homes and businesses. The marvels of Abuja and Lagos amongst other places bear marks of our contributions. And now the question: what have we done about Igboland? Have we given thought to how we can build industries and other businesses to create employment for our teeming youth in Igboland? Have we wondered why our young and not-too-young are streaming out of Igboland in search of greener pastures to other lands? Why have we chosen to invest so intensely in other lands to our detriment?”

The above words gave me hope. And then I read Ochereome Nnanna’s article, “Behind Fashola’s ‘unreserved apology’ to Ndigbo”. Although he tried to explain away the Igbo migrations, Nnanna literarily hit the bull’s eye when he described as sound Fashola’s point about people needing to develop their home states in order not to run away to other lands.

“Part of the Igbo agenda should be to develop Igboland so well that other Nigerians, Africans and foreigners should want to also come there with their investments. They would come if the opportunities are there. Nigerians feel cheated that Igbo come to their door mouths in large numbers and they cannot find enough of their own people in Igboland. Whatever is keeping them away should be addressed. Why would they even come when the owners of the land are leaving in such droves?” Nnanna wrote.

“Uncontrolled migration will destroy the Igbo nation. It will extinct the language, custom and values of the people. It will attenuate its majority status and bastardise its population which is rapidly being absorbed by their various host communities. It will continue to increase the insults the Igbo people suffer from their oft-aggrieved hosts and expose them to hostility and xenophobia. The Yorubas and Hausa-Fulanis also migrate and settle outside their native lands, but they do not suffer the level of hostility aimed at the Igbos because back home, there are enough indigenes and non-indigenes living profitably. Only a person who loves you can tell you the home truth,” he further submitted.

The point in all of this? For me, we may never stop living in or migrating to Lagos or Abuja or other parts of Nigeria, but let’s build Igboland to such a level that migrating to these locations will be one of the options, not the only way out. This point has been made for the umpteenth time, but as the saying goes, until we reach our destination, we have to keep going.

This article was first published in BusinessDay on October 17, 2013. The version published here has been slightly modified.