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How Masks Travel: Aesthetics, Trade, War, and Authority in Eastern Nigeria, an Introduction

2019; UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center; Volume: 52; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/afar_a_00443

1937-2108

Sidney Littlefield Kasfir,

Global Maritime and Colonial Histories

In the area described by the Lower Niger, the Benue, and the Cross Rivers, a unique combination of circumstances made possible the mobility of masquerades between 1700 and the present. Behind this mobility lay, in the Cross River region and near it, the sophisticated trade networks in (at various times) slaves, palm oil, salt, cloth and ivory developed and managed by both the Calabar and Niger Delta traders, and inland, the Arochukwu. Between the Imo and Anambra Rivers lay the highest rural population density in sub-Saharan Africa. Throughout the much larger eastern region, masquerades were used to impose (and sometimes depose) authority, oil the wheels of trade, and give material substance to spiritual belief. Therefore in a region where masking served political, aesthetic, and economic ends and the density of both population and trade networks made almost everything commodifiable, masks traveled. Much of the way in which these exchanges took place is buried in local histories, and one of the aims of this group of essays is to demonstrate the recurrences and variations of the material objects and ensembles which were, and are, simultaneously commodities of a very special kind, things possessing ritual and political power, and aesthetic expressions of authority and its transgression. The authority of the Ekpe (Ngbe) society, marked publicly by its mask enactments and privately by its complex of ritual privileges made available to initiated members, was felt throughout the region that is now southeastern Nigeria and southwest Cameroon. Although it is commonly said that Ekpe functioned as a de facto government in the absence of centralized political power, Malcolm Ruel (1969) has given it a slightly different interpretation, arguing that its primarily role is as a sanction, formalizing and enforcing community authority. However it is seen, its mystical aspect was fed by both secret and public visual display and performance, the subject of some of the essays appearing here. In the otherwise egalitarian communities of the region, typically managed by councils of elders, Ekpe provided a formal authority structure. As it traveled northward into Igbo and later Idoma lands, however, it was the masquerade and its performance, but not usually the complex ritual structure and graded levels of membership, that was transferred. In central Idoma, for example, Ekpe incorporated the Ogongo masquerade, a cognate of the Igbo Okonko. The latter was a carved whiteface mask worn with a white knit body stocking, while the pair of Ekpe performers wore appliqué costumes with a peplum and small fabric "leopard tail." The fact that the Idoma word for leopard is eje, not ekpe, makes the masquerade's provenance clear. Besides Ekpe, a series of warrior masquerades also originated in the Cross River region and filtered northward into Ogoja and Idoma as Ogrinye or Oglinye (Talbot 1926, Kasfir 1979, 1988). Clans such as the Ohafia Igbo trained their own professional soldiers through a stringent set of requirements and a code of aggressive behavior which spread with its own masking practice: first dancing with enemy skulls or jawbones and later, when the pax Britannica shut down local warfare, with carved mask headdresses. This too, like Ekpe, thrived most successfully in the absence of a central political authority. Such masquerade groups were composed of young men (formerly fighters, now morphing into symbolic warriors), who remained under the watchful eye of the traditional governing councils of senior elders who in turn deployed them as "policemen." However, given their youthful hubris, the elders' control was mostly nominal and they in fact existed on both sides of the law as self-proclaimed vigilantes (Kasfir 1979). In this form they are the precursors of today's transgressive behavior by young men's masquerades in the region (Pratten 2008).Jordan Fenton's essay in this collection focuses upon the masquerade societies known as Ukwa, Nnabo, and Agaba, which operate in contemporary Calabar town. An important part of his analysis links their forms and ideas with much older and now defunct local warrior-related societies, but also societies from elsewhere. These elements are combined conceptually in what he terms "currencies," which enable the exchange of performative elements across time and space, and like currency, gradually accumulate power not unlike "money in the bank." Looked at historically, their role as a form of social and political protest in the Cross River region continues the analogous behavior of the older Ekpe, Ekpo, and Blood Men Associations under earlier forms of authority and displays the important role of youth culture in challenging precolonial and colonial power's replacement by often corrupt local politicians.Shifting the focus further north from Calabar to Arochukwu, Eli Bentor excavates the complex roots of its Ikeji festival. In an ethnically heterogeneous environment, Arochukwu communities maintain their historically separate identities and during the festival publicly acknowledge the role of warriors from the peripheral Ibom Isii group in helping to win a war against local enemies and to thus establish the Arochukwu village-group. In turn the various Ibom Isii villages perform warrior style masquerades during the festival, which Bentor compares to the widespread warrior masking genres in the Cross River region. Up to this point the focus of these youth genres was on masculinity: Recall that they were once associated with actual warfare and not just the performance of male aggression through costumes, music and dance. But unlike in, say, Idoma, this kind of "play" (as masquerades are called in Nigerian pidgin) has been replaced in Arochukwu by what Bentor calls cogendered age grades and even more diffuse hometown associations.This introduction of gender as an important factor in Cross River masquerades is taken up more broadly by Amanda Carlson in her essay, which examines how the female body and gender symbolism permeate many masquerades in the Cross River region such as Ejagham. In turn she analyzes how these are invented, traded, bought, or stolen in a region where almost everything is commodifiable. If warrior masquerades embody the essence of masculinity by acting it out, certain Cross River women's masquerades do something parallel, except that the act of protest or defiance they express is based in the power of a very widely held taboo: publicly exposing female nudity. There is also the opposite occurrence, the concealment of the dancer's identity, as in a typical male masquerade. Carlson carries this discussion into the Ekpe diaspora in Cuba and elsewhere where it inevitably encounters the opposite performative ideal, beauty-queen sexuality and the influence of American popular cinema. Finally she traces the reverse diasporization which has occurred as the Hollywood film industry has infiltrated popular culture in Nigeria, in this case, the Calabar Carnival, which combines elements of local women's performance with Caribbean carnival practices, engendering wide local debate over the proper way to narrate and display the female body.So far these papers have dealt with the Cross River region and its diffuse forms of political authority enforced or sometimes opposed by masquerade societies. But not all of what is now eastern Nigeria consisted of small-scale gerontocracies. A strong centralized kingship grew up (or was imposed) in Igala sometime before the sixteenth century, at the Niger-Benue Confluence, nexus of north-south and east-west riverine trade. Its capital, Idah (old spelling Idda), is situated on the east bank of the Niger. A second monarchy, further downriver, is Onitsha, which its present obi has described as a fusion of Edo, Igala, and Igbo cultures (Achebe 2013a, b). On the Lower Niger the Igbo and Igala therefore dominated the south-north river trade beginning in Brass and Bonny in the Delta and reaching Nupe and beyond to Hausaland. The Igala kingdom, until the mid-nineteenth century when Europeans took control of much of the trade, based its wealth and power on transshipment of all manner of goods, from slaves to necessities such as agricultural products and salt and luxuries such as imported cloth and beads. Igala political authority, unlike that along the Cross River and its hinterland, was based in a palatine retinue headed by an atta, or king, with a council, the Igala Mela, representing the nine indigenous clans as owners of the land, and an achadu or prime minister who represented the interests of Igbo settlers and other nonroyals. Together they acted as kingmakers and limited the power of the atta. The Igala Mela also controlled the very powerful ancestral masquerade, Egwu Afia. To offset this, the atta, as he consolidated his authority over various indigenous clans, confiscated (or had established, still an unsolved question) a mask from each, the eight masks collectively known as the Egwu Atta, which represented the palace's ritual dominance and its identity as "the face of the nation" (Sargent 1988). The most popular oral tradition, however, insists that the eight royal masks were left behind on the battlefield by a fleeing Jukun army many centuries ago. In either case, the royal masks, through their change in ownership, have come to symbolize the authority of the palace. Whether the Jukun army with its masquerades actually traveled down the Benue at some point, or this is an ingenious mythical genealogy, is a fascinating art-historical puzzle which others besides myself have tried to solve (e.g., Adepegba n.d., Miachi 2012).The larger point to draw from the story here is that the same combination of influence and authority, backed by considerable economic wealth through trade and an understanding of the potential use of supernatural sanctions bestowed by the possession of powerful masks, occurred at both the Confluence and the Cross River and allowed for the transference in ownership of masks and sometimes the complete ritual ensembles that surrounded them. While the rights to deploy them were bought and sold in the Cross River, in Igala they were appropriated by the palace from its subjects (or in mythical form, its enemies) and reinvented as a royal genre. In Idah, the Igala capital, just as in Arochukwu, these masquerades had diverse ethnic origins but were brought together ritually through the celebration of a major festival.Finally, let me return to masks and sculpture from the region as commodities to be bought and sold. Initially supported by a high population density and strong trading ethos, these objects became international commodities during the palm oil trade and subsequently have moved from their places of origin into far-off museums and private collections during the colonial and post-independence period. While seemingly a problem of a different order, this international entry into a more global art market deserves a place in any serious conversation about how masks travel. For one thing, it exemplifies the movement of eastern Nigerian art through trade networks, a "traditional" (in the sense of precolonial and early colonial) practice in much of the region. Further, this modern trade has been driven in no small part by Nigeria's off-the-books economy and a lax bureaucratic enforcement of its antiquities laws. One example is a group of six Idoma masks and figures which I documented during fieldwork in the 1970s and '80s but since 2009 have encountered in museums and private collections in both Europe and the United States, culminating in their inclusion in the carefully researched exhibition Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley (2011) for which I was one of the curators. As in the other essays in this collection, the underlying factor in this globalized trade is the mobility of masks as an art form. Some of the motivations are different: while not for political and economic gain or spiritual and social empowerment as in cases of local ownership, the international art market offers other rewards. As acquisitions, whether by museums or private collectors, masks as a special kind of commodity offer both investment potential and the burnishing of the new owner's reputation for taste and erudition, in addition to the aesthetic satisfaction provided by their sheer emotional affect. At the beginning stage of such trajectories from local to global, there is typically a "willing seller-willing buyer" scenario, contrary to the romanticized notion that village-level art theft is usually a stealth-in-the-night, one-sided occurrence. The seller is usually neither the mask's owner nor its caretaker, but nonetheless a member of the community who knows where it is stored and whose need for money outweighs respect for its cultural value. The buyer is usually a cultural outsider, such as an itinerant trader with business connections to bigger traders in places like Foumban, who then sell them to art dealers in Paris or Brussels. There are of course variations on this theme: a Paris dealer with a degree in anthropology from the Sorbonne proudly explained to me how he and a fellow dealer from London traveled directly to Idomaland in the early 1970s and did two weeks of "fieldwork," which meant buying masks of a generation ago very cheaply after agreeing to have replacements made for the owners, and then selling them for a huge profit in Paris.The "eastern region" of Nigeria, an awkward shorthand for lands between the Niger-Benue Confluence and the Niger Delta and Cross River, is the subject of these essays because they developed from an exhibition of art from this region at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2015. The same kind of inquiry could be done in many other places, such as Christopher Steiner's (1994) work in Côte d'Ivoire in 1988. We hope the subject will expose some of the complexity in tracing mask origins and discourage the rigid classificatory assumptions which surround masks and their study.