Arts: The Futility of Absolutism
By: P-J Ezeh,
Dept of Sociology/Anthropology,
University of Nigeria
Mon père ne vit pas, il prie…Notre monde est celui
qui croit à la fin du monde.
Cheik Hamidou Kane, in
L’aventure ambiguë
Introduction
Seven years ago, Jonathan Benthal as the editor of the lordly Anthropology Today journal wrote an editorial on anthropologists’ sectarian subscriptions which he began with the following words: “One aspect of the history of anthropology which has so far received little attention is the effects on
individual anthropologists of their religious backgrounds.” Often this is even all the more so to scholars and artists of other specializations. The extent to which an artist succeeds in being relevant beyond his time and clime may depend to a great extent on how he mediates between epistemological prejudices and the true freedom of thought that is the hallmark of genuine intellectual enterprise. I will draw from real-life
experiences to demonstrate this point. One is the present near-death of musical innovation in southeastern Nigeria because Christians enjoying their new-found majority among the elite there have stifled their latitude of thought by limiting their lyrics to orthodox and semi-orthodox slogans. Such ontological sterility is produced that, practically, songs no longer contain new messages and their renditions become mere
predictable routines. Creativity is cruelly manhandled.
The other is my personal experience during an ethnographic sojourn among the Orring, a minority ethnolinguistic group in Nigeria’s meridional districts, where my bias guided by Western scholarship very nearly deprived me of witnessing a rare phenomenon that is outside the more familiar principles of physics. A
tree was rooted up one year previously in a tropical rain storm but at about the same time a year afterwards it got restored without a human counterforce whatsoever.
An artist ruled by sectarian or any other form of absolutism is not capable of confronting unusual situations with a productive frame of mind.
The Musical Example
One of the best-known pioneer Christian missionaries among the Igbo, Bishop George Basden, devoted a chapter of his book on the ethnography of this Nigerian group to their music. Basden (1982) finished collection of data for the book in 1917. Christianity was only two odd decades in the land. The music he
described was the autochthonous variety. We lack the space and time in the present piece to report him in the sufficient detail that may recapture his fascination.
Contemporary art scholars have an array of examples of such approbatory views on various indigenous musical genres and in diverse African societies. What makes a work like Basden’s so useful for our present purposes is that it was published at a time the indigenous lifeways have suffered least contamination from
foreign impositions of the proselytizing and colonization years. Practically all subjects were covered as themes in the indigenous music and a wide range of original experimentation in sound and instruments tried.
Until as recently as 1970s such originality in creativity was still possible, and could be savoured in sectarian as in secular genres. There were accomplished virtuosos in such categories as folk, highlife, juju, soul, and so on. Harcourt Whyte’s sectarian compositions were a wonder that attracted curious tourists from
far and near.
I see one thread running through them all whether they are secular or sectarian. The artist was original in concept and execution. Even when their philosophies coincide, it would be clear that, unlike the pedestrianities we are now being bombarded with daily these days, such remain either decent, healthy borrowings or
mere coincidence of great thoughts; and not instances of crude roguery of sick minds. For example, those who remember Celestine Ukwu’s “Onwu bu Ugwo” (Death is a debt) highlife piece and Whyte’s “Nwoge Nta” (Transcience) immortal sectarian number will agree that they illustrate this point. Same theme, superb separate original renditions in different domains each in its own honorably detached way. Compare this with the
puerile obsession with number one that goes on these days. Me, me, me, me, me … ad nauseam.
What typically go on these days in the name of music are, with one or two exceptions, egregious examples of art piracy where such plagiarists, in even a more questionable theology, imagine they are excused in such needless intellectual shortchanging of themselves and society because the names of God and Jesus are
mentioned.
The absolutism that drives their strategy is: claim Christianity and no matter any measure of callowness and fraud in your music, everything goes. And they forget that they are referring to the same Judaeo-Christian God who is reputed to abhor any offering with a blemish (Leviticus 3:6).
Great works of art of whatever genre require, as a precondition for their creation, patience, sincerity of purpose and humility. Philistinism and fervour are ultimately sterile even outside the nobler domain of art. It was the inimitable Frantz Fanon (1952:8) who used to say, “I do not trust fervour … Fervour is the
weapon of choice of the impotent.”
The Orring Experience
I used to take the tenability of a position like Benthal’s for granted but never spared a serious thought for it, until June 1999 when sheer aleatory made me a surprised member of the cast in a strange, real-life drama relating to this theme, if refocused on another aspect of the problem1. Although an
ethnographer may mean well, his religious background may affect his choice of research topics in a related domain. I nearly missed the opportunity to investigate one of the strangest reports one could hope to come across just because my agnostic disposition initially made me to see the issue in a different light.
How many ethnographers would rush to bet their shirts on the authenticity of a claim that a tree stump which is now growing shoots was that of the same tree which one year previously was rooted up by a tropical rain storm? And that for the restoration in question no human counterforce was used? Such was my
unenviable plight. It was not a case of being challenged to investigate or make a more generally accessible meaning out of an aspect of a people’s belief system. One wasn’t confronted with some myth, either. One was invited to witness what was supposed to be an actual botanic-physical phenomenon if of a kind that is agreed by all to be a rarity. Everyone agreed that there had been no precedent to this even at any other
time in the history of the community.
During my initial trip to the scene I advised myself that the report was a hoax and returned to my class-room work, some 100 kilometres northwest. I felt it would have been a different issue and one that was worth the trouble is the matter were presented as, for instance, a component of the people’s mythopoeia.
But no. I was instead invited to see this more or less the same way that someone who is used to using a fossil-fuel-powered motorcar may some day be shown a model that is powered by ethanol. Guided by what is generally known about gravitation, I thought that a stump of an uprooted tree that has been lying flat on the ground to be restored to an upright position without any known physical counterforce would be impossible.
But then I made the mistake, of forgetting that the pitfall such absolutism of theory is what Karl Popper had noticed since 1940s and warned against, whatever might be the opinions of his opponents. We as humans involved in whatever intellectual pursuits may only know so much about a subject at a time and never enough to pronounce all-embracingly on it. Indeed the philosopher, Colin Tudge (1999: 174 – 176), has been
making the point that the presumed orderly working of the universe, in which, for instance, the principle of gravitation is rooted, can no longer be taken without queries, given chiefly Einstein’s formulations on Relativity. All those theories such as quantum mechanics and gravitation that anticipate a stable ordering of the universe must either be correct and Relativity is wrong, or the other way around. In some
interesting sense it all leads back to good old Popper and his warnings on absolutism of theory.
It was s sojourning trader on palm-bamboo basket, the foremost product of women in the locality that first brought me the news about the mysteriously restored trees. He is a Yoruba. I had taken up residence in Eteji (known to the rest of Nigerians with its more familiar anglicized form, Ntezi) returning there
these days instead of my own Igbo area any time my other professional duties permitted. It was the only strategy through which I could carry out a frighteningly expensive participant observation of this society which nevertheless I am so determined to conclude. Eteji is one of the two communities of the Orring minority language/ethnic group who are the subject of my study; the other being Lame (known better by the name
Okpoto which available evidence, suggests was given to them by their more populous neighbour, the Igbo). Groups related to the Orring are also at other parts of Ebonyi State like the Eteji and Lame, and at Cross River State and Benue – all in Nigeria’s southeastern districts. But all together they will be about 500,000 people in a country with a population of some 120 million.
The British colonial government tried to help the Orring preserve their identity after merging those of them in the present Ebony State into a single multiethnic administrative unit known as Abakaliki Province. Their Igbo neighbours had a different tactic after the British left as a result of which assimilation,
linguistically and culturally, set in. It was such skewed acculturation, at the expense of the Orring, that I thought was ethnologically noteworthy, and have been labouring to account for.
The “Resurrected”
Trees
What made me change my attitude to the story of the trees that came back to life was entirely fortuitous. When I came to spend the weekend in my research station, John -- one of the most steadfast of my indigenous Orring informants – was visiting me as usual. It was my effort to impress it on him that he should
always draw my attention to any major event in town whatever might be his own attitude on them that drew down an entirely new dimension to he tree matter. He informed me that he really saw when the trees laid on the ground. They did so for one year. He saw them because the compound on whose front they laid was that of his kinsmen, so he was always going there for one reason or the other. There was, in John’s belief, no
doubt that the trees’ was a case of a mysterious restoration.
All around the compound of these kinsmen of John’s are dense groves. The enclosure at the foreground is the first of the traditional assembly grounds known here as liese where the various lepa political subunits of the traditional community meet for celebrations or deliberations. There are five of
such lepa on top of which is the community or, in fact, the kingdom itself. Cook (1935) a British colonial bureaucrat who was one of the first non-Africans to study this patrilineal group noted their peculiar monarchical structure which stood in sharp contract to the acephalic ultrarepublican one of the surrounding Igbo clans. Below the Orring lepa is lema which unites the various compounds, odaada,
from a common ancestor.
This particular liese belongs to Ulepa, the eldest of the lepa in the Eteji kingdom. John granted my request that we go again to the scene where the reportedly resurrected trees were. There they stood. The mighty silk cotton tree (scientific name: Bombax buonopozense Beauv)3 now
growing new shoots were flanked by stumps of kinyif hardwood trees which are fairly common in these parts but whose botanical name I am yet to ascertain. As one faced the trees, the kinyif by one’s left had dried up, perhaps never to come back to life again. The one on the right was like the cotton tree, growing some shoots. As John and I stood there talking, one wiry but extremely friendly man of about 50
joined us. John greeted him familiarly. I also greeted him in Korring, language of the Orring, but maybe my accent or appearance betrayed me. The man replied me in Igbo which, as it happened, was no less heavily accented. He gave his name as Chukwu Eke.
The man told us that it was his wife who first saw the restored trees. The restoration occurred following a storm and on the night of the same traditional week day in the same month of May as when the trees fell. In such a rainy night in this unlit villae, it would be pitch dark, and it was. But as the rain was
abetting, a sound redolent of a loud groan was heard. The Ekes thought that someone was entering their compound. They were mistaken. It was Mrs Eke who flashed her husband’s torch at the direction the sound was heard. She shouted the strangest announcement ever heard in the town. “I don’t believe my eyes. Those trees are standing up again”. Mr. Eke summoned the courage and moved closer to the scene. The trees were well
and truly standing. He summoned the rest of the members of the compound. There were no footmarks indicting that some human beings must have done the job.
In the following days, the scene was a great attraction to curious visitors. Those who came to buy or sell at the community’s market famous for its bamboo baskets made point of walking the one kilometer or so to see the trees.
A diviner prescribed that the restoration was a sign that some of those who shared from the proceeds of the timber of the trees should not have done so. The trees were declared the communal property of the entire Ulepa lepa whereas in fact it belonged only to Bileagbadum, one of the lema. The money
must now be brought out so that a goat, chicken, kola nuts and yam tubers must be bought for a communal feast in honour of the restored trees. I also went to witness the feast. The great cotton tree was bedecked in an immaculate white cloth also bought with the feast fund. My initial costly agnostic prejudice has not made me change my view that there may be a place for hard science in the how and the why of the trees’
restoration, although I am yet to get any helpful response from such a sphere yet. That should, in my view, be possible – if not immediately then in future. I have already spoken with some of the best in the Western-style physics here in Nigeria. But all I keep getting even from them as yet are metaphysical ratiocinations similar to those that everyone else including the locals, some church missionaries in the place, and
my colleagues back in the University consistently give. Indeed the boldest of the Christian theological opinions on the event came from a non-Orring Methodist missionary -- a lady the Rev Miriam Ude – living in the locality. After confirming that the trees were really restored, she told me, “It is all part of the end-time signs”. Rev Fr Romanus Igweonu, the Catholic priest in charge of the Orring area, was less
apocalyptic in his own interpretation but nevertheless had only the supernatural to link the matter with. “Christians will see this as a sign that God is alerting his people of his presence”, he told me.
But absolutism of theory when in favour of metaphysics may be just as dangerous as when it is in favour or against any other thing else. My mistake in my initial reaction to this event is the nearest illustration of the relevance o this caveat. Besides, history invites us to be suspicious of sweeping metaphysical
explanations of even those happenings with cryptic causes. For instance, most respondents, whatever their walks of life, do similarly explain away the phenomenon of witchcraft using metaphysics. But it happens that in those occasions when that phenomenon has been scientifically investigated either by African anthropologists (e.g. Offiong 1991) or foreign ones (e.g. Nadel 1976) totally empirical explanations have always
been possible.
It seems to me that the event of the Eteji restored trees call also for two other basic research strategies besides that of the more conspicuous metaphysics – that intellectual coquette whom everyone who dares feels able to date. The Eteji event requires an unhurried anthropological inquiry on our own part, plus a
thoroughgoing physical study by those who can do that. This surely is not a rejection of metaphysics but only a recommendation that, in the interest of objectivity and growth of knowledge, we do have options besides it.
Implications for the Artist
For the artist in particular the lesson in the futility of absolutism is even more evident. The artist shortchanges himself and humanity if he circumscribes his vision to the world so far known to him. It was my initial mistake in the Eteji case.
Very few remember that the possibilities of such feats as air and space travels were first explored in fields of art. From the antique Greek and their Daedalus to modern Euro-Americans and their science fiction on life in space the subjects were well explored before formal science came in on the act. Krydz
Ikwuemesi has been painting a Yoruba creation story that demonstrates adumbration of the mechanics of parachute well before the instantiation of the equipment relatively recently in the 18th century. Christopher Okigbo’s (1971) “Path of Thunder” collection descried the Nigerian political troubles of 1960s which peaked with the Biafran war. Using the medium of novel Chinua Achebe also predicted
the political upheaval in his Man of the People.
A society where artists do not give their creative imagination free rein is doomed to stagnate in all those domains that truly matter, or worse still decline and die.
Notes
I would like to thank Prof Dan Obikeze, former Dean of Faculty of the Social Sciences at the University of Nigerian, Nsukka, and Prof Azuka Dike, until recently the Head of Department of Sociology/Anthropology there who encouraged me to bring this matter to the attention of the wider anthropologists’ community. I am
also grateful to all those who answered my queries or otherwise assisted me during this inquiry and observation both at Eteji and at the Departments of Psychology, Botany, Physics and Astronomy of the University of Nigeria, Nuskka. What errors that may inevitably still remain in an essay on such an oddity of a topic as this are entirely mine. I am thankful to the Council for the Development of Economic and Social Research in Africa, Dakar, Senegal, for some assistance in an aspect of the programme by way of awarding me their Small Grant for Thesis Writing in 1997. Not to be confused with the shrub of the Gossypium which probably is better known because of the economic utility of its variety of cotton. Bombax bounoposense Beauv also known as Bombaceae is indeed one of the mightiest trees in these parts. The one at Ntezi has a circumference of more than 5.10 metres. A good measure of
its bark had been cut before I measured what remained of the trunk. I could not measure its height since of course I became academically interested in it at a point when the lumberjack had sold out its timber. Cotton as the name of the fibre of this tree is anomalous; its own variety really relates to kapok than to what is generally known as cotton. It says something for the size of Bombaceae that in coastal villages
some of the biggest dugouts are made form its trunk.
References
Basden, G. T., 1982. Among the Ibos of Nigeria. np: University Publishing Co.
Benthal, J. 1996. “The Religion Provenances of Anthropologists”. Anthropology Today, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 1, 2.
Cook, A. E. 1935. Intelligence Report on Mteze and Okpoto Clans of Abakaliki Division of Ogoja Province. An unpublished report available at the National Archives, Enugu with reference number EP/Milgov, dated 5th January.
Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Black Skin White Masks. London: Longman.
Offiong, D. A. 1991, Witchcraft, Sorcery, Magic and Social Order Among the Ibibio of Nigeria. Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers.
Okigbo, Christopher. 1971. Labyrinths, with Path of Thunder. London: Heinemann.
Nadel, S. F. “Witchcraft in four African Societies: an Essay in Comparison”. In Murphy, R. F. (ed). Selected papers from the American Anthropologist 1946 – 1970. Washington DC: American Anthropological Association.
Tudge, C. 1999. “The Language of the Future”. Index on Censorship. Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 172 – 180.
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