Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World (2001)

ISSN: 1525-447X

ART AS TIME-LINES: SACRAL REPRESENTATION IN FAMILY SPACES

Nkiru Nzegwu

Introduction

This essay brings together strands of philosophy and modes of African representation to explore the intersecting categories of time, space and reality in the creative expressions of African artists. Taking family spaces as points of departure, I focus on the complex idea of time- lines that family memorials and artists’ representation of sacral objects reveal about how we inhabit spaces, inscribe values to such spaces, and carry the articulated systems within us. Drawing attention to the philosophical ideas behind these memorials and artistic forms, I trace the temporal lines these objects chart in expanding our spatio-temporal notion of reality, and in linking our experiential present to the past, future, and the afterlife. The idea of objects as “time-lines” speaks to the imaginative ways forms of representation code information and knowledge, and alludes to the existence of different spheres of life. To better describe our situatedness in the realms of the physical, the mental, and the pneumatic, I use the terms “body-space,” ideational space”, and “spirit-space” to capture the different conditions and qualities of the three environments, and to simultaneously complicate and enrich our understanding of uwa (universe). “Body- space”, refers to the physical environment of our everyday pattern of action and social interaction; “ideational space”, refers to the non-tangible mental realm of thoughts, ideas and concepts; while “spirit-space”, refers to mmuo or the pneumatic realm of the spirit where ancestor figures, supernatural beings and entities are held to dwell.

The distinguishing feature of these three spaces is that they are mutually permeable and interpenetrable, hence none is “behind”, or “under”, or “above” the other. Additionally, the three spaces may, but need not, occupy the same spatial location, since they are not necessarily coextensive. For example, an ideational system in which thought processes occur may occupy the same spatial location as physical bodies and pneumatic entities but would still retain its specific temporality. It is important to state that the relationship between the three spheres is not epiphenomenal since they possess the power to impact and affect each other. According to Onitsha metaphysical scheme that informs the standpoint of this paper, though oge mmuo (spirit-time) is different from oge madu (human-time that encompasses body-space), the two spaces are interconnected through the ideational-space, and sometimes impact on each other. Thus, on this picture, uwa or the universe is a multiplicity of intersecting spatial spheres with different conditions of temporality, constantly shifting and changing, and without a permanently fixed or static location.

By contrast, in the everyday reality of the typical Western frame of reference, time and space are conceptualized as three dimensional, physical reality. Within this reality, there are private and public spaces: geographical and architectural spaces are represented as being in the public domain, the psychological, symbolical and spiritual spaces are relegated to the private domain, but the idea of a spiritual realm is poorly articulated and developed. Contrapositively, in the Onitsha intellectual scheme, notions of the spiritual are fully developed and are a constitutive part of the everyday explanatory model. As a result, notions of publicity and privacy are radically altered with new theoretical meaning. All objects in their respective spaces are publicly accessible subjects, in principle. This means that objects in ideational-space and spirit-space are accessible in much the same way objects in body-space are accessible. Nothing can remain inherently private or hidden. Hence it is logically possible for two people to apprehend and think the same idea in ideational-space; they can also apprehend the same entity in spirit-space, provided they have learned the processes of thinking and perceiving under these spatio-temporal conditions.

Disciplinarily, because reality is empirically conceptualized in analytic philosophical tradition as a unitary whole with fixed essences,1 it is possible to miss the way people shift “in and out” of space and time as they think their thoughts, and live their lives. This occurs because of the illusion of permanence and uniformity that underpins the notion of reality in European philosophy, compels scholars to view reality in one definite way, and to reject the idea that there are variable conditions of time and states of being. In fact seduced by the analytic relation of permanence and uniformity inherent in the idea of three dimensional reality, most people ignore the way in which this view of reality is fundamentally a fictive construction, an abstraction that yields a specific explanation about the world. However, if we drastically slowed down the hermeneutic reel-of-life, it is possible to examine our everyday process of life, and observe our oscillations between the discontinuous conditions of the body- space, ideational-space, and spirit-space.

Minimally, three questions arise in any serious discussion time and space. Specifically, how do we know that time exists and that it extends beyond our actual perception of them? What is the nature of the connection between the three delineated spaces: the physical realm (body space), the mental realm (ideational space), and mmuo, the pneumatic realm (spirit space)? What do these three states tell us about ourselves?

In this essay I argue that certain representational forms that arise in family spaces function as temporal pathways to an expanded notion of reality. Part one is divided into two sections. In its first section, I slow down the hermeneutic reel-of-life and draw attention to the shifting time frames and spatial zones in which we live and the web of family relationships that initiate the creation of memorials and representation of sacred forms; and in the second section, I examine the skeptical implication of this methodology and its negative impact on identity. In part two, I examine an aspect of the views of the Beninoise philosopher, Paulin Hountondji, on knowledge production in Africa and argue that a recovery of Africa’s indigenous knowledge must recognize the challenge it poses for the conventionalized view of reality that prevails in philosophy. And in the third part, I deal with the significance of sacral representation as time-lines, and the role they play in family-identity and family-cohesiveness within an expanded notion of space and reality. The last part focuses on the impact of these forms of representation on contemporary artists.

Passing Through Spatio-Temporal Frames

In the evening of Wednesday February 2, 1994 I arrived at Muritala Muhammed airport Lagos to begin a major research project on Yoruba arts and aesthetics. Moving along the immigration line and circumspectly checking my environment to anticipate unusual activities, I shifted to another mode of consciousness; in which I was physically on the line but ideationally absent.

While in Nigeria, I planned to conclude my five-year research on Nigeria’s internationally renowned artist, Odinigwe Ben Enwonwu, whom I had learned was seriously ill and may not have very long to live. Before anything happened to him, it was imperative that I probe the underlying rationale and significance of his Agbogho mmuo and Ogolo series, and as far as possible elucidate the deeper mysteries associated with these “spirit” forms. As a non-initiated woman in mmuo mysteries,2 I was not supposed to know the secrets of mmuo (spirits). Thus the challenge I faced was how to get him to discuss the matter knowing that he knew that to speak about such matters with a non-initiate would violate his oath of secrecy.
Discussions with Enwonwu would center on what his rationale were for taking mmuo as a basis of creative expression. Such insight would be important if I am to write convincingly about what the Agbogho mmuo and Ogolo meant to him. For over forty years, he had diligently sketched and painted these spirit forms with such regularity that some of his ardent critics had claimed that he must have lost his imaginative vision. From my research perspective, however, it was unimportant that he may be in a creative rut. What was important was for him to elaborate on the values, ideas or messages to which he sometimes alluded when confronted with his near obsessive preoccupation with the forms of Agbogho mmuo and Ogolo.
I recalled intriguing comments that his brother’s funeral had given him a whole new perspective from which to understand Agbogho mmuo. A close study of his work from 1987, when his brother Ike Francis Enwonwu died, and 1993, when he grew too ill to paint, reveals a profusion of fully developed character studies of Ogolo and Agbogho mmuo. Caught in various dynamic poses his forms pulsated with life and motion. Ogolo Metamorphosis (1990) depicts an ogolo in a powerful spectacular leap, heroically separating into two distinct parts amidst the clouds, in a reproductive rite of continuity. A transcendent twin ogolo was emerging from the frontal body of the ogolo with its back to the viewer. Clearly, Enwonwu’s consuming interest in these forms suggests that something quite enigmatic and compelling was at stake.
Randomly, in an associative process, I wandered off to the works of Sokari Douglas Camp. I recalled the central enigma in her 1988 exhibition at the National Museum of African Art in Washington D.C. Her large welded metal construction Church Ede (Decorated Bed for Christian Wake) (1984), was a memorial tribute to her father, simultaneously representing an artistic exploration of Kalabari funeral rites and the ritual of transcendence and transfiguration. I’d always wondered why her creative energy and inspirational insight coalesced on the funeral bed, resulting in an intricately constructed large steel four-poster bed. No doubt, this grand steel bed referenced Kalabari ceremonial brass beds on which the death-stilled body of a transcending spirit is usually laid in state. Made out of artfully placed metal strips, evocative of the strips on duein fubara (Kalabari ancestral screens), the steel bed held the suggested outline of Sokari’s absent father. On either side of the bed, two female figures devotionally sketched the pathway of the receding spirit as they solicitously fanned the stiffened body, whisking away all obtrusive flies.
Sokari had touchingly personalized her memorial tribute by incorporating a motorized part that simulate the swirling motion of handkerchiefs and fly whisks which daughters typically use to fan the deceased, and by so doing affirm their filial relationship to the deceased. It was unclear whether Douglas Camp was consciously using the materials of body-space to give physicality to her lament in ideational-space for a father who now exists in spirit- space. It seemed to me that in so far as Sokari, the daughter, was concerned with sketching out her father’s ancestralized state, she was intuitively responding to the maxim that: Life never dies, it simply transforms.

Madam this way...

Passport.

Running the gauntlet of immigration and custom officials at the arrival lounge at the airport, some of whom were extorting “dash” (gift), it was clear that my entire research was going to be a tough job to pull off. First of all, the multiple locations, which the research on Yoruba art and aesthetics called for me to visit, were far removed from the Ikoyi residence of Enwonwu. As if this logistical problem was not enough I wondered whether my uncle who had died late December had been buried. If not, I knew I was in trouble, since I would have to radically alter my plans. My worst fears were confirmed when my brother sardonically greeted me at the airport with the following words: “Perfect timing! Akunne is going to be buried in two days time. We really should leave for Onitsha tomorrow.”

Akunne Uwechia was my father’s eldest full brother, by virtue of which position he was the “big father” (nnukwu nna). As the first child of my father, it was incumbent on me as the ada (first daughter) to organize my deceased father’s unit so that it could play its rightful role in the unfolding ritual drama within the wider lineage. Thus, right from the airport, I had less than twenty-four hours to perform two major mentally switches, which involved temporally and spatially relocating myself into the conceptual space of Onitsha. It was from there that I had to begin preparing for the task at hand. The first switch took me out of the existential framework of life in upstate New York to the social scheme of Lagos. After being filled in on the woeful social and political events of Nigeria, the second switch had to be thrown to relocate me from the Lagos world-scheme to the ritual- cum-ceremonial framework of Onitsha funeral obsequies.

Crossing time frames, entailed re-membering histories, shifting spatial locations, re- situating myself in appropriate temporal spaces, listening to stories and narratives. In the process of crossing time frames, I recalled and called forth different facets of well-worn selves that had been ignored and forgotten, yet were etched into the many crevasses of memory that glued together my identity. The complex process of relocation and change forced to attention the way in which we carry our histories. The rite of conversing and trading our stories triggers metamorphic changes that more firmly situates an individual within the social matrix of the everyday “body-space” of his or her culture. The mental changes I was undergoing helped me to inhabit the space more securely by displacing my Americanized professional veneer for my Onitsha cultural identity. Switching the psychological “skins” of my numerous identity transmutations enabled me to “step out” of the commodified efficiency time mode of the American cultural scheme in which a paid job was more important than family obligation. In “stepping out” of that condition of temporality, I “stepped into” a culturally validated temporal space in which family-connectedness and family obligations constituted the central basis of time- allocation, time-management, and personal identity.

Most assuredly, this process of “stepping in” and “stepping out” invokes the manner in which at the transfiguring moment of death, we permanently step out of the conditions of the everyday three dimensional reality, and into the pneumatic mmuo conditions of spirit-space and time.

Skeptical Thrust of Spatial Shifts

Although exceedingly mechanical, the preceding description of a self as extended in time and space, allows us to see the different means and modes by which humans traverse reality, in the process shifting from one temporal state to the next. But herein lies a paradox. If selves are extended in time, and each new state carries with it a different set of value expectations, would this not imply that there is no fixed identity and no underlying essence at the center of our identity. As the eighteenth century British philosopher, David Hume once puzzled over, if experience is a series of fleeting impressions that are spatio-temporally extended, where is the “self” that gives unity and coherence to these experiences? Succinctly put, how is personal identity constructed under a theory of experience that reduces knowledge to impressions in a stream of consciousness? How is the idea of a self, the owner to which these stream of impressions belongs, to be understood?

The theoretical problem attendant to conceptually slowing down the hermeneutic reel-of-life is that we run the risk of discovering that there are no overarching essential features or traits to which personal identity hangs. Experience becomes a constant stream of fleeting impressions or perceptual stimuli that subverts our idea of self. This skeptical problem, a slightly different variation of Zeno’s paradox of change, exploits the seemingly discontinuous character of changing frames of experiences to launch a skeptical assault on personal identity. Consider that if life consists of an infinite series of changing frames of experiences, there is no one enduring event that is spatially extended in time or remains the same to assign unity to these experiences. Thus, on what basis can the existence of an enduring entity be postulated to give unity and coherence to our experiences?

Although it seems that it does, but switching from time-frame to time-frame, and questioning the corresponding conditions associated with each frame in the reel of life does not subvert the unitary character of the self or personal identity. We remain the same person with enduring characteristics, values, experiences, motivating narratives even as we examine what occurred in changing our experiences, values, and narratives. Within the framework of the intersecting conditions of time and space that is spatio-temporally extended, we selectively add to, organize, and reorganize our experiences by reference to what we privilege as meaningful. Our personal identity (constitutive of the stock of imaginative narratives, values and experiences through time) remains basically the same even as we continue to evolve and develop through life. Our ability to remain the same person comes from the fact that the enduring narratives of our lives are equally extended in time and space, and are held together by the glue of memory. Thus, we (meaning, the characteristics, enduring values, imaginative narratives that guide us) undergo each new experience by injecting newly acquired stories into the experiential frame where they are mixed with older experiences to produce new coagulates.

What the skeptical thrust of this extension of self in space plays up is the transformational impact of change that problematizes and contests the existence of real essences. In Impossible Dreams (1995), Susan Babbitt offers an epistemological argument that convincingly undermines the legitimacy of the anti-foundational thesis that sequential change implies that there is no fixed essences. Her argument rests on the contention that “a commitment to the idea of real essences does not automatically imply “a commitment to the idea of fixed, eternal essences that separate one group from another with sharp discontinuity” (Babbitt 1996:145-146). The fact that something is temporarily extended and endures over time does not mean that what is extended is fixed and unchanging. A self or an identity extends over time, with new experiences informing the constitutive character of self- identity. But this does not imply that identity is dissolved. As she puts it: “Indeed if knowledge claims are contingent upon the emergence or bringing about of the right sorts of theoretical and practical transitions, there is no reason to expect that the identification of real essences should result in precise sets of categories with clear boundaries and fixed content” (146). The thrust of Babbitt’s argument is that “an opposition to a particular conception of justification, [in]...which standards and concepts are justifiable a priori and...precludes the proper appreciation of difference” (152), does not provide adequate grounds for denying that there are real essences or an enduring identity.

An understanding of the hermeneutical sequences of spatio-temporal extensions and shifts in frames of identity is useful for seeing those interspatial shifts need not necessarily be conceived of as involving geographical displacement. The spatio-temporal relations of specific spaces enter into the structure of what is apprehended in those environments. The fact that spatial and temporal shifts can occur without physically displacing a body from a specific location, as occurs under meditation and divining states, forcefully highlights the many possible ways in which trans-spatial communication and contact occurs between physical, mental and pneumatic states. From the standpoint of physical body-space reality, erstwhile impenetrable barriers and chasms between the physical world or body-space, the mental world or ideational-space, and the pneumatic world or spirit-space assume a different quality when conceptualized on a framework that recognizes the complex, extensively permeable nature of the universe.

In consciously recognizing the occurrence of interspatial shifts and becoming more adept in inter-spatial interaction, we find that the conditions of mmuo or pneumatic space which previously had seemed incomprehensible and impenetrable become intelligible and passable as explanatory paradigms emerge to offer grounds of openings. In Onitsha cultural logic, for example, an endless cycle of coming and going in the nexus of family is witnessed between the body-space and spirit-space and are socially highlighted. This permeability gives spirit-space a definite kind of concreteness and familiarity by treating it as a natural extension of the physical realm. The cycle of birth and death of which the death of Akunne Uwechia is one aspect of the cycle, is seen as a normal passage between body-space and spirit-space, in which the incarnate spirits of his grandchildren emerged, and in which he had once resided prior to his incarnation. Following his death as an initiated elder, he is seen to have passed into the state of ndi ichie or ancestor. Most significant, in this transformation into an ndi ichie is the idea of a passage through the outermost boundary of our three-dimensional constitution of body-space into ani mmuo or spirit-space, that may best be described as the fourth dimensional state of reality.

Listening Closely, Interrogating the Reality of Science

The problem Africans have consistently faced in the study of our cultural reality and episteme is that the theoretical investigations of the latter have routinely been driven by the positivistic imperatives of European and European American structures of knowledge. In invidious imperializing moves, African pneumatic concepts and methodological moves that do not conform to the positivistic standards of validation and verification are summarily dismissed as erroneous and primitive. This imperious attitude fostered by the intuitive belief of European and European American scholars that African culture is primitive, has become the dominant theoretical standpoint for most Africanists’ investigations of Africa’s material culture. As a result, the central logic of various African cultures are irrationalized before the “superior” rationality and value system of Europe and the United States. Not only has this posture of arrogance shaped knowledge production about Africa, it has enthroned a mode of epistemic interpretation that stymies understanding.

Generally, discussions about Africa’s socio-cultural life proceeds by prefacing or highlighting the continent’s economic and scientific backwardness, in the process, building up a conflicted wall of pressure which African scholars have to confront to prove that they know. Directly responding to this pressure in the Second Bashorun M.K.O. Abiola Distinguished Lecture at the African Studies Association, Hountondji deplores the scientific and technological failures in Africa, explaining that these shortcomings are a consequence of the subordinate way in which Africa’s traditional knowledge has been integrated into the world-system of knowledge. In his view, this current state of scientific and technological underdevelopment parallels the early twentieth century integration of Africa’s subsistence economies into the world capitalist market. As he sees it, the problem is not “from any original backwardness”, as it is from the mode and character of integration (Hountondji 1995:2). At the end of his multipronged explanation Hountondji revisits what he takes to be the root of the problem and asks in evident exasperation: “Why is positive knowledge in Africa so often mingled with mythical beliefs and practices? Why does the “‘traditional’ healer always begin this (sic) cures by an invocation to gods, spirits and the ancestors and by all sorts of less intelligible incantations? Why not develop this knowledge for its own sake and rid the horizon of all these gods and goddesses”? (8).

Hountondji’s frustration is certainly not new. It has been echoed by numerous Africans some of who have indicted the backwardness of their people and the primitive state of their traditions as responsible for the European subjugation of the continent. It is to this well-known sentiment of cultural despair that Hountondji responds in answering his questions in ways that directly address and seek to correct past misinterpretations of Africa’s traditional knowledge. He rejects Levy-Bruhl’s patronizing thesis that this integration of gods, spirits and ancestors with positive knowledge reflects a primitive mind unable to distinguish between the natural and the supernatural. By contrast, his explanation for the integration of positive knowledge with gods, spirits and ancestors accords with the views of scholars, like Eric Havelock in orature, who hypothesized that reference to “gods and goddesses” is a shorthand way by which people in oral structures of knowledge understand and theorize about abstract concepts (1991:24). Essentially in agreement with this position, Hountondji’s argues that “the personification of basic categories” and “the mythical projection of configurations of the divination material into deities” are reducible to mnemotechnic devices (8). Although he does not go as far as Haverlock who claims that abstract reasoning exists only in a literate alphebetic context (1990:24),3 Hountondji’s position on “gods, spirits, and ancestors” coheres with Haverlock’s views that personification of basic categories are features of information storage in contexts of memorization and recall.

Epistemologically, Hountondji’s position also overlaps with that of Robin Horton, the English anthropologist, who views spirits in African traditional thought as attempted theoretical explanations (Horton 1982). On this framework of explanation, science is the marker of knowledge that maps out the true nature of reality. It is for this reason that Hountondji finds the traditional healer’s references to “gods, spirits, and the ancestors” as unnecessary mythologizations that do not add anything positive to what we know. It seems that having found a perfectly “scientific” rationalization for the occurrence of these mythical entities in African thought, Hountondji is not prepared to entertain any further complication of this “scientific” (read, physicalist) picture with the presence of any unwarranted unverifiable entities. Thus, in trying to understand why the “‘traditional’ healer always begin this (sic) cures by an invocation to gods, spirits and the ancestors and by all sorts of less intelligible incantations” [emphasis mine], Hountondji failed to ask the following pertinent questions: What evidence is there that the “gods, spirits and the ancestors” are simply mnemonic devices, or tentative theoretical explanations of physical events in body-space reality? Why does he believe that the diviner’s explanations are specifically limited to the body-space manifestation of a malady of an individual who exists in three different locations? What makes it so easy to privilege the physical imperatives of science and its body-space reality, and to devalue the pneumatic imperatives of spirit-space reality? Why does Hountondji believe that the pronouncements of traditional healers are not directed both to the physical and the pneumatic sides of life?

Evident in Hountondji’s writing, and the other mentioned scholars, is a tacit hierarchical ranking of cultures and a conscious privileging of science. Though progressively positioned, Hountondji’s assessment of the state of science in Africa reflects a settled view of it that is substantially informed by the imperatives of three-dimensional space. Like all world-views, the logic and metaphysics of this three dimensional construction of space treats it as implicitly logical, fixed, predictable, and subject to comprehensible physical laws, that eliminates anything which is counterintuitive. Efficacious and predictive in some cases, this Newtonian conception of space and time looses its predictive power in some equally important cases. Its intuitive abstraction of space and time is primarily an abstraction, not an accurate description of reality, even though this hardly appears to be the case when its construction of reality is evaluated within its legitimizing principles.4 But regardless of the plausibility of this physicalist view of science, and our commitment to its idea of absolute space, time and motion, this three dimensional reality must be subject to radical interrogation because of the inherent limitations of its explanatory myths, narratives and solutions. A critique of its physicalist imperatives require putting its ontological ethos under critical scrutiny, and seeing that the view of reality it offers is a theoretical abstraction that effectively transforms time and space into immutable categories with a propulsive force of their own.

In Dangerous Currents: The State of Economics, Lester C. Thurow gives an elaborate description of how economics “still rests on a behavioral assumption--rational utility maximization--that has long since been rejected by sociologists and psychologist who specialize in studying human behaviour” (1983:216). The point of his example is that people not only construct models of interpretation that are based on erroneous abstraction, but that they end up living that reality too. The relevance of this insight to this argument is that our understanding of science in most cases still rest on the ordinate points mapped out by Isaac Newton that have been proven to entail an erroneous construction of reality. Even today, there is inadequate recognition, in most traditional philosophical circles, that the universe is not exhaustively defined or understood by the physicalist laws of three-dimensional reality. Furthermore, there is inadequate appreciation that to speak of the universe as constitutive of events rather than points in absolute space is to speak of a relational network in which events are woven in an interconnected format. Under this different ontological condition, a different way of knowing prevails, since the old physicalist logic and metaphysics underpinning our definition of identity and logical relationships are radically transformed. In a language that sounds suspiciously similar to those used by some traditional healers, we learn that every event has “some bearing on everything else”, “everything is everywhere at all times”; for “every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location.”5 In the traditional healer’s language and relational structure of explanation, it makes sense to use the familial concept of ancestors to speak of the ways in which the living are embodiments of ancestors’ and are also aspects of future descendants. Thus, what may appear as the “irrational” postulations of traditional African healers become more intelligible when they are treated as epistemic claims, and the appropriate relational structure of interpretation is used to decode their articulations.

It is worthwhile to point out that Hountondji’s evident neglect to seriously treat the “sorts of less intelligible incantations” of traditional healers comes from prejudging Africa’s traditional cultures and their knowledge claims as primitive. Yet, most strongly reflected in this stance, are Hountondji’s philosophical training and European biases. The fact that he neglected to question the idea that the basic structure of reality is exhaustively physical, reveals his theoretical commitment to a mode and manner of thinking that irrationalize whatever deviates from it. Because of his acceptance of the immutability of this structure of reality, Hountondji fails to consider that the personification of basic categories may not entirely be reducible to mnemotechnic devices. They are coded capsules of knowledge that draw attention to the wider more expansive view of reality that conflicts with the arbitrarily narrow limits of the European conceptualization of space and time. Indeed, if for the moment, attributions of backwardness were set aside, it would become clearer that the language of “gods, spirits, and ancestors” is actually forcing a theoretical rethinking of the currently accepted limits and constitution of the world. Thus if Hountondji’s injunction to African scholars to critically assess, test, update, and reapproriate Africa’s ancestral heritage and creativity is to have revolutionary potential, then we must adopt a relevant framework of interpretation to understand the significance of the pneumatic concepts and ideas that are currently being dismissed as pre-theoretical and primitive. Also, we must work towards an epistemic break with the prevailing positivistic metaphysics and paradigm of science, so that a critical re-evaluation of the structure of reality can begin.

The critical issue at the heart of my argument is not that scientific knowledge per se is unimportant and irrelevant, but that the deployment of a specific conception of science and reality ignores the implicit nature of its own abstraction. In calling for a serious treatment of African ideas and concepts, it is important to call attention to this fallacy of misplaced criterion in which inappropriate yardstick is employed. This routinely occurs when scholars ignore the specificities of reality of their preferred model of explanation, and deploy that model in a differently constituted context. This sleight-of-hand trivializes important ideas of Africa’s endogenous system, which fails to conform to the physicalist criteria of evaluation. It is true that sometimes the underlying assumptions of technology and natural science many differ or conflict with pneumatic ideas, but this should not become the basis of rejection. After all, the reality defined by Newtonian physics, while useful, is also highly problematic, and it is not the only possible way of conceptualizing reality.

What is valuable about Hountondji’s intervention is that it urges us to radically interrogate Africa’s conceptual schemes as well as the celebrated paradigms of science and its initiating conditions. Conceptualizing the spatio-temporal conditions of reality as body-space and spirit-space enables us to see the many different interpretive possibilities and options available in understanding the spatial and temporal conditions of life in all their different manifestations. Since other models exist for interpreting reality, Hountondji must consider that nothing invalidates the healer’s conceptualization of treatment as a healing of both the physical body and the pneumatic self. As the analysis in the following section makes clear, category personification may, in fact, be alluding to a view of reality that is better characterized by the relativity and quantum view of reality.

Convergence of Space-Time Continuum in Family Spaces

The climatic event of my uncle’s funeral was the appearance of the venerable mmuo ogonogo (the tall spirit of the threshold/crossroad) to conduct the concluding part of the burial rites. This event is significant since it collapses the time-space continuum in ways that transforms our conception of death, and makes it a natural extension of life. Additionally, the appearance of the concretized manifest spirit is significant since it is a messenger, an inter-spatial traveler and custodian of the market site, where the world of humans (body-space) converge with the world of spirits (spirit-space). Known as mmuo afia (spirit of the market/crossroad), mmuo ogonogo prepares the deceased elder and initiate to encounter its fate by “seeing” in spirit-space. Prior to this rite, the feeble spirit of the departed is in a liminal state of indeterminacy, preparatory to its being born in spirit. Unable to comprehend what is happening, it remains umbilically tied to its discarded physical body until its formal birth into spirit-space is fully completed. Only with the process of iwanye okpa n’anya, a process of clarifying the vision with a drop of blood (from a chicken) into the eye, is the wraith of the deceased fully born into the reality of spirit-space and its visual impairment removed.6 This clarifying process is the reverse process encountered in earthly birth, in which a baby begins to see only after wiping the blood from its eyes. Still feeble, the newly born spirit-elder locates the path that leads to its first resting stage in obodo mmuo (spirit land), where it awaits for the second funeral rites to open the doorway into the ancestors’ realm.

As Basden reported in 1921, the resurrection ritual of the deceased in spirit was re- enacted as part of the second funeral obsequies. After the burial of igbudu, a “catafalque made out of white bamboo mat that is placed on four vertical sticks with white strips of cloth across it” (Bosah 1988:130):

the maw-afia appear escorting the “spirit” of the dead man from his house beneath the floor of which his body lies buried. On his return to this world, the spirit walks slowly with tottering uncertain steps and muttering words with a feeble voice - his speech being disguised similarly to that of the maw- afia. The poor “spirit” is as yet weak from its enforced imprisonment in the grave, it need time and food to recover its lost strength. Meanwhile the escorting maw-afia are busily engaged in dusting down the “spirit” to remove earth stains of the grave. Amidst profound expressions of joy on the part of the assembled relatives and friends the “spirit” meanders round...His strength is soon exhausted and he returns to the house and disappears. (Basden 1921:124).

When the spirit appears again:

He can walk faster, and speak loudly and clearly. He goes in and out amongst his kinsfolk comforting and exhorting his wives and children. After this tour he returns to his house and assumes his former position on the “ukpo” (seat of honour), his attendants all the time vigorously fanning him. His daughters bring presents of gin and cowries, and to manifest his gratitude for the gifts a day is appointed by the men present, acting on behalf of the “spirit,” on which he will make a special visit to the women-folk of that particular village (fig. 4: -- Parade). The “spirit” then retires to his own place once more.
On the appointed day he tours the whole town speaking words of comfort and counsel, and in return receives abundant presents, and thus having fulfilled every duty of a good, kind-hearted and contended “spirit” he disappears finally. (Basden 1921:125).

This rite of resurrection (ipu mmuo ofuu, coming out in new spirit, fig. 5: -- Akunne Egbuji) is still being performed as the culmination point of an elder’s second funeral obsequies. The only change is that it has become a one-day event, occurring on the third day of a four-day funeral ceremony. Today, as in the early twenties, the family expresses its delight at the resurrected mmuo ofuu (or new spirit).

Needless, to say, there is no visible resemblance between the deceased and the resurrected apparition, nor is there any attempt to create one. People are keenly aware that the existential conditions of being a spirit and existing in spirit-space are radically different from the physical conditions and logic of the body-space that it is misguided to so attempt to create or simulate a resemblance. Following this logic, actors within the Onitsha metaphysical scheme never strive for physical resemblance for an embodied spirit since they are truly viewed as an “other” transcategory being.

Although Basden, like most colonial officers-cum-anthropologists of the period, claimed intimate knowledge of the people he wrote about, his description showed superficial understanding of the logic and metaphysics of the cultural practices. If anything, Basden’s distanced white gaze saw as “curious and interesting” the “habits, customs and beliefs of a little known African people” whom he clinically examined. Perhaps, more important in our reading of Basden’s account of the Igbos, is our recognition of the sorts of intellectual absurdities that follow when colonial officers like Basden attempt to understand the death and life-after-death rituals he encountered on the standards and conditions of the body-space. An instance of this absurdity occurred after he was informed that “Ezira” was the resting-point of ancestral spirits on their way to the spirit-realm. To “test” the credibility of the narrative, Basden rushed off to a neighboring geographical village of Ezira and imperiously claimed to have proved that no such spiritual place exists. No doubt, his need to establish the low-level nature of the people’s intelligence and philosophical thoughts explains his willingness to apply a highly inappropriate criterion of verification to determining the validity of this symbolic location.7

Cognitive aberrations of this sort are eliminated if attributions of primitivity are not made prior to analysis, and if the specific cultural practices are correctly explained by an interpretive framework that understands the operative ontological imperatives of the culture, and the people’s construal of reality. Any interpretation must recognize that central to the enactment of this resurrection rite is an awareness and recognition of the complexity of life and conditions of temporality in the spheres.

Although a psychological explanation of these resurrection rites may construe them as manifestations of people’s subliminal desire for assurance that their beloved ones are in good spiritual state. But this preferred line of interpretation does not entirely explain the non- autobiographical aspect of the rites. The resurrection rite makes important philosophical statements about the regenerative character of life as well as an even deeper statement about death, as an intermissive transfer station in the cycle of life. What is being asserted is that death is not the cessation of life, but merely its transformation, as we know it. As the resurrection ritual indicates, family cohesion is promoted and lineage memory is reinforced, through knowing that life continues after death in a new state after going through a transition process of birth into spirit-space. Aware of the psychological impact of death in this transition rite, it is incumbent on the living to help facilitate the passage of the newly dead into their new life just as the birth or passage of a new born child or incarnating spirit into life as we know it, is facilitated by other- worlders who are grieving the lose of their own. Thus, the epistemological importance of the rites performed by mmuo ogonogo or the tall spirit is that it reaffirms the cycle of life, and underscores people’s awareness of the distinct difference in the metaphysics and logic of existential conditions of the two spaces.

Against this conceptual background, it is crucial to see mmuo ogonogo more as a theoretical confirmation of the multiplicity of spatio-temporal states of reality, and in which the possibility of inter-spatial and inter-temporal travel exists. As an embodied sojourner of the spirit-realm, mmuo ogonogo articulates the principle of mmuo or pneumatic space, in the process, affirming the role of embodiment as a prerequisite for existence in physical space. Given the intangibility of pneumatic-space, physical embodiment is crucial for being in body-space, while the reverse is true for humans seeking to journey into spirit-space. The body has to be shed either in death, sleep, or meditation so that the spirit can be released to function in the nontangible, conditions of spirit-space. The conditions of intangibility associated with pneumatic space means that there are no fixed geographical points, stations (as Basden assumed), or locations-in-the-clouds called heaven. Mmuo or pneumatic space is both everywhere and nowhere.

Theoretically sophisticated, the Onitsha ontological framework ensures that its ideas and concepts are logically consistent. This consistency is evident in their recognition and insistence that the physical conditions of life in body-space are a prerequisite for interaction in body-space. Thus, when spirits are invoked they have to appear embodied so as to intermingle with the inhabitants of physical space. This need to visually and conceptually satisfy the logic and conditions of body-space reveals a strong awareness of the laws of physics of the two realms of life. Because the creation of mmuo ogonogo involve a convergence of physical laws and pneumatic principles, the invocation of mmuo (or spirit manifestation) is never viewed as masking, nor can the word be plausibly used to represent the practice. The word ‘mask’ and the concept of masking suggest that faking, playfulness and intentional concealment are the objectives of the institution. Yet, nothing can be further from the truth as has consistently been pointed out by Igbo scholars.8 In assuming a privileged position of knowing, and assuming that what is known is an instance of faking, the word ‘mask’ delegitimizes the profound ideas at the heart of the practice, and misrepresents the event as noncognitive and devoid of theoretical significance.

The art of spirit manifestation or invocation consciously works on the principle of embodiment, not concealment. Embodiment works on the premise that invoked spirits have to be given the necessary receptacles for appearance in body-space, preparatory to interacting with people in this sphere. In spirit manifestation, the physical receptacles are human mediums whose consciousness are temporarily used as media for communication, while awolo (or skin) represents the personality of invoked spirit and cloaks the identity of the medium so as not to distract people’s attention. Because the central process involved in achieving this trans- substantiation is out of the scope of this paper, the topic will not be examined here.

What is important in all this, is that on the one hand, mmuo ogonogo (the tall spirit) is a concrete representation of people’s theoretical beliefs, that dramatically reenacts both the miracle of resurrection and the central principles of life in expanded space and time. On the other hand, the traveling spirit is a visible temporal capsule that links the afterlife with the past and through the present. It points out, and constantly reminds us of a radically different conception of reality in which time and space are illusive, and are not the restraining barriers they seem to be. Lastly, as if to underscore this point, mmuo ogonogo concretely affirms the principle of family cohesiveness by validating the belief in ancestors, and in life after death.

Spatial Reconfigurations: Art as Time-Lines

Creative forms, of which the tall spirit is one, function as philosophical tools for traversing the conditions of temporality we know as past, present and future. The references to spirit-space and the conception of art as sacred object are grasped only if one listens attentively to artists’ discourses on creativity, and their rationale for choosing their themes. In the case of Enwonwu, creativity and art are seen as an “invocation of ancestral spirits through giving concrete form or body to them before they can enter into the human world” (1968:421). In his view, art enables the artist to treat the present as a point of transition to and from the past into the future, and to and from the future into the past. Since the present moment or “the here-and-now” is not actually extended in three-dimensional space, art becomes the vehicle for extending it, reminding us that the present finds extension in future states.

Construing artistic production as a creative ritual of spirit embodiment allows Enwonwu to participate in the mysteries of his culture while relishing the sacredness of his professional role as a creator. Following the death of his brother Ike, Enwonwu entered a different metonymic phase in his work in which art became the key for understanding the mysteries of mmuo (spirit), his past and his place in it. He focused on spirit forms that he said took him back to the time with his father when he saw carved spirit images in the shrine.9 Through successive paintings and sketches of Ogolo, (runner-spirits) that are closely related to Agbogho mmuo (maiden-spirits) and Ayolugbe (singing-spirits), he reconciled his concept of art with deep mysteries, intuitively attending to the sacred rite of creation involved in the transformation of these forms into receptacles of life. Ogolo are lithe, skittish figures with long conical- shaped head and multicolored, appliquéd “skin”. Stealthy runners, with a reputation for savagery in whipping, they are beautiful to behold, but dangerous to encounter. The following are some of the paintings of Ogolo in Enwonwu’s post-1987 series that capture the rhythm and force of this mmuo (spirit) in various forms and movement: Ogolo Adonis (1989), Ogolo Metamorphosis (1991, fig. 6), Ogolo (1989), Ogolo in Motion (1989), Nne Mmuo (1987, fig. 7) and Ogolo Emerging (1989).

While contemplating the spirit-identity of these forms, and the colour, tonal values, and vibrancy of Ogolo, Enwonwu’s visual objective was to represent the inherent beauty of Ogolo, which in his view, has universal appeal.10 The linear shapes of the canvases Enwonwu chose to capture the spirits wonderfully accentuate their vertical elongated forms and amplifies their beauty. The yellow and red colors of the fabric “skin” are intersected by the black lines of uli “body” markings. Created immediately after the funeral ceremony of his elder brother, the painting Nne mmuo, becomes an exhortatory reminder of the immutability of life. The appearance of this spirit and others at the funeral remind people that earthly life is not the only expression and form of life. Their presence reinforces the message that celebrating the departed’s exit from earthly life constitutes a grand welcoming of a new spirit into spiritual life and space. The interconnectedness of earthly life (in body-space) and pneumatic life (in spirit space) breeches the artificial worldly separation of the two realms. Through dance the Ogolo rechoregraphs this grand drama of life and death, and validates the oneness of life by drawing from the interpretive dance movements of earthly life.

Nne mmuo is captured in the validatory throes of an intricate iru ani (couching low) dance motion, displaying humanoid skills that reenacts the metaphysical maxim about parallel states of existence: as it is above, so it is below; as it is in humans, so is it in spirits. The visual language of interpretation captures the dramatic intensity, colour, and emotional style of the spirits. With dignity, respect and sensitivity, Enwonwu captures the movement of the spirit’s hands, the intense concentration on its face, and the suggested ripple of muscles in the thighs. Becoming one with the Ogolo means cathartically moving with the spirit to the point where one memorably grieves through dance, and heals by realizing the transformatory potentials of death and that there is life after death.

Enwonwu’s strong attachment to this sacral forms reveals that he also utilized them at a personal level to negotiate, come to terms with, and pass through the portals of death.11 With the resurfacing of his prostrate cancer in 1993, Enwonwu faced the prospects of his own mortality. Sometime in October, four months before his death in February 1994, he had a premonitory experience that for him marked the turning point of his illness and his serious encounter with the afterlife. “Woken” by a presence that drew him to the window facing his hospital bed, he found himself at the edge of a cliff that abruptly plunged into a dizzying chasm. On the other side of this awesome vista was his mother and immediate elder brother, Francis. The mother beckoned, but he faltered as he tried to approach. Explaining that there was something he had to do since he was too afraid to cross, the next morning he asked for the painting he was working on before his illness. Still in hospital, he steely worked to finish the painting, weakly dabbing on paint onto canvas until he could no longer continue. The spiritly Ogolo that emerged was unusually frisky and elegant suggesting that it was an evocative form of his own inner spirit, being freed from the encasing prison of his feeble disease-ridden body. The colorful, cheery dancing form validating the resilience of life, and was the medium he utilized to draw together his last resources and energy to cross the chasm of death, into afterlife.12

In this example, Enwonwu presents a model of using the creative process to facilitate transition from one spatial condition to another. A different model occurs with the creative process of Douglas Camp, who uses it to chart a different time-line to an ancestral past. Born in Buguma, Nigeria, in 1958, Douglas Camp now lives and works in London. A sculptor of international standing, Sokari brings a sophisticated understanding of metal to her creative vision. In an important sense, she sees her work as both an expression and a continuation of Kalabari – Izhon creative principle. Within the aesthetic universe in which she creates, Sokari is aware of the intrusion of spirit forces into people’s lives, and into the creative process. Spirit possession amplifies the power of art; the corporeality of embodied Sekiapu spirits inspire her art, and by virtue of spirit-channeling, the objects and forms created are power objects.

Being a Kalabari expatriate in England has mediated Douglas Camp’s creative lens in profoundly deep ways. In a series of brilliant large-scale sculptures of Kalabari festival scenes, she imbues her steel constructions with rhythmic vitality that dissolves the solidity of steel, robbing it of its rigidity. Her Sekiapu-inspired dancing spirits appear mobile even in their immobility and as they are rooted to their spots. Bird Masquerade with long tail (1995, fig. 8) provocatively “swishes” its behind as well as the two brooms in its hands, while firmly balancing an reddish-orange egret on its head. The spirit-figure formed by the ultramarine blue steel lattice wrapper suggestively “flutters” as the dancing spirit “moves.” Caught in a swashbuckling swagger with arms slightly crooked in a dance gesture is Dandy Masquerade (1995). This self-assured, dandy male spirit is decked out in a coppery waistcoat of pelete cloth (native cut) with four mirrors hanging low at the level of its behind from the dull grey sash encircling its waist.

The ferocious powerful Big Masquerade with the boat and household on its head (1995) wields two cutlasses with the bright red blood of a recent sacrifice splattered on its titanium white apron. It bears an architectonic Kalabari wooden boat on its head on which the artist has a carved family inscription. Equally fiercsome, the energy of the powerful Otobo (Hippo) Masquerade (1995) dominates its space. Its look is also remarkable: a dull-grey rectangular-shaped large steel head is vitalized by dominant blue-and-white piercing eyes, prominent steel fangs for teeth, small humanoid wooden skulls indelicately dispersed around the base of the head, and green palm fronds jutting askew all around the base of the head. Intricately crafted, the sculptures collectively underscore the evocative quality of some of the performances of the Sekiapu Society, and Douglas Camp’s interpretive vision of the vitality of the dancing spirits.

Sokari comes to her steel representation of the Sekiapu dancing spirits whilst participating in the Buguma Centennial celebrations in 1987. Prior to that, her metal constructions had been restricted to Church Ede (1984), a decorated steel bed she constructed to rechoreograph her father’s Christian wake, and to memorialize his absence. She began a tradition of personalizing her work by motorizing sections of it to fuse together three major qualities of the three dimensional space: visual, locomotion, and auditory. Her next steel project was the grand festival boat or Alali Aru, evocative of the elaborate festival boats used in Buguma during the Centennial regatta. Standing on the stern of the boat is the motorized lead Sekiapu dancing spirit, whose windswept wild appearance, and occasional stomping of its feet adds an unusual auditory zest to the sculptural piece.

Dance and the transgressive character of choreographic dance patterns performed by priestesses first kindled Douglas Camp’s interest in spirits. She studied the mannerism and gestures of a specific Kalabari priestess, Amonia Horsfall, who performs a trance inducing dance in which traverses and collapses gender categories. Possessed, Horsfall role-plays and dances men’s steps then switches in mid-dance into the choreographed patterns of women’s dance. Working with Horsfall, Douglas Camp found herself being gradually pulled into the spirit sphere by the good relationship she claimed she developed with Horsfall’s main spirit guide (1988:16). Consequently, “I made spirit objects that...I imagined because of the way she danced...I felt it was all right to make these things” (Douglas Camp 1988:16).

The Sekiapu-inspired sculptures commemorating the spirit-dancers contextualizes Kalabari-Izhon aesthetics, the philosophical concerns of Sokari, and her fascination with inspired dance, spirit possession, and movement. Fascinated by the intricate interplay of possession, creativity and dance, and the idea that possession is a medium for creativity, Sokari focuses on the movement and gestures of the dance performances of the Sekiapu or Ekine Society, capturing the modes and moods that she takes to be the essence of the society’s spiritual drama. Unlike Enwonwu who utilized the Agbogho mmuo to deepen his knowledge of mysteries, Sokari’s sculpturally nuanced spirits are deployed to recover history and assert her identity in the context of her life in London. Separated from the material aspects of Buguma culture, yet desirous to validate it, her metal sculptures become ways of asserting her difference and identity. By this means, she inscribes her values in the British environment as she engages in a nuanced, multi-layered exploration of self-identity in a migratory context of transitoriness. In this journey of self-assertion, Douglas Camp simultaneously proceeds in a journey of self- recovery. Unwittingly, she apprehends the female roots of the Sekiapu society, and in transforming herself into Ekine Erebo or Ekine woman, intuitively recovered the history of Ekineba, the female deity that is the founder and patroness of Ekine society.

Although today the Sekiapu dance drama of the Ekine Society is represented as an all-male institution, this was not historically the case. The origin of the Ekine Society, as recounted by Horton in “The Kalabari Ekine Society: A Borderland of Religion and Art,” lies with Ekineba, a beautiful woman who was abducted by the Water People or water spirits (1963:94). Carried into spirit-space at the bottom of the creeks by these Water- People, Ekineba was shown a vast array of different plays by each water spirit, and according to Horton was, indeed, the first Kalabari person ever to have seen spirit embodiments dancing on the mud-flats by Water People (1995). After this epiphanous revelation Ekineba was returned to the “land of humans” (body-space) at the command of the mother of the water spirits. Coming to, she narrated her experiences and taught Kalabari people all the plays she had seen, which soon became very popular. The plays were regularly performed in accordance to a stipulated set of rules in which Ekineba had to initiate each performance by beating the signal tune. Chaffing under this rule which they found unduly restrictive, a group of young men refused to obey the rule which the Water People had stipulated must be performed before any of the play was performed. On three separate occasions they failed to let her beat the signal. Losing patience with this violation of their pact, the Water People abducted Ekineba for failing to enforce the code. Perhaps in remorse, the men made Ekineba the patron Spirit of Sekiapu, named the society after her, but promptly barred women from it.

Conclusion

The primacy of Ekineba in the Ekine Society speaks to the clairvoyant powers of an Ekine woman both in spirit possession and in creativity. Sokari’s sculptural representation of the Sekiapu dancing-spirits (or masquerades as she calls them) excavates a historical time-line that links the past to the present pronounces on the possibility of human interaction with the inhabitants of the spirit-space. Because African art came to art history via anthropology, and because anthropology is the handmaid of imperialism, no indication is ever given in the writings of anthropologists of the deep philosophical ideas underpinning the conceptualization of artifacts in Africa’s material culture. Rarely is any hint given of the sophisticated ontological framework, ritual of resurrection, or the potentialities of human’s capacity to transcend the three dimensional conditions of space and time. Since the objective of imperialism is to legitimize the dominance of Europe by racializing and primitivizing all non-Europeans, the discipline of African art history was consequently founded on a patronizing treatment of its culture and practices that stymie understanding.

It is worthwhile to recognize that estrangement from Africa’s material culture led to an aberrant intellectual situation in which Africa’s philosophy of life and mode of visual representation are presented to the world by European and European American collectors, anthropologists, historians and museum officials, most of whom lack an adequate grasp of any African language to participate in any meaningful intellectual discourse. A direct impact of their “scholarly” claims is the validation and grounding of knowledge on ignorance, the effect of which is the construal of sculpture as the dominant category of analysis in the concept of spirit manifestation. Most collectors, many scholars and museum officials treat the wooden face of the spirits as the most significant aspect of the manifested spirits, even when they assert that, in its cultural location, the created form is much more than its sculpted face or headdress.13

I would like to acknowledge the Senior Getty Grant that supported my research travel to Nigeria, and which yielded the experiences that are the subject of discussion in section one.

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Copyright 2001 Africa Resource Center

Citation Format

Nzegwu, Nkiru (2001). ART AS TIME-LINES: SACRAL REPRESENTATION IN FAMILY SPACES. Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World: 2, 1.