Tom A. Miachi. The Incarnate Being Phenomenon in African Culture: Anthropological Perspectives on the Igala of North-Central Nigeria. Ibadan, Nigeria: Kraft Books Limited, 2012. Illustrations. 388 pp. n.p. (cloth), ISBN 978-978-918-068-4.

Reviewed by Sidney Kasfir (Art History - Emory University)
Published on H-AfrArts (August, 2015)
Commissioned by Jean M. Borgatti (Clark Univeristy)

When Is a Masquerade Something Else?

My initial response on receiving Tom A. Miachi’s immensely important study of Igala incarnate beings (in published literature usually called masquerades) was dismay that neither he nor I had known about each other’s writing project when I was completing my parallel set of essays on the arts of the neighboring Idoma for Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley (2011) (coedited with Marla C. Berns and Richard Fardon). In a world of better scholarly communications (more on that below), he would have been a contributor to our book, and my more up-to-date Idoma comparisons would have appeared in his.[1]

This review is in two parts: one examines the content of the book as exposition and intellectual contribution to the study of Nigerian, particularly Igala, art and visual culture; and the other comments on the conditions of its researching, writing, and publication, and by extension, publishing practice in contemporary Nigeria. This study is clearly a distillation of many years work, the topic of a graduate master’s thesis from the University of Ibadan in 1983, and doctoral thesis in 1991, and preceding that, work that he conducted at University College London where he earned his bachelor of science degree.[2] Many of the cited interviews in the book date from the first research trip mentioned, in 1978-79, roughly thirty-five years ago. The photographs, however, are spread over many years and include several from 2008-9 and even one of the late Ata of Igala wearing the Ejubejauilo mask in 2012, the year the book came out.[3] Both the photographs and text suggest that the field research has also been intermittent over the past thirty-five years, thus creating a much longer, more inclusive time frame than seen, for example, in John S. Boston’s classic ethnography of the Igala in 1968 or Paul Chike Dike’s PhD thesis in 1977.[4] 

Given its position on the lower Niger River on the southeast side of the Niger-Benue Confluence, Igala has been the nexus of trade, politics, and immigration for many centuries. Although by 1979 about 37 percent of its population was Muslim and 28 percent Christian (pp. 114-115), it was never attacked and defeated during the nineteenth-century jihad of Uthman dan Fodio and has remained a major example of the staying power of kingship through successive encounters with powerful political entities. Therefore any in-depth study of Igala is also invaluable in constructing a historical narrative of the whole Confluence region of Nigeria. 

Early in the book, the chapter entitled “Ethnographic and Historical Base of the Igala of Nigeria” establishes in detail the complex settlement history and trade relations with the Hausa, Ebira, Nupe, and Igbo. The level of detail here is quite extraordinary, reviewing as it does the work of other scholars, including both historians and ethno-archaeologists, for example, connecting horse bones found at Igbo Ukwu with the Igala-Igbo trade in cloth, slaves, and horses.[5] Given the central placement of Igala for both Niger River and overland trade, it is not surprising that they should have dominated more peripheral areas. Women wove okpe burial cloth on vertical fixed looms; the cloth was traded in both the Confluence and along the Benue.[6] I have noted elsewhere that burial cloth formed the basic structure of the risen ancestor in his shroud as depicted by the “tall ghost” incarnations, ekwuafia, egwu afia, and mmuo afia, among the Idoma, Igala, and Onitsha Igbo respectively.[7] It was also highly valued along the Benue for its ostensible purpose as a cloth for wrapping the corpse.

Most of the book maintains this level of exegesis, but there is also an oratorical thrust when the author takes on what he appears to think of as the African art establishment’s gatekeepers of old (most of whom are now either dead or in deep retirement). The opening section introduces the author’s four major points, which he uses to distinguish his research from that of non-Igala scholars: duration; linguistic fluency; son-of-the-soil status; and the supposedly misguided conceptual biases of art historians, intent on writing about “masquerades” (a term the author formerly used himself but has more recently rejected) instead of what they really are, “incarnate beings.” The first three differences are treated matter-of-factly, but on the concept of incarnate beings, the author waxes eloquent throughout the book. He begins with a superficial gloss on what masking has meant in Europe, as a form of frivolity or play-acting (ignoring its symbolic seriousness and also ignoring the African recognition of this same complexity in the use of the word “play” for masquerade in Nigerian pidgin).

Having established that European masking refers to nothing serious, he can only conclude that, since it is often a serious business in Africa, it is supercilious, or perhaps just a form of their wrong-headedness, that Western art historians use this mask nomenclature with reference to African enactments. Their most serious shortcoming, he writes, is that art historians deal with masks as artifacts without exploring context, thus condemning them to superficial commentary about style and material. Here he commits the functionalist’s error of not recognizing that the mask’s form gives rise to its affect, and affect allows meaning to materialize; in other words, appearances are not really just icing on the cake, but one of its major ingredients. It is also simply not true that context is absent from art historical accounts, and he appears to be referring mainly to exhibition catalogues rather than monographs. But since there have been no extensive published studies of Igala art by art historians (as opposed to such historians as R. A. Sargent, such anthropologists as John Boston and Paul Chike Dike, and such government ethnographers as Kenneth Murray and Myles Clifford), this would be hard to establish.

Returning to the dismissal of masking practices in Europe as in any way comparable to those in Africa, there is such a copious literature on the relationship between play and ritual, much of it available when the author was a student of anthropology in London in the late 1970s, that it is difficult to know how to approach a critique of his critique. The writings of Denis Diderot (The Paradox of Acting, 1883), Roger Caillois (Man, Play and Games, 1961), Gregory Bateson (“A Theory of Play and Fantasy” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972), Barbara Babcock (editor, The Reversible World, 1978), Le Roy Ladurie (Montaillu, 1975; Carnival in Romans, 1979) were all well known then. Unfortunately, probably the most relevant theoretical work for Miachi, Margaret Drewal’s Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency (1992), while principally about Yoruba masking, was unlikely to be available to him in Nigeria—a point to which I’ll return.

The notion that, in Africa, a mask embodies the spirit of an incarnate being has been reported in innumerable studies by both art historians and anthropologists. Where Miachi diverges from these studies is to identify Igala incarnate beings broadly as spirits of the deceased, or what Richard Henderson refers to as the “collective elder dead,” who, while no longer bodily present, are spiritually very much alive.[8] Incarnate ancestral spirits, in Igala egwu afia and in Idoma ekwuafia, as physical resurrections of named deceased elders, are a major part of Miachi’s research, but in Nigeria as elsewhere, there are also other, nonhuman, spirits embodied as masks: one need only invoke spirits of rivers, trees, forest pools, powerful animals, and mythical creatures, as well as non-ancestral human spirits, of dead enemies, for example, in warrior masquerades. I don’t wish to dismantle the author’s presumptions here about specifically Igala spirits but only to place them in the broader context of those of neighboring Nigerian cultures—Idoma, Igbo, Yoruba, Ebira, and so on—which he asserts are closely related. 

The author next places the incarnate being concept within wider Igala society, which in the introduction he envisions through a neo-functionalist approach. Having been trained in British social anthropology, he mentions Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, and more specifically cites Vere Gordon Childe: “not the least important function of ideology is to hold society together and lubricate its workings.”[9] Miachi argues that the incarnate being phenomenon is the product of an ideology fashioned by African societies to do exactly this. The majority of older masking studies make the same assumptions, most commonly expressed in the notion of masks as “agents of social control” (e.g., George W. Harley, Masks As Agents of Social Control in Northeast Liberia, 1950). He pays particular attention to the role of the egwu afia in settling family disputes and alludes to their precolonial responsibility in judging criminal cases, a role documented by other writers for both Yoruba Egungun and Idoma Alekwuafia as well as certain Cameroon Grassfields masquerades and further afield in West Africa. 

As detailed descriptive ethnography, including frequent direct quotes in Igala from interviews that the author also translates, this study fills a very important lacuna in our knowledge about Igala performance by those impersonating spirits, whether named ancestors in the case of the non-royal egwu afia, those owned by the Igala king (Ata) known as egwu Ata, or “entertainment incarnate beings” (p. 209, plates 24a and b), owned by younger men’s age sets. There is no other such detailed description of the egwu afia, to my knowledge, and although they differ morphologically from the several Idoma versions, their social and ritual roles, behaviors, and occasions for appearance are essentially the same. Here his position as an initiated male member of the culture, also trained as an anthropologist, as well as the long-term nature of his fieldwork, was crucial. 

In turn, he traces various connections to cognate performing spirits in Igbo, Jukun, Idoma, and “Ebira Koto,” that is, the older Ebira communities in Koton Karife north of the Benue. An appendix contains an authoritative interview from 1982 with the elderly Onu-Achilaka on the origins of the egwu afia, who claimed that egwu afia came, along with the Achadu, from Igboland. And we know from Henderson’s study of Onitsha, The King in Every Man (1972), that the “collective elder dead” are materialized there as egwu afia or mmuo afia. 

Since the Achadu is the non-royal “prime minister” who heads the Igala Mela, the non-royal council of kingmakers, which is structurally similar to the Yoruba Oyo Mesi, the egwu afia represent the interests of the non-royal clans and are in some sense counterpoised to the position of the egwu Ata, the royal incarnate spirits under the Ata’s control. Miachi chooses not to make this connection, however, and might disagree with my interpretation. Here, I am drawing upon part of an argument made much earlier by Boston (in his 1969 article) in his proposal that Igala has had three periods of strong outsider influence: Yoruba (suggested by the structural similarity between the Oyo Mesi and the Igala Mela as well as the close relationship of the Igala and Yoruba languages); Bini or Edo (following the defeat of Igala by Benin in circa 1516 and evidenced by the famous Benin-style brass face mask Ejube-jauilo, hung at the waist of the Ata); and Jukun/Kwararafa, usually assumed to have taken place in the early seventeenth century although Miachi here accepts uncritically the Ata’s statement that it happened in 1449, considerably before the war with Benin.[10] 

The problem of accepting oral traditions literally becomes more apparent when the Ata repeated to the author, in a 1978 interview, that the egwu Ata, the group of present-day royal performing spirits, were acquired when left behind on the battlefield by the fleeing Jukun army. Yet a chart created by the author of the hierarchy of these eleven spirits states that they are in the custodianship of many different clans of various origins living in Igala. In a parallel study, R. A. Sargent explains this as representing different episodes in these clans’ incorporation into the Ata’s control.[11] Keeping in mind the discussion by Boston in 1969 of the problems in interpreting Igala oral history, the battlefield story may not be representative of all the royal egwu. I am not at all suggesting that it didn’t happen, as there is both Idoma (collected by me in Otobi) and Yoruba (collected by John Willis at Otta in Masquerading Politics: Power and Transformation in a West African Kingdom, 2008) oral evidence that certain powerful masked spirits did accompany warriors on battlefields in the past. Rather, because it is after all a very good story, it has perhaps overshadowed the other, more mundane accounts of mask acquisition within the egwu Ata corpus.

I have barely scratched the surface of what the book covers: there are chapters on every type of incarnate spirit brought into the kingdom by various settler groups, including, as in Idoma, a large influx of immigrants fleeing the north side of the Benue during the Fulani jihad. A surprising example is the akwuchi masquerade or incarnate being, indigenous to Igala but owned by a Hausa immigrant group. Its form is a hooded structure fixed on a large fiber costume similar to those seen in other Islamized West African areas, such as the sengko in Gambia.[12] What is unexpected about this is that it is not at all like the Hausa (known there as Abakwariga) textile embodiments from further east on the Benue, which, I have argued, originated the burial shroud type that became Idoma ekwuafia.[13] Akwuchi’s owners practice a version of Islam that they say predates the jihadist movement. This fits an emerging broader picture of pre-jihad Hausa masquerades that were documented by the earliest foreign visitors. The akwuchi material, treated in two sections of the book, is a valuable addition to such data. This is but one example of many that will make this monumental study an essential reference on Igala history, ritual, and visual performance for many years to come. 

I conclude here with a few brief observations about the business of research, writing, and publishing in Nigeria. As someone who has taught and conducted research in two Nigerian universities (Ibadan and Jos) as well as Makerere in Uganda, I know the less-than-ideal conditions in which scholars are expected to carry out their work. Heavy teaching and examination loads along with administrative responsibilities leave little time for research and writing. Grants and time off are hard to leverage successfully. Professional networking is limited to occasional trips abroad, which are also spent reading to catch up and buying books not available at home. Library holdings in many African universities (South Africa excepted) are typically out of date, or missing from the shelves. All these limitations work to peripheralize the contributions of a great many Africa-based scholars within the wider academic world. 

Miachi’s book, despite its very original thinking on the Igala and their culture of masking, has been subject to these same limitations. When I met him we were both graduate students in London in the early 1980s. Sadly, his study has not incorporated anything published in Europe and North America since that time (i.e., in the last thirty years), which greatly undercuts its impact and potential influence there. But interspersed throughout the book are citations to his own more recent papers and many other works, published and unpublished, by scholars in Nigeria. An important example is the Igala historian J. N. Ukwedeh’s History of the Igala Kingdom, c. 1534-1854: A Study of Political and Cultural Integration in the Niger-Benue Confluence Area of Nigeria, published by Arewa House at Ahmadu Bello University in 2003, as well as two unpublished papers by the same author. There are many other examples of works from small publishers in Nigeria. This points to a serious issue. It is not that there is no Nigerian scholarship, quite the contrary in fact, but rather, that much of it stays within the Nigerian academic orbit, thus creating two parallel economies of knowledge that don’t intersect, except every once in a while at an international conference or workshop.

Probably the most important omission is Sargent’s interpretive essay on the egwu Ata which the author apparently did not see, though he refers to the book, West African Masks and Cultural Systems (1988), in which it appears. Miachi himself was a presenter at the 1981 Oxford symposium (though not a contributor to the final product), which several years later became the book. Its lack of general availability in Nigeria is symptomatic of the parallel economy I have been complaining about. (Though copies were sent to Jos and Ibadan University libraries, given the exigencies of the Nigerian postal system in the 1980s, it might be overly confident to assume they made it onto the shelves.) 

A more serious problem, which can mainly be laid at the feet of the publishers, is that the text was never copyedited to a professional standard. There are misspellings on nearly every page, especially of non-Nigerian names. For example, Alan Merriam becomes “Merrian” (p. 43) and Franz Boas is “Boaz” (p. 45) in the chapter on theoretical approaches. More seriously, and this must be attributed to the author and not the publisher, Miachi’s enthusiasm to replace the term “masquerade” with “incarnate being” extends to the citations of other scholars’ work. For example, he gives a title for a 1974 article by Henry Drewal as “Gelede Incarnate Beings…” when it is “Gelede Masquerade: Imagery and Motif.”[14] He also misquotes my dissertation, inserting “incarnate being” where I use “masquerade” (p. 164). This is set apart on the page with spacing as a direct quote, not a paraphrase, so he crosses a line here of what is professionally accepted.  

In sum, these flaws will undercut the book’s acceptance in the international scholarly arena, though I hope very much they will be overlooked by fellow scholars who study the cultures of the Niger-Benue Confluence and beyond, and who stand most to benefit from the excellence of this ethnography.

Notes

[1]. The author refers in several places to my 1979 PhD thesis, “The Visual Arts of the Idoma of Central Nigeria,” but except for one very early article, “Anjenu: Sculpture for Idoma Water Spirits,” published in 1982, never to my published work since then.

[2]. There is no bibliographic entry for the author’s PhD thesis at Ibadan but he mentions it in the acknowledgments as completed in 1991.

[3]. Miachi points out that William Fagg’s 1968 reference to it as a pectoral mask is incorrect since it hangs below the Ata’s waist as he sits leaning forward in the photograph (p. 118). The human size suggests, he says, that it might have been worn as a face mask in an earlier time when the Ata was secluded and rarely seen in public.

[4]. John S. Boston, The Igala Kingdom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968); and Paul Chike Dike, “Symbolism and Political Authority in the Igala Kingdom” (PhD diss., University of Nigeria, Nsukka, 1977).

[5]. See Alex Ikechukwu Okpoko, “Archaeology and Ethnoarchaeology in the Anambra Valley,” in History and Ethnoarchaeology in Eastern Nigeria: A Study of Igbo-Igala Relations with Special Reference to the Anambra Valley, by Philip Adigwe Oguagha and Alex Ikechukwu Okpoko, Cambridge Monographs in African Archaeology 7 (Oxford: BAR, 1984), part 1, ix-xvii, 1-184 ; and A. E. Afigpo, “Trade and Trade Routes in Nineteenth Century Nsukka,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 7, no. 1 (1973): 77-90.

[6]. See Erim O. Erim, Idoma Nationality 1600-1900: Problems in Studying the Origins and Development of Ethnicity (Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1981), 26-27. 

[7]. Sidney Kasfir, “Art in History, History in Art: The Idoma Alekwuafia Masquerade as Historical Evidence” (Working Paper 103, African Studies Center, Boston University, 1985).

[8]. Richard Henderson, The King in Every Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 88 passim. 

[9]. Vere Gordon Childe, What Happened in History (New York: Penguin, 1946), 23. 

[10]. John Boston, “Oral Tradition and the History of Igala,” Journal of African History 10, no. 1 (1969): 29-43. 

[11]. R. A. Sargent, “Igala Masks: Dynastic History and the Face of a Nation,” in West African Masks and Cultural Systems, ed. Sidney L. Kasfir, Annales vol. 126 (Tervuren: Musée Royal de l”Afrique Centrale, 1988), 17-44. 

[12]. Peter Weil, “Fighting Fire with Fire: The Mandinko Sengko Mask,” in West African Masks and Cultural Systems, 153-194.  

[13]. Sidney L. Kasfir, African Art and the Colonial Encounter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 179-180; and Sidney L. Kasfir, “The Ancestral Masquerade: A Paradigm of Benue Valley Art History,” in Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley, ed. Marla Berns, Richard Fardon, and Sidney L. Kasfir (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum, 2011), 101-115.

[14]. Henry Drewal, “Gelede Masquerade: Imagery and Motif,” African Arts 7, no. 4 (Summer 1974): 8-19, 62-63, 95-96. 

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Citation: Sidney Kasfir. Review of Miachi, Tom A., The Incarnate Being Phenomenon in African Culture: Anthropological Perspectives on the Igala of North-Central Nigeria. H-AfrArts, H-Net Reviews. August, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=42991

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