Arquitectura en Capas

Whether by coincidence or by design the arrival of Europeans at the mouth of the Qua Iboe river was met with the same rites as were used annually to purge Ibibio villages of malevolent spirits and diseases. During the night, women swept the ground in front of their houses, roofs were beaten and torches carried around the village.¹ This chapter examines the ways in which Ibibio and Annang made sense of colonialism and Christianity. It traces their cultural engagements with European rule and religion during the period that led up to the most signifi cant watershed of the colonial period, the Women’s War of 1929. It concerns the ways in which uneven relations of power, between men and women, educated and illiterate, titled and non-titled, were negotiated within shifting terrains of social, religious and political contest.²

T H E L A N D S C A P EO F P O WE R

Territory on the south-western side of the Qua Iboe river joined the newly formed Abak District of Ikot Ekpene Division late in 1910 after being ceded from Aba and Opobo Districts.³ Repeated disturbances in this part of the District resulted in further troop deployments, and additional police were stationed at Ikot Ekpene until 1912. During this period the process of dismantling the apparatus of the slave trade continued, and in 1910 the compounds of slave-dealing chiefs in south-western Annang were burned, including those of Akpan ‘Uko’ Udo Ndok, the village head of Ikot Akpa Nkuk, and Inokon Uyo Ubong of Ikot Udo Obobo. A dislike of answering summonses, a tendency to assault court messengers and police, and a habit of ‘going for bush’ continued, however, as did colonial suspicions of the subversive infl uence of trading middlemen. In 1911 it was reported of the south-western Annang that:

The infl uence of several cunning and avaricious Opobos and Aros is great with the Chiefs. This infl uence, together with the peculiar semi-passive resistance of the natives renders the task of bringing them into line with the natives on [the north-east] side of the Kwa Iboe River a diffi cult matter.⁴

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Administrative problems were compounded by the isolation of Abak, the District headquarters located across the river, though successive attempts from 1911 to 1926 to establish a more central site failed. With the outbreak of war in 1914 and the shortage of staff, Abak station was evacuated resulting in a ‘serious retrogression. … The safety of life and property within the area was reduced’.⁵ Several cases of highway robbery were reported in the District during 1914, the year of the amalgamation of Northern and Southern Nigeria.⁶

The extension of British rule from the 1910s to the 1940s would later assume the appearance of ‘a series of disconnected and reluctant conces-sions to circumstances which the Government could not ignore but was unable to meet in any other way’.⁷ The introduction of courts and the appointment of chiefs as assessors and judges was the sequel to expeditions Figure 3.1 Map of Calabar Province

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and the introduction of the Warrant Chief system is a well-known instance of the ‘re-invention of tradition’ since it corresponded less to pre-colonial kinship institutions than to administrative demands for cost-effectiveness and for a buffer to defl ect potential political resistance.⁸ Before 1914, British political offi cers sat as judges in the Native Courts with a bench of local Warrant Chiefs who acted as assessors. In the southern Annang region the fi rst courts were established at Utu Etim Ekpo and Azumini.

Lord Lugard, reiterating the colonial fallacy of Aro domination over this region, refl ected that the Warrant Chief system helped to re-establish the status of traditional authorities among the peoples of the south-east who, he believed, had been rendered ‘powerless’ by the disintegrating infl uence of the coastal middlemen and the Aro traders.⁹

Lugard’s reforms, the Native Courts Ordinance of 1914 and the Native Authority Ordinance of 1916, were intended to reinforce and recreate an independent paramount chieftaincy by removing British political offi cers from the court and by introducing the position of the Native Court permanent president. Particular emphasis, therefore, was placed on identi-fying strong regional and clan chiefs. Indeed, it was not until these reforms that enquiries were held into pre-colonial governance, and attempts were made at founding colonial administration upon ‘the less organised forms of government which existed before any European offi cial intervened’.¹⁰ In the Annang context this meant investigating the offi ce of the àkúkú.

Very few such chiefs had been appointed as Warrant Chiefs as ‘an okuku was taken and hidden in the bush whenever the whiteman came, for it was feared he would catch and carry him off ’.¹¹ Evidence of the àkúkú’s power in Abak District was confl icting. ‘Some accounts indicate that the least expression of his will, even a gesture, was most punctiliously obeyed:

others that he was held as of no importance or could be unceremoniously disposed of by assassination.’¹² Although successors had not been installed in some communities, in many others okúkú were still alive. Nevertheless, the District Offi cer responsible for implementing Lugard’s reforms and for selecting permanent court presidents in Abak District did not pursue this line in his recruitment and concluded that:

To speak of tribal or clan chiefs in regard to this District is … to employ a quite inapplicable category. No such Chiefs exist, and the problem … is to take the best possible steps towards producing such an institution artifi cially.¹³

Instead, initially fi ve chiefs were recommended whom he considered superior to all others, including Ebong of Ibesit whom the Resident called

‘an able man of no standing’, and the charismatic Inokon Uyo Ubong of Ukanafun.¹⁴

It was on the basis of this reinvention of traditional offi ce that Lugard’s

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legislation, ‘set up by a stroke of the pen in parts of the Southern Prov-inces composed of no more than placemen, persons with no tribal authority whatsoever …’¹⁵ By 1915 the list of Court Members in Abak and neigh-bouring Uyo Districts comprised many ‘small boys’ who were neither recognised chiefs of a town nor possessed any ‘qualities which would justify their holding warrants of membership’.¹⁶ The appointment of Native Court permanent presidents petered out, but the imperative of identifying tradi-tional, hereditary chiefs which was initiated by this process, and revisited in Grier’s recommendations of 1922, the Commission into the Aba Riots in 1929 and in Cameron’s reforms of the 1930s, would dominate colonial discourse on chiefs and courts until the 1940s.¹⁷

The creation of an autonomous sphere of Annang chieftaincy was premised on the quest for vertical hierarchies of political power. Indirect rule therefore formalised informal and contested local hierarchies. In 1924 the Abak Native Court (including the Ikot Okoro sub-court) had fi fty court members who had been appointed from 1915 onwards. Of these, none claimed a hereditary title: ten were classifi ed as government nominees, thirty-nine were placed in a category of ‘obscure native title’ and one (from Oku) had been appointed on the basis of being chosen by his town. In Utu Etim Ekpo Native Court (including Ikot Odiong), which served the remainder of Abak District, there were forty-seven Warrant Chiefs, who included three hereditary chiefs (all appointed in 1924 including Udo Abassi from Ika), seven government appointees, thirty-six whose title could not be determined, and one who was selected by his town.¹⁸

The administrative and executive responsibilities of the Warrant Chiefs were quickly overshadowed by their judicial duties in the Native Courts.

This was a result of the fi nancial attractions of justice and the administra-tion’s conviction that the greatest need was to maintain order and therefore to settle inter-village disputes. Under the Native Courts Proclamation Amendment of 1901 the Warrant Chiefs restricted villagers to taking cases to the newly formed Native Courts. As a result the elders who arbitrated on the various Annang tribunals, notably the village meeting (èsòp ìkpá ísbn) and the court of the clan leader (èsòp àkúkú), were stripped of their power. The newly appointed chiefs capitalised upon their exclusive rights, as the following observation on the status of chiefs in Calabar Province illustrates:

They have made no effort to support Government measures, and adopt an attitude of indifference in all matters respecting the public in general, spending most of their time and money in litigation with a view to improve their private fortunes.¹⁹

In 1910, just a year after the fi rst Native Courts were established in Abak District, several chiefs were found guilty of supplementing their offi cial sitting fees by ‘usurping the functions of the Court and trying cases

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themselves’.²⁰ These chiefs designated themselves ‘Consul Men’ and their informal courts represented a semblance of offi cialdom since they issued their own summons and had uniformed messengers.²¹ Such illegal tribunals were popular because they were closer, cheaper, faster and more effective than the few, new and often distant Native Courts, where claimants became frustrated because fees were lost when attendance at court could not be guaranteed, and reviews were delayed when the District Offi cer could attend court only infrequently. Outside the courts, the new chiefs also capi-talised on unexpected opportunities for physical coercion. In 1923, in an incident which confi rms observations of the banality of violence associated with indirect rule, a minor ‘epidemic’ of slight wounds was reported to the District Offi cer.²² On investigation he discovered that the chiefs of a number of villages had armed a sanitary patrol with small bows and ordered them to shoot anyone committing a nuisance.²³

An expanding colonial bureaucracy also meant that where district offi cers were distant and aloof, clerks, letter-writers and interpreters became part of the local social landscape, and part of personal networks. An analysis of African scribes, clerks and interpreters exposes a sphere of ‘working misun-derstandings’ which opened up between colonialism as practised and colo-nialism as envisaged by its architects. Court clerks had considerable scope for manoeuvre and their relationship with the chiefs sitting on the court benches created a network of power that linked local political authorities to the bureaucracy of the colonial state. After Lugard’s reforms of 1914 the ascendancy of the court clerk was determined by the infrequent presence of political offi cers and the use of English in the forms and records of the court. The Warrant Chiefs depended on the court clerks’ favour. They paid bribes for their seats on the bench, and addressed the clerks as ‘master’.

Clerks, then, controlled the gateways to colonial courts and bureau-cracies and hence exercised great infl uence over these important sites of struggle for access to resources and the meanings of social relationships and authority. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s clerks in the south-eastern Nigerian provinces gained an odious reputation. Indirect rule provided an

‘academy for improvisation’ in which these ‘auxiliary tricksters’, the inter-preters, messengers and clerks, could profi t from their function as political and cultural intermediaries.²⁴

The administration of Abak depended heavily on these intermediaries and hence on district interpreters, clerks and lawyers. The diffi culties this generated were apparent in 1915 when relations between the Government and the chiefs ground to a halt. Between them the district interpreter and a local lawyer were thought to have circulated a rumour that the government was about to seize the palm fruit harvest and had played upon these fears to get the chiefs to pay for and sign a petition. The rumour enfl amed local opinion to such an extent that European lives were thought to be

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in danger. Unknown to the signatories the petition was in fact a protest against Lugard’s reforms which threatened to exclude the interpreter from court proceedings as British offi cers withdrew from day-to-day sittings. The chiefs were so angry at having been duped that they insisted that the inter-preter was transferred, and the DO reported that the running of the district was ‘hung up’.²⁵

Popular reaction to the unfamiliar prominence accorded the chiefs during this period found its outlet in ‘non-approved’ institutions, including the secret societies, as their source of justice and fair play.²⁶ The imposition of the colonial judicial order was met with overt and covert responses from the elders of the secret societies. The potential revival of ‘pre-government days’ was a constant fear for the administration and so-called ‘revivals’ were especially prevalent during the First World War years:

During the last few months, the secret societies have begun to wake up again. The reason for this is apparently the war at home. Some of the interior people say the day of the white man is over in this country; others, who do not go quite so far as this think that while our hands are full of graver business, we shall not trouble very much about them.²⁷

Elsewhere, at Etaha Obong market, two miles from Uyo, ékpó meetings were held during which they resolved to restore their ‘ancient authority’. Tired of the Native Court, ékpó had made arrangements to deal with anyone who sought to frustrate them and demanded ‘to rule the whole country again under the old ekpo law’.²⁸

Evidence of secret society activities illustrates that they were inspired by particular grievances with the Native Court system. Reports appeared in 1916, for instance, that ékpê societies throughout Ikot Ekpene Division, including the Annang villages of Abak District, had revived their former judicial functions. In January, representatives of the ékpê society had been called with àyèì to meet at Obo market.²⁹ There they agreed to revive the rule that intruders should be apprehended and killed by the society. The witness statement of Akpan Ekoreko living at Ikot Ama given during the ensuing investigation exposes the clandestine details of its activities:

The fi rst meeting of the Ekpe Society in connection with the new law was at Ikot Akpan Essiet in the compound of Chief Ebok Idiang (Ikot Ama Court). There an oath was sworn that no one should report what was arranged to the DO. It was then arranged that any[one] caught stealing should be killed and not taken to the DO. Another meeting was held at Ntaw Akpa Oko in the compound of Akpan Nwoko (Ikot Ama Court). Mbiam was again sworn and the same law proclaimed.

An order was passed that every town should give their Court Member a goat and 100 manillas because it was their business to get the matter

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settled if the DO came to hear of it. After that there was a big general meeting at Edet Akpan Efi ong. At this meeting 1200 manillas was subscribed to act as a fund to bribe the police if any one should be killed, and if the family tried to complain to the DO they were to be fl ogged and turned back. Their townspeople would then deal with them. … Since then several people have been killed under this law.

About 9 days ago a man stole 1 manilla in Etim market and he was seized by the Ekpe people. I can’t say if he has been killed, but the matter was not reported to any of the Courts. This law was made because the Native Court could not give them suffi cient punishment.

This law could never have been made without the Native Court Chiefs who were all present at the meetings.³⁰

The Warrant Chiefs were treading a fi ne line. While the court chiefs in Ikot Ama conspired with the societies, elsewhere they found themselves in confl ict with their masked members. In Ukanafun in 1917, ékpó, whose laws were in force during September and October, travelled fi ve miles in full regalia to attack the president of the Native Court at Ikot Idiong. Ikot Idiong (Ikot Odiong) was the fi rst Native Court to be established in Ukanafun in 1912 (see Figure 3.2). It was a travelling court whose messenger was based at Utu Etim Ekpo, and was opened because:

people like their cases heard in their own country by their own chiefs.

If they do not get more or less their own way in this matter they do not bring their cases to court. The advantage of having the cases heard in an authorised Court is that the grievance is made public and not heard on the doorstep of some chief ’s house and the result unknown.³¹ The chief of Ikot Idiong was accused by the ékpó society of deliberately requesting the court from the Government. After refusing to contribute to repair costs for the court building, ékpó members from the neighbouring village of Ikot Odobia raided the court session on 12 September, released prisoners and attacked the house of Chief Udodung, the court president.³² Three days later ékpó from Ikot Odobia marched again and were joined by members of affi liated societies at Chief Udodung’s house where they accused him of having brought ‘a Government court into an Egbo country and thus breaking Egbo law’.³³

The Native Courts were unpopular because of their procedures and their punishments. The courts lacked effective sanctions in calling witnesses, judges were frequently bribed and the review process collapsed under the weight of demand. Re-interpretations of customary law during the early colonial period outlawed ‘repugnant’ practices, so that recourse to oaths (kbìàm) and ordeals (úkán) was made illegal and investigative procedures, oath-swearing on testimony in the Native Courts, became a parody of tradi-tional practice. Native Court punishments, too, were insuffi cient to act as

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deterrents. Punishment for theft became a standing grievance, especially when the penalty was reduced from two years to six months’ imprisonment in 1914. Imprisonment was roundly rejected since it carried less social stigma than being publicly shamed in a market. In 1923 chiefs in Abak Division called for the rations given to prisoners to be reduced since their sentences were deemed insuffi ciently harsh.³⁴

Secret society tribunals, in contrast, offered familiar means of investi-gation, defi nitive resolution, and harsh punishments, and were popular as a result. In 1924 the ékpó society, which was mandated to protect farms from theft, met in Ikot Okoro, Abak District. At the meeting, kbìàm (of coconut

Figure 3.2 Sketch map of ‘Okanafon Country’, 1917³⁵

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milk) was distributed to the various villages represented, who were charged with pouring it on village paths and announcing the threat that anyone who

milk) was distributed to the various villages represented, who were charged with pouring it on village paths and announcing the threat that anyone who