African Religious Poetry: The Journey So Far

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CHAPTER TWO

REVIEW OF LITERATURE AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK The concept of libation is not new in world history, neither is it a recent literary discovery. It dates back to and was a central and vital aspect of ancient Greek religious activity. Libation performance is a religious rite in honour of the gods and goddesses of the land or the ancestors. It is an act of intimate communion with the deities or spirits of the ancestors; it involves the act of ritual pouring of liquid as offering to the deities or spirits of the ancestors. In African cosmology in general, and the Ibibio in particular, libation is an aspect of religious poetry, which in turn is a sub-genre of oral literary form. In libation performance, there are key concepts like invocation, prayers, supplication and worship.

Oral literature, the mother of religious poetry which this study focuses on, dates back to the emergence of a people as living in groups within specific cultures. It involves the life pattern of the people as they come into existence. In Africa, oral literature includes all the artistic literary expressions embedded in both the visual and performing arts components of the people‟s culture. This chapter makes a review of some literatures that relate to African religious poetry, libation performances, and also considers the theoretical framework applied to the study.

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fact that we “have seen the light”. Others have clamoured for a resuscitation of “the good old days”, a “return to their roots” (Etuk, 2002: 23,151).

What then is African Traditional Religion? African Traditional Religion (ATR) is the religious culture of a people. According to Etuk (2002), tradition is a tenet that institutions seek to “be known and identified, and will serve as their epitaph when they are no more” (29). Bolaji Idowu (1991) says that “Africans share common origins with regard to race andcustoms and religious practices” which in turn bring about a common Africanness (103).

African Traditional Religion thus is one that the Africans identify with. Etuk (2002) adds that it is the most accommodative of existing religions in that it does not:

[...] seek to convert others to its tenets, it neither objects to its members holding membership in one or more other religions as they feel the need; nor does it frown at its adherents borrowing into it any elements From other religions which may appear to enhance its practices and rituals. ... [It is] so readily accessible that anyone could come to it without feeling alienated, for instance, by the inability to read its sacred writings. In this way, the traditional religion lent itself readily to use; one did not have to go to school in order to learn it or to be an educated person in order to understand it;

and one did not have to master anything in order to be admitted to its membership (36-7).

By this assertion, Etuk (2002) is of the opinion that African Traditional Religion is free, open and easily adaptable without encumbrances. It is “not merely at one with the culture of the people; it is the culture of the people”, the total way of reference to the Supreme Being (Etuk, 2002: 36).

The study of African Traditional Religion finds apt expression in Idowu‟s assertion that Africans share a common origin with regard to race, customs and religious practices. Thus, religion, to him, permeates African life as a vital key to the understanding of African cultural values (99). This assertion unfortunately does not go down well with the likes of Leo Frobenius who believes that “Black Africa is a Continent which has no mystery, nor history!” This foreigner‟s myopic contention echoes Emil Ludwig‟s ignorant opinion that “deity is a philosophical concept which savages are incapable of framing” since he (Ludwig) could not believe that untutored

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Africans can ever conceive of God (cited in Idowu 1991: 88). These of course are notions born out of blind ignorance, rancid racial prejudice and pride.

However, P. Amaury Talbot (1926), a colonial administrator who lived in the Southern part of Nigeria, tends to uphold the Diffussionists views in his religious summations in his agreement that Nigeria has a higher degree of religion than Frobenius and Ludwig believed. His interactions with the natives as an administrator over the years afforded him the opportunity to conclude that “Nigerians are ... long past the primitive degree of development” but that her religions have suffered retrogression as a result of her environment (Talbot, 1926: 14). He believes that the dense forests of Nigeria have negatively affected the religious life of the people.

Similarly, Ruth Finnegan (1970), a more liberal investigator, believes that African knowledge of God is not in doubt, adding that “the title of God and even the exact framework take a different form in different areas” (337). Finnegan‟s opinion corroborates Andrew Lang‟s judgment which recognizes the fact that every society has its own knowledge of God which is indigenous to the people. According to Lang, as people vary, so too are cultures and their concepts of God since there is no defined systematic statement about beliefs in God. He concludes that “certain low savages are as monotheistic as some Christians” (cited in Idowu, 1991: 89). Even Father Schmidt echoes this in his statement that “the belief in, and worship of, one supreme deity is universal among all really primitive peoples” (cited in Idowu, 1991: 89).

Since no parameter is set to measure or define man‟s belief in God, Idowu is of the opinion that one should leave the Almighty to conduct His judgement on man. He believes that Africans‟ efforts to defend their belief system are efforts in futility as preconceived opinions have blinded their assessors‟ minds to any of their defences. His summation is that any attempt by Africa to reposition herself from the parochial position allotted her as “third world” by the first and second worlds, especially in a search for equity and assertiveness, brings “upon herself a frown; she is called names ...

she is helped to be divided against herself” (Idowu, 1991: 77). This is to say that Africans can do better than try to live a life of complaisance with her assessors. She should rather indulge in a critical self examination in relation to her worship and reference to the Creator. All her attempts to reflect that she believes in and worships the true God is seen by the superpowers as attempts at asserting equality, which is never imagined possible by the superpowers.

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However if a culture, any culture at that, is left in its pristine undiluted rudimentary form, it can only mean that such a culture is static; a dead culture. And no one culture can be so assessed since culture in itself is an adaptive phenomenon which changes and adapts itself to various demands of the dynamics of the larger world. To this Idowu adds that religion in its pristine form is no longer in existence, what we have today are modernized contemporary worship forms.

The study of early life patterns of the Ibibio reveals that her society was far from idyllic. There was indiscriminate indulgence in “human sacrifice, most commonly of slaves, and infanticide, particularly the killing of multiple birth children” (Etuk, 2002: 22). There was also profound involvement in slavery, rituals and other forms of wickedness, especially on those that were considered as weaklings. Etuk (2002) adds that this is not to lay an emphatic claim that the Ibibio‟s (and by extension, African‟s) past was altogether “depraved and so utterly benighted that they had no values” which helped to maintain and strengthen the survival of the people as a race (23). Every society at one stage or the other has what can be classified as their imperfect period which it grows out from as time and development set in. If these are so, Africans should make concise efforts to reflect their current status of development and not condemn their years of early beginnings. It is therefore important that those values and institutions found to be the bulwarks of the survival of the people should not be discarded and trampled underfoot.