Background to the Study

The arrival of Western civilisation and colonialism changed the thinking pattern of the Africans; it reduced their self-esteem and respect for their culture, religion, language and everything that served as the bulwark to the survival of the people. The

“modern” African looks up to everything “European” as the ideal. The consequence is that the modern African abandons the natural communal culture of their land for the white man‟s artificial culture. The Ibibio man is a victim of this as well; his religious

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culture is undermined to the extent that most cultural values are no longer honoured.

Among the Ibibio, most rites are no longer performed. Even the few that are still adhered to are performed in secrecy, so that the larger society may not vehemently condemn the performance and the performers as heathen and agents of darkness.

Even though colonialism exposed the African cultures economically and politically to suffer neglect, Ibibio inclusive, some cultural values such as food, clothing, hair styles and furniture have been greatly enriched as a result of this contact.

New methods of making delicious meal from the same local raw materials have been popularised, new fashionable ways of crafting the hair-weave and creativity in the ways the same fabrics are designed have enhanced the lifestyles of the Ibibio in line with the trend in the outside world.

However, the formalised Eurocentric education which the Africans now have has tended to lead to the neglect of most societal mores and values, especially among the educated elites. In Ibibio society today, most traditional rulers have abandoned their social responsibilities of performing libation, a status quo that was put in place to promote some values as well as to check and harmonize relationships among the citizens. The rulers claim that libation performance would contaminate their faith as Christians whereas the non-disclosed reason for this nonchalant attitude among the traditional office holders is simply the quest and crave for wealth. Greed and the quest for material wealth have paved the way for mediocre to assume the post of traditional rulership which was hitherto achieved on merit. Dishonest government functionaries capitalize on these human foibles to install their stooges on most traditional seats, thereby killing the cultural implication of libation performance. Accordingly, Niyi Osundare quotes Achebe as saying, “when it is the hunter that tells the story of the hunt, the antelope would always be at a disadvantage”³. There is no way these types of leaders can “command the respect” ⁴ of the ancestors that they are supposed to be pouring the libation to. Knowing the impact of libation on deceit and hypocrisy, the fraudulent leaders cannot pour libation but delegate this power to people who are deemed to be more traditionally religious.

Although this research on Ibibio libation performances is not a maiden search into Ibibio life and culture, it is to a great extent a novel attempt. Libation is an aspect of African oral life. Orature (a word coined by Pio Zirimu, a Ugandan linguist, which means the oral nature of literature) as a discipline, has come to stay (Onuekwusi, 2001;

Ikiddeh, 2005). Most researchers shy away from this field of study because “it is fetish”.

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This study focuses on an in-depth literary examination of an aspect of Ibibio oral tradition, the libation performances.

Many scholars, indigenous and expatriate, have written so much about the ethnic group or people called Ibibio. The anthropological reports of Messenger (1959) “The role of proverbs in a Nigerian Judicial System”; Talbot (1926) The People of Southern Nigeria Vol. 2; Forde and Jones (1950) The Ibo and Ibibio-speaking Peoples of South- Eastern Nigeria and other colonial administrators of the erstwhile colonial community attest to this.

Similarly, scholars in the major ethnic groups in Nigeria, especially the Yoruba and Igbo, have carried out extensive studies of aspects of their orature, in addition to the linguistic study of their language. But among the Ibibio, the reverse is the case. While there has been observable progress in the study of the language and linguistics of the Ibibio as a group, not much has been done in the area of research and preservation of orature such that there is a virtual dearth of research in the orature of the Ibibio as an ethnic group. This shortcoming has prompted this study.

In a book review in the Journal of American Folklore, Elaine Lawless (1987) confesses that “major texts of the study of folklore simply ignore religious folklores and genres; save for the few paragraphs that describe the categories of religious legends”

(227). Similarly, Melville Herskovits (1961) regrets that “Social Anthropology” (a discipline developed in Great Britain) concerns itself with the study of kinship and related structures, using only a “highly restricted approach which focuses on social rather than cultural issues” of the people studied (455). The result is that they “have done little to give us a rounded view of the life of any people” under study (455). This, he further adds, has left a vacuum in the study of non literate, non historic societies.

Lawless (1987) further says that, in spite of the many anthropological collections on African arts and cultures compiled in Journal of American Folklore, religion is not given adequate attention. In Herskovits‟ (1961: 455) view, “the study of narrative, like that of other humanistic aspects of African culture ... has been eclipsed by emphasis laid on the study of social institutions”, Similarly, Olatunde Olatunji (1993) considers the study of oral art genres even as practised today, as “fast-vanishing remnants of a dying „folk‟, „lowly class‟ culture which must be rescued and preserved”

(8). This assertion is observed to be an accurate description of the state of Ibibio religious sub-genre, especially libation performances. Early investigations into African life were more interested in observing features that bore resemblance to their indigenous

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environment, with a view to ultimately highlighting any different peculiarities of African life as evidence of the continent‟s backwardness.

It has been observed that the “superior” American civilization also had folklore which it sought to preserve because it realized that:

[...] proverbs, riddles, racy sayings, peculiar expressions, having that attraction of freshness and quaintness ...

belong only to the unwritten words ... [that] relate to the quiet past: if they are not gathered while there is time, they will be absorbed into the uniformity of the written language (Jackson, 1988: 57).

On May 5, 1887, a proposal was signed by seventeen people at Cambridge to establish the Folklore Society in America. The number of signatories to the proposal was later upgraded to one hundred and four people. Its aim was to establish a journal that will

“collect the fast-vanishing remains of folklore in America” (Jackson, 1988: 56). Also on the term of their reference was the quest to collect “the relics of old English folklore such as ballads, tales, superstitions, dialects, etc” for the purpose of preservation, regarding their importance to the American society (Jackson, 1988: 56).

The above assertion corroborates the position of this researcher that if the Ibibio language and its literary propensities are not written down, not gathered while there is time, there will come a time when they will be no more and posterity will lose them forever. Also stated in this research on Ibibio libation performances is the belief that proper documentation of Ibibio cultural artefacts (such as the libation texts) should be taken up as a matter of urgency to avoid extinction. As Bruce Jackson (1988) recalls, in America, urgent calls were made at some point where, “some local historians express the love to maintain relics of information that pattern to their genealogies” so as to ward off its extinction (56). In this regard, African literary scholars and theoreticians have provided vibrant indigenous paradigms and hermeneutics in the definition and classification of African literature as their modest effort to locate indigenous artefacts within their rightful places of survival and recognition.

In the case of the Ibibio race, indigenous scholars have dwelled on one aspect of Ibibio life or the other, one form of literary study or another. When searching into the libation performances among the Ibibio, the data bank becomes empty as very few people seem to have taken interest in this arena. The available resources are in the field

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of socio-religious enquiry, not a literary analysis. This thus forms the crux of this research.