Children begin to acquire knowledge of their ancestral ties to Ohafia when
they accompany and assist their parents in work and social interaction. They
travel to the farm, to market and to the compounds of friends and relatives.
They are sent running on errands to deliver yams, to fetch water, to bid a
neighbour visit, to perform countless tasks assisting in the progress of
daily life and sociality. Through this participation in quotidian existence
they gain an emerging sense of the cultural environment. They discover the
names of places and in doing so learn that residential compounds are known
by reference to the men who originally cleared the bush and established the
site as cultural space. They learn that access to the constantly shifting
mosaic of agricultural plots which demand their labor and yield their food
is reckoned by reference to the names of ancestral mothers who farmed those
plots ages ago.
This sense of inhabited and embodied history which informs the ancestral
presence is not a formal abstraction transmitted by didactic procedures. It
is a lived reality which develops over time through everyday experience. As
the child navigates this terrain, tending to the small responsibilities
assigned to him or her, this landscape of names begins to take shape: the
names of the dead, of those people who cleared the land, built the
compounds, farmed the land and conceived the people. It is impossible to
identify a particular place in the village without making reference to these
names. They are simultaneously its history and its topography.
A Place in Time
Residence in Ohafia is patrilocal and compounds are composed of large
houses, occupied by senior males surrounded by lines of smaller huts housing
other family members. Typically, men's huts line one side of a path while
women's huts line the other. The overall pattern is one of compact rows of
contiguous structures traversed by a maze of paths. Amidst this labyrinth of
domestic space are numerous shrines, some hidden, some out in the open. One
type, marked by a thin oko tree (Pterocarpus soyauxic) surrounded by stones
is found in a small clearing near the patriarch's house. The tree marks the
shrine as ezi ra ali, the place where mothers of that compound bring their
newborn children to be blessed. The rite is a simple one performed by the
eldest daughter of the paternal group. Rubbing the baby with chalk she
recites a brief blessing and places the child upon the ground. Until this
rite has been performed mothers carefully avoid letting their infants touch
the earth. The umbilical cord of each baby born to the compound is buried
beneath the stones of the shrine.
Simple as it is, this rite embodies a fundamental relationship between
individual, family and land which is the crux of personhood in Ohafia. To
question whether someone was ever placed on ezi ra ali is among the gravest
of insults. Such a remark suggests that the person has no home, no family --
that they are, in effect, not a person at all. Ezi ra ali means 'compound
and land'. In this context 'compound' refers to much more than a cluster of
buildings. It is the physical manifestation of the paternal group in space
and time, a history of occupation in which a place comes to represent the
people, past and present, who have occupied it. The rite of ezi ra ali is an
enactment of this identification between person, paternal descent and place.
It is a rite of placement, positioning each new child within a terrain,
social, spatial and temporal. As children grow older and come to know this
terrain they find that it is etched with its own history which is their
history as well. In the paternal compound in Ohafia, where generations have
resided in the same place for centuries, the successive lives of those
inhabitants, whose collective existence anthropologists attempt to capture
in the notion of 'patrilineage,' are not only inscribed upon, but are
constitutive of, the habitat itself. Naming practices also reflect the sense
in which each person is understood, at a fundamental level, to be a living
manifestation of the cumulative force of his paternal descent. Men's and
women's names consist of their given names followed by their father's name
and then their grandfather's name. This is usually the extent to which a
name is given for social or legal purposes. But a person's full name is
understood to go on and on, from father to father ad infinitum.
Knowledge in the Flesh
In Ohafia, as boys grow up they learn to have a particular kind of
relationship with their bodies, one which links their sense of their own
masculinity with the ancestral traditions of Ohafia. When a baby boy cuts
his first teeth the occasion is celebrated and he is said to have "cut his
first head." This bodily transformation is the first in a series of events
which are considered to be equivalent to head taking. Customarily, when a
baby boy cuts his first tooth neither the mother or father will comment
publicly on the matter. They will wait until the auspicious event is noted
by a friend or relation. Sometimes this is even prompted by the mother who
may complain that the baby has something wrong with his mouth and will ask
the friend to examine him. Once it is announced that the baby has "cut his
first head" the bearer of this news is responsible to sponsor the
celebration of the event. The cutting of first teeth is also celebrated for
baby girls. However it is not referred to as "cutting a head" and the
celebration is not as elaborate as that for boys. Instead it is said that
"she has asked us not to go to the farm," because the family must stay home
from work in honor of the occasion.
The traditional rites for girls had largely fallen out of practice by the
time Nigeria gained independence in 1960. A limited form of female
circumcision involving removal of the clitoral hood was performed shortly
after birth as were male circumcisions. These operations were somewhat
perfunctory, and were performed without the ritual elaborations often
associated with circumcision in Africa. Because of the absence of symbolic
significance attached to circumcision, when medical clinics became
established in Ohafia, medical doctors rapidly assumed responsibility for
male circumcisions and the practice of female circumcision was abandoned.
When a boy reaches the age of seven or eight his father will provide him
with a bow and arrows. These he learns to use in contests with other boys,
shooting at balls of rolled leaves or other targets. He develops his skill
with the bow because he must eventually kill a small bird. When this is
accomplished he is said to have "cut his second head." A celebration follows
in which the boy ties the dead bird to the end of his bow and marches
through the village proclaiming his victory and singing that his age mates
who have not yet killed birds are cowards (ujoo) Those of his age mates who
have also "cut their second heads" will join him.
His father will dress him in a fine wrapper and the procession will travel
through the village visiting his kinspeople who give him yams and small
amounts of money. In many cases it is through this process that the young
boy first comes to know his maternal relations, many of whom, by virtue of
the dispersed residence of the maternal family, he may never have met.
Hence, at the age of seven or eight the young boy constitutes, through this
first act of manhood, a new social role for himself. It is a role that
allows him to ally himself with his accomplished age mates and to
distinguish himself from the "cowards." He is allowed to dress in finery
reserved for adults and he becomes a person of interest to his maternal
family, the people who will ultimately grant him land and livelihood.
Young boys confided in me that some now use the rubber slingshots which are
available at local markets to kill the birds. These simple weapons have a
much greater range and accuracy than the traditional bow. But if they do
acquire their birds in this manner they must keep it a secret. Elders insist
that the boys must use the bows, not because of the greater test of skill,
but, as one man explained: "because we must not forget how to use the
weapons that our ancestors used." This remark should not be dismissed as
mere nostalgia. It is an expression of the fact that, in marking this step
in the transition from childhood to manhood, it is not the killing that is
important but the production and reproduction of a particular bodily praxis,
one rooted in ancestral knowledge. Sometimes, enthusiastic boys are
encouraged to raise their own war dance, complete with a small oyaya. In
Ohafia it is not enough to remember the stories of warriors of the past.
Various rites and performances are specifically aimed at somatically
transmitting the knowledge of the Ohafia warrior. Whether this knowledge is
embodied in aesthetically structured performance, such as the war dance, or
in ceremonial constraints such as the sanctions surrounding the nnu nnu mbu
(bird killing rite), the performed aspects of ancestral practices are
considered crucial to the preservation of Ohafia identity.
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