Burn the mmonwu: contradictions and contestations in masquerade performance in Uga, Anambra state in southeastern Nigeria.

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CONCLUSION

In considering the rise of Pentecostal movements as a dominant discourse actively antagonistic to masquerade over the last fifteen years or so, it would appear that there has been a decline in masquerade. At Umueze in Uga there has been the withdrawal of the powerful masquerades, recognized as empowered metaphysically with potent medicines, and a number of major masquerades are no longer present, “having travelled to distant places” to quote the adage. However, this contestation of masquerade has a more contradictory dynamic.

Firstly, the everyday practices associated with playing with masquerade in Uga are still widely dispersed in a range of embodied practices such as dance. Masquerade dances are acquired without the transfer of the actual masquerade associated with that dance, such as the dance of the Ijele masquerade (Gore and Nevadomsky 1997:68). There are also the playful bodily responses that mimic masquerade movements linked to its flute music and knowledge of its attributes (Fig. 21)–these take place in confrontation with masquerades but also on public occasions with no masquerade presence. This is disseminated not only in public performances but also in the form of video CDs, the Internet, and other mass media–and even successful, elite, middle-aged men, who have turned away from masquerade, still download masquerade flute music as their mobile phone ring tones.

[FIGURE 20 OMITTED]

In contrast, the cultural repertoires of masquerade in Oka village of Uga became a key means to assert an emergent political autonomy and was a valuable cultural resource in its new political self-definition. Moreover, in a discussion with the Onye Isi Mmonwu of Oka, he considered the impact of Pentecostalism similar to the building of the Anglican and Catholic churches around 1946 in Oka (a later date than at Umueze) as an accommodation that had little impact on masquerade. (14) Its antagonistic campaigning did not disturb the quotidian practices of masquerade despite the fewer major masquerades now found in Oka and Uga generally. Instead, there is a wider social circuit of major masquerades in the region in which he participates as Owe Isi Mmonwu. This makes the disappearance of some major Uga masquerades not as significant an event as it might initially seem. Moreover, current youth entertainment masks have the potential capacity to develop into major masquerades.

[FIGURE 21 OMITTED]

Secondly, entertainment masquerades of the youth are a part of cultural repertoires that coalesce youth as a category in opposition to older generations in ways that challenge or at least subvert the authority of elite, middle-aged men who have taken up Pentecostalism and now reject masquerade fellowship as a potential avenue of social advancement. Masquerade now offers an alternative mode of sociality centered on localized youth identities (see Nunley 1987 for an example of fractured and contested youth masquerade in the 197os in Freetown, Sierra Leone) rather than defining a wider collective set of intergenerational relations between male age-sets at community level (d’Azevedo 1973, Yoshida 1993, Ottenberg 1972, 1975). Furthermore, in defining elite relations within the town, the at-home youths define a localized and spatialized circuit of ideas and practices that highlights their positioning as permanently resident (De Certeau 1988:95-110). Youth masquerades also provide a locus for the making of wider regional “modern” youth identities that contest the exclusive claims made by Pentecostal movements of a “modernity” defined and made by a rejection of a pagan past. Mass media becomes a site for this contestation and the engendering of masquerade youth identities. There is a surprisingly large number of masquerade video CD discs in circulation among youth that document masquerade events (Bantu Communications Concept n.d) or offer its performances as cultural backdrop to renowned musicians (such as Pericomo Okoye n.d.). Their production, distribution, and circulation is antithetical to the brand of “modernity” advanced by the Pentecostal movement and its modes of representation within the mass media construct an alternative, youth-defined “modernity”. Masquerade has many dimensions and is a site for many overlapping discourses, local, regional, national, and international. (15) Although major masquerades are perhaps not as commonplace as in the past in Uga, masquerade there is a medium that has a flexible capacity to adapt, change, and innovate that is perhaps its creative artistic signature.

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Notes

This article is dedicated to Nze Justin Ubajekwe (also known as Uba), Ezenwammadu of Uga, 1920-2003.

(1) It is perhaps best known as the home of Christian Uba, the “godfather” of Anambra state politics, and his brother, the temporary governor of Anambra state in 2007.

(2) This includes not only the masqueraders and public performers such as musicians and followers but also patrons who sponsor the masquerade and others who take up membership within the masquerade association.

(3) Awarasi village also borders on Achina, Umuchu, Amesi, and Nkporogwu, which are all noted as centers of masquerade (Nze Justin Uba, Ezenwammadu of Uga, personal communication. January 2, 2003).

(4) There are only a very small number who still adhere to worship of the deities found in Uga, who included Idenmili-Umuagbaja, Udo-Okwu, Ogwugwu Umucheke, Urasi, Ojukwu, Nwachi, and Nwoko, among others (Nze Justin Uba, Ezenwammadu of Uga, personal communication January 2, 2003).

(5) During the funerary rites, visiting groups to the compound of the deceased present a cloth among other gifts to the deceased’s family.

(6) There is a discourse on masquerades of other communities that is highly critical and unfavorable, where a particular masquerade displays uncovered hands or feet as these are considered not to constitute proper mmonwu (Nze Justin Uba, Ezenwammadu of Uga, personal communication. February 10, 1992).

(7) Pa John Umeanoka, personal communication, December 29, 2005.

(8) The visual embellishment which was a publicly acclaimed feature of Oku-ekwe differed in each village, such that the carver John Umeanoka of Awarasi village (personal communication, January 4, 2006) described the Umuneze Oku-ekwe as Ijele, highlighting that iconographically it used cloth with wooden projectiles like the Ijele masquerade of Onitsha rather than wooden masks like the Awarasi Oku-ekwe.

(9) A community shrine located in the central market at Achina was destroyed in the middle of the night at the behest of a local Pentecostal preacher and similar cases of destruction of shrines persist in the area (Mbachu 2007).

(10) Maintaining secrecy from women and abstinence from sexual relations make up some elements of nso, as does marking out the masquerade’s public emergence (opupu ‘going out’) and its public retirement (mbata ‘coming in’). Failure to comply with nso can result in the masquerade destroying itself during the performance, with disastrous consequences.

(11) Reed (2005:57) has argued that the banning of medicines is an elite top-down disciplining that stemmed from the Anambra state organized Mmanwu festival established in 1986 (and other conduits of state authority). However there has been a discourse within Uga on the use of charms stretching back to the 1960s (Gore and Nevadomsky 1997:68) which has classified charms as harmful or malign rather than as previously ambivalent, defined by their consequences with either positive or negative outcomes. There is a dialectic to this local discourse in that Uga has no doctor and many inhabitants cannot afford the high costs of medicalized health care and so resort to dibia native doctors for treatment, leading to a private exercise of such ritual medicines.

(12) www.viewnaija.com, accessed April 30, 2008.

(13) Nze Everestus Umealakei, personal communication, August 25, 2006.

(14) Nze Everestus Unrealakei, personal communication, August 22, 2008.

(15) The Onye Isi Mmonwu of Oka cited how, at the request of diasporic indigenes, he had facilitated the export of masquerade to the USA for masquerade performances by cultural troupes that are used in defining disaporic Igbo identities (and even to South Korea in transnational flows).

CHARLES GORE has carried out extensive research in Edo state and elsewhere in southern Nigeria since 1986 from a grass roots perspective. He was consultant for the BBC film Artist Unknown and published a monograph, Art, Performance and Ritual in Benin City, in 2007. cg2@soas.ac.uk

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