a tour of the Cross River region of Nigeria

 

Whilst still wishing I had more time in Lagos, I took my flight from there to Port Harcourt, to join a ten-day tour of what the agency naughtily called Biafra – a term you should not use in front of most Nigerians.  Yes, a lot of time has passed since the Biafra War (1967-70), but it resulted in the deaths of more than a million people, and the country is still battling to maintain its unity.  Our tour included a visit to the Biafra War Museum in Umuahia (which was for a time the capital of Biafra), and I did hear a few rants from people in the region who still resent being a part of Nigeria (given that most of the wealth of the nation consists of the oil in their region), but it is generally not something you should talk about today.

What we tried to talk about was the cultural history of that part of the country, but I have to say that we met so many kings and chiefs, and saw so many different masquerades, that my head is still reeling, and I think I just have to accept that one can enjoy looking at cultural stuff without necessarily understanding it.  & this isn’t in any way a criticism of the tour itinerary – no, I absolutely loved the tour – but more a kind of excuse for my not being able to set much out in writing here.  & this being Nigeria, people didn’t necessarily turn up when they said they would, cultural events didn’t happen as scheduled … but other things that weren’t on our itinerary popped up in their place.

For example, we were able to visit two girls who were in seclusion for a year whilst being fattened up ready to be put on the marriage market – something that is not really supposed to happen any more but does … not a part of the culture I’d encourage them to continue, though I have to say the two girls concerned looked happy enough.  At the end of the fattening they take part in a festival – the Iria Festival – where their bodies are painted and they publicly pass into womanhood, available for marriage.  Whilst these two girls had another three weeks to go before their festival, our guide heard about another taking place in a different town, and we were able to attend – watching some of the girls get painted in the morning and then sitting behind the chiefs in the town square for the ceremony itself.

Thankfully this year’s inspection of the girls by three post-menopausal women did not result in any of the candidates being sent away in disgrace (as apparently sometimes happens) for being pregnant or having gone through an abortion.  Not a public intimate inspection, thankfully, as these women can apparently ‘see’ if any of the girls falls into this category!  In this photo of one of the girls receiving her certificate from the chiefs, you can see the edge of a top hat in the bottom right-hand corner … one legacy of the time of British colonial rule!  In a nearby part of this area, in Obuama, we met with the council of Chiefs of the Kalabari Kingdom, who looked most bizarre in their traditional outfits of long black gowns (somehow linked to a time when the Portuguese were there, trading with both Nigeria and India, where the fabric originally came from) and either top hats or bowler hats, together with some fancy silver buttons and clasps whose origins no-one could really explain to us.

& we saw many masquerades – dances by masked participants – with many different representations of Ekpo, being a dead soul that comes to the land of the living, and is either a messy, ugly, contorted image representing someone relatively recently deceased, who has not yet found peace, or sometimes a more ordered image of a peaceful soul.

 

Here are photos of two of my favourites of the masquerades, the first the Iriaha – war dance – masquerade, the second a representation of an Ekpe warrior.