In May, 1803, a group of 75 Igbo people taken from Nigeria and transported to the US for auctioning as slaves chose independence over slavery – even when independence meant death. While chained and packed like worthless commodities in a small vessel named ‘The Schooner York,’ these ndị amaala, free people of the land, to whom the idea of being ohu (slaves) was not only foreign, but also disgusting and unacceptable, rose in rebellion, drowning their captors and grounding their ship at what is today a historic site at Dunbar Creek at St. Simons Island, Glynn County, Georgia.
Knowing that nothing liberating will come from an onward march into the US, they chose to go back into the water, chanting that through the water they came, to the water they will go. This act of mass suicide amounted to an uncertain number of deaths though 13 bodies of the drowned enslaved people were recovered.
Recently, concerted and individual efforts have been in the make to commemorate what may as well be the first instance of Black Resistance, and indeed human resistance, against enslavement. In May 24, 2022, for example, the Georgia Historical Society, the Coastal Georgia Historical Society, the Glynn Academy Ethnology Club, and the St. Simons African American Heritage Coalition, unveiled a historical marker at Old Stables corner in St. Simons Island, Georgia, in a ceremony attended by roughly 100 people, in commemoration of the Igbo Landing event. The marker reads as its title, “Ibo Landing: The Legacy of Resisting Enslavement.”
At home in Nigeria where these slaves were taken from, nothing much has been done to commemorate this historic act of bravery and rebellion and resistance. It is not unexpected, though, considering that we are a people afflicted with collective cultural schizophrenia and amnesia. What tangible thing, for example, have we done collectively as a country to commemorate and properly honor the three million lives lost during the Nigeria-Bịafra war save for the half-hearted erection of a now moribund National War Museum at Umuahia? It was therefore a commendable development when the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), in the last weeks of May, 2023, unveiled different creative, cultural, and intellectual events to commemorate the “first black civil rights movement in human history.”
Two of such events stand out: an International Conference with the theme, “The Legacy of Research and Resilience in the Fight for Black Liberation: The Concept of Healing and Restitution” convened by Dr. Ikechukwu Erojikwe, a senior lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies, UNN, from 23rd-24th May, 2023 and an art exhibition aptly titled, “The Awakening” curated by Dr. Chijioke Onuora, Vershima Itiav Josep and Jibrin Ebenezer at the Obiora Udechukwu Gallery, Department of Fine & Applied Arts, University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
“The Awakening” lived true to its name: it awakened in me, and I believe in all who went to see the exhibition, a consciousness as to the depth of the ugliness and horrors of the transatlantic slave trade as a whole, and the courage required to reject and actively fight against one’s oppressors and enslavers, in particular.
It awakened in me a need to read more, to know more and to write about this event. Three artists, through their paintings exhibited on that day, provide the portals through which I will journey, in this essay, to Dunbar Creek, where my ancestors subverted the taboo against suicide and showed, as I have argued elsewhere, that suicide can be a salvific undertaking. As Prof. Damian Opata remarked in the lead paper he presented in the International Conference, “suicide is conventionally an abomination in Igbo cosmology, but that cosmology never anticipated anything like the banality of the transatlantic slave trade.”
I intend to, in this essay, justify my choice of these artists’ paintings: to show how their paintings, not only captured the physical reality of the Igbo Landing, but also dug deeper to represent the people’s cosmological and mythological realities (or conditionings), the psychology that drove a chained enslaved people to an imminent death by drowning.
Victor Umamah’s ‘Akụkọ’ is my opening portal to 1803. The 16*20 inches digital painting utilizes the colours: white, black, red, blue, yellow and different shades of grey, to depict the tragic yet courageous event of the Igbo Landing. At the vanishing point of the painting is a black ship emitting fumes of grey smoke into the sky thereby painting the sky different shades of grey. This darkening of the sky is both literal and symbolic. A typical slave ship, as depicted in the painting, is a large cargo ship, and considering that these ships were used from the 17th to the 19th century, it is safe to assume that the slave ships ran on steam engines. Since the steam engine needs to burn fuels like coal and firewood to power the steam, smoke and gas are emitted as its residues. This is released into the atmosphere, thus darkening the ship’s immediate surroundings. Beyond that, the accumulated effect of this, like that of every other such emission, is climate change, due to ozone layer depletion. Climate change is an impending doom, as signaled by the gathering of the dark clouds in ‘Akụkọ.’ But there is an even more severe doom. That is the evil of the slave trade, the dehumanization it brings, and the blood that flows from the slave ship, its redness diluted and reduced by its mixture with the water upon which it flows towards the art viewer. Almost united in outlook with the sky is the part of the water upon which the ship and the blood from the ship flows. It is grey, with human heads seen struggling to stay above the water. One of these drowning human beings has an arm outstretched to the mother figure – the most prominent figure, taking half of the painting.
The pain of this mother figure is a focal feature of Umamah’s ‘Akụkọ.’’ Unlike the other drowning figures in the painting, this mother has the water at her shoulder level. She doesn’t look like she’s submerging like the others, rather, even with her gloomy uli-designed and blood-streaking face, sunken cheek and chained neck, this mother seems to be emerging from the water – to be breaking free. To be rising, like the half of a yellow sun behind her, at the vanishing point of the painting. The mother is indeed rising with the sun for the hope she signifies is reflected in the blueness and liveliness of the part of water where she emerges from.
The Igbo concept of Nneka, Mother is Supreme, comes to mind here. For being the procreative vessel of the human race, the mother (and by extension, womanhood) joins God in Okike, the act of sharing life, of creating. Prof. Anenechukuwu Umeh notes in his book, After God is Dibịa , that God as “Aka … is the Origin, the Antiquity and the First One” and that forms the root word “Ka” used to denote greatness at a comparative level in the Igbo Language (ie. Ọkịka – the quality of being ‘greater than …’). It is therefore important to observe how ‘ka’ is attached to Nne in Igbo imagination of the mother, thereby associating her procreative ability with the power of God to originate.
This concept is well explored by Umamah in the painting, with its consequent Nwabụndụ – the child is life. Because the mother is the bearer of the child and because the child is life and because with life comes hope, the Igbo Landing, as depicted by Umamah, is not a hopeless situation since the water is more colourful at the other side where the dead live, in their children, a better life.
‘Akụkọ’ tells the story of Igbo Landing through the lens of female (and by extension, life herself) resilience. It does what is not usually done in a society lost to the colonial whims of toxic patriarchy: it associates femininity with heroism. Like the title, the art work is a story of bravery and resistance and a testament to the long-derided female power, that manifested yet, not so far ago, in the Aba Women Protest of 1929.
Treasure Chidnma Ndukwe’s ‘Mmụọ Mmiri,’ just like ‘Akụkọ ,’ offers hope to an otherwise hopeless and tragic event of the Igbo Landing, but in a slightly different way. Unlike the human, physical and biological sources of hope painted into ‘Akụkọ,’ the hope the enslaved Igbo people had in Ndukwe’s ‘Mmụọ Mmiri,’ is the Mmụọ Mmiri – the Water Spirit/Deity.
In ‘Mmụọ Mmiri,’ the bare back of an androgynous spirit being with long flowing hair is the second most prominent part of the painting. This spirit is mostly blue, the colour of the sea. The most prominent figure is a full sun with orange shell, white yolk, and yellow albumen. The water Spirit leads a single file of chained enslaveds (chained neck to neck and arm to arm) to this full sun, a landing of blazing, untamable hope. The water is dark, save for the trail created by this water spirit and the sky looks gloomy apart from the clouds nearest to the full blazing sun.
Ndukwe’s ‘Mmụọ Mmiri’ raises some pressing questions in the mind of the viewer. Can it be that the Water Spirit is leading the spirits of the drowned enslaved people to a bright ‘Be Mmụọ,’ the land of the Spirit, where they will rejoin their ancestors as free born rather than live in the US as slaves? I reject that suggestion. The triumphant march into the river is one guided by the rebellious attitude of “you may chain my body, but not my mind, not my spirit.” Therefore it makes no sense to have the Water Spirit lead chained Spirits to Anyanwụ (the Sun).
What is happening in Ndukwe’s ‘Mmụọ Mmiri’ is the depiction of the march of the chained Igbo bodies with free minds, that which was leading their minds, that which was leading their spirits. I return again to Prof. Umeh to make sense of the cosmological and psychological conditionings that made the 75 enslaved Igbo people chant as they marched into the water, “mmiri ka anyị si bịa , mmiri ka anyị ga-esi laa.” – From water we have come, to water we shall return. At the surface it may seem like the ignorant chant of a primitive people who believed that since their ship sailed the waters to bring them into enslavement, their bodies will become vessels which will float them back home through the same waters. But it was far from that.
Prof. Umeh records that it is the belief of the traditional Igbo person that the human being is basically energy and water clothed with the human flesh in order to inhabit the physical realm of the world.
“Mmadụ (human being) is ‘ọkụ na mmili’ (energy and water) but in coming to each plane of existence, of which one is allowed seven or eight cycles of reincarnation … one takes the cloth/body – ọgọdọ, ahụ, arụ – that is applicable to that plane of existence.”
When the enslaved 75 were chanting that to the Water from which they came they would return, they were therefore not referring merely to the mode of their physical transport, but to a return to the basic substance from which they were made. Their chant was a summon of the Mmụọ Mmiri, the spirit in charge of the basic element of their existence, to come take them ‘home’ – home being a metaphor for freedom, not just from their enslavers, but from the cloth (flesh) which made it possible in the first place, for them to be captured and chained, in joyful anticipation of another cycle of reincarnation, when they will exist in a plane where transatlantic slave trade will be a long forgotten history.
These enslaved 75 were able to hold this belief because it is a commonly held belief amongst their people that “mmụọ na mmadụ na-azụ ahịa mana ofeke amarọ” (the spirits and the humans are in constant interactions but the uninitiated is oblivious of that). What Ndukwe did with acrylic and gouache paint on black embossed paper was to capture this belief with which the enslaved 75 marched back into the water alongside them, blurring the line between their beliefs and their physical realities, thus birthing cosmological realities. At the point of death, they were existing simultaneously as humans and as spirits, experiencing fully the physical phenomenon of the tidal waves of the water and the spiritual redemption the water spirit offers them for as Umeh wrote, “in the final analysis, there is only one existence, one life, one energy, one power, one light, one mind, one consciousness …” and it is to this oneness the 75 marched.
A conceptual comparison of Ndukwe’s redemptive agent and Umamah’s brings into the discussion the limitation of salvation and redemption. Redemption, these artists seem to tell us, is determined and limited by the redemptive agent in question, especially as regards its (in)corporeality. In Umamah’s ‘Akụkọ ,’ the woman (mother) who is the redeemer is burdened by the sadness of her limitations. While through her biological procreative ability she offers hope to the dead by ensuring the existence of a future generation which the dead will live in, she cannot offer any form of help, whether physical or spiritual, to the dying. She, herself, is a chained bleeding victim of transatlantic slave trade.
Her helplessness is heart-wrenchingly captured by the outstretched hand of the drowning victim closest to her. Weighed down by her helplessness, her eyelids remain shut as she makes no attempt to offer a saving hand to this victim. The sun rising behind her is only half in shape.
Such a sense of defeat is not seen in Ndukwe’s ‘Mmụọ Mmiri.’ The Water Spirit whose torso is above the water towers over the black torsos following it. Proportionally, Ndukwe’s water spirit is a giant when compared to the humans she painted, a classical symbolic representation of greatness with magnitude. It leads boldly, and others follow, itself not chained, its arms free as it wades through the dark water towards a full-blown blazing sun. Its movement in the water chases darkness to the fringes as the trails it leaves behind is marked with a brilliant combination of blue and white to create a very bright path. The water spirit is bringing the 75 to a full hope, a total salvation which only beings not weighed down by the limitation corporeity offers can partake in.
Michael Chukwuemeka Obi’s ‘Ikenga’ brings an exciting dimension to the artistic recreation of the Igbo Landing. While the two artists earlier discussed tried to accurately depict both the event and its significance, Obi’s ‘Ikenga’ is severely limited in its depiction of the event but rich in its painting of the symbolism of the landing. In Obi’s painting, two ships are obscurely placed at the vanishing point of the painting. Taking more than half of the 2*3 ft oil paint on canvas, and thus the focus of the painting, is the warrior Ikenga.
How did we arrive at the classification of Obi’s ikenga as a warrior ikenga? We can see the ikenga with a matchete on one hand and a severed human head on the other. The human head shows that the armed warrior is not just any warrior but a proper dike who has been to war and back, alive, with a human head. To properly understand why the return from war with a human head makes one a great warrior at the time these people existed, it is important to understand that instead of the kind of arms and ammunitions used in wars today, they used machetes. Meaning that to cut off someone’s head in the battle field, one must engage directly and physically with another warrior and beat him in the clash of machetes.
The war between Umuaro and Okperi in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God (1964) proves how difficult it was to achieve this dike’s act of beheading your enemy warrior in a war. Set in 1920s Igbo Nigeria, a century after the Igbo Landing, the war between Umuaro and Okperi occurred at a time when the Igbo warriors already had access to the type of guns that can be broken “in the face of all,” definitely not sophisticated, but guns they were nevertheless. Yet, in a war that lasted a period of five days (with one day off), both sides could only kill a total of nine people, even with their guns.
The Ikenga is the symbolic carving of the essence of its owner. In fact, Ikenga goes beyond symbolism. Jeff Unaegbu, a research fellow of the Institute of African Studies, University of Nigeria, writes that “[t]he Ikenga is the spirit of individualism, industry, progress and SELF-DETERMINATION or INDEPENDENCE … It was a ram-horned wooden effigy which many Igbo men communed with before they set out for the day’s work … The Ikenga makes the Igbo man ABHOR the SLAVERY of his SPIRIT. The Ikenga makes the Igbo man ABHOR the SUBJUGATION of his SPIRIT.”
The ram is equally revered and despised in the Igbo worldview. More on its reverence, though, which is why it is a central component of the Ikenga. Two Igbo proverbs capture this reverence: (a) “ebule na-eli n’ude,” a tribute to the ram’s resilient (stubborn, maybe) spirit and (b) “ebule ji isi eje ogu” a saying that recognizes that the ram lurches at its opponent with its head, a total fearless head-on approach to war situations. These attributes of the ram makes it a must-have in the design of Ikenga. Obi understands this and painted an Ikenga with a visibly sturdy ram horn.
While Unaegbu tried – and eloquently so – to describe the essence of Ikenga, I return again to Achebe’s Arrow of God for a full illustration of what the Ikenga is. The scene is the face-off between Akukalia and Ebo in what was supposed to be a peace talk. Akukalia and Ebo broke into a fight because Ebo had made what Akukalia considered a veiled reference to his impotence. When Akukalia who was “no match” for Ebo got “a broken head streaming with blood” he was so “[m]addened by pain and shame” that he “made for his house to get a matchet.” “What happened next was the work of Ekwensu, the bringer of evil,” Achebe writes. “Akukalia went into the obi, took the ikenga from [Ebo’s] shrine, rushed outside again, and while everyone stood aghast, split in two.” “Ebo was last to see the abomination,” Achebe continued. “He had been struggling with Otikpo who wanted to take the machete from him and so prevent bloodshed. But when the crowd saw what Akukalia had done, they called on Otikpo to leave the man alone.” It was when Otikpo released Ebo that Ebo saw his Ikenga, “split in two, before him.” Finding it unbelievable, he “rubbed his eyes with the back of his left hand … The two pieces of his ikenga lay where their violator had kicked them in the dust.” Still not wanting to believe his eyes, Ebo went into his shrine only to meet “an empty patch, without dust, on the wooden board” where his ikenga, “the strength of his right arm,” had stood. Ebo, a warrior, cried out for his late father. As if to add insult to the injury, Akukalia still asked, “what can you do?” when his own people do say, “naanị ihe na-emeli dike bu ‘ndo, bikonụ’ ebe dike na-emeli ‘I ga-eme gịnị?” True to the saying, a warrior is only defeated by apologies while the question “what can you do?” gifts the warrior another human head to add to his dike collection. Akukalia did not live to repeat that question.
It is crucial to explain why the people were ‘aghast’ and had to ask Otikpo to release Ebo when Akukalia split his Ikenga. By splitting Ebo’s ikenga, Akukalia had killed Ebo, and that was why the people felt that Ebo should be allowed to respond. Ebo matched a metaphysical killing with a physical one, for in the Igbo tradition, a man’s ikenga is only split at his death, with one part of it buried with him.
Against this background, I attempt to make sense of Obi’s ‘ikenga.’
Silhouettes of human beings are painted jumping off of the slave ship into the water. The warrior ikenga, clear and well detailed, even in its clothing (including the charms worn on the breast for protection), is painted walking towards the viewer, to home. Considering that this Ikenga is whole, Obi, it seems, refuses to accept the death of these enslaved 75. Rather, the Ikenga, their spirit, is marching home to tell the tales of their bravery, to show off the head of their captor now their captive.
This interpretation raises some questions, too. Is Obi trying to exclude women from these brave 75 as it was not common for women to own ikenga in the past? Or, is he trying to say that all the victims, their gender regardless, were by the virtue of their resistance, all warriors worthy of having the ikenga dike? I will like to reason in favour of the latter. Obi, maybe subtly – if you consider that there is no obvious reference to female heroism in his painting – or more boldly, considering the essence of ikenga, doing what Umamah did with the mother figure in his ‘Akụkọ.’
As a painting, unlike Umamah’s ‘Akụkọ’ and Ndukwe’s ‘Mmụọ Mmiri,’ Obi’s ‘Ikenga’ does not offer much excitement in its use of color. Its colour combination, especially when the ikenga itself is removed, tethers closely to the bland and there is no immediate justification as to why this is so. The strength of the painting lies therefore in the story that it tells.
The trouble with the story of ‘Ikenga’ is that we do not get to see the humanity of the victims. These victims are reduced to mere silhouettes close to the vanishing point of the river. Even the ikenga we have is just one, depicting the victims in the monotonous painting of a warrior. In that regard, Ndukwe’s ‘Mmụọ Mmiri’ has its own failings too. In Ndukwe’s ‘Mmụọ Mmiri,’ all our enslaved victims are courageous folks bravely marching into the river following the lead of the Water Spirit. One may offer the defense that led by the Water Spirit, they were all filled with hopes of the brilliant, but what is humanity without vulnerability? Without nuance? Without the sadness, and doubt, and defeat all etched into the face of the mother figure in ‘Akụkọ .’
Obi’s ‘ikenga’ as I already noted almost excels in its ideals (ie. thematic preoccupation) though it leaves much to be desired in its artistry (ie. aesthetics). It was overburdened by the story it sought to tell thereby creating an aching imbalance and vacuum. How does one unfamiliar with its story appreciate the painting? That is where Umamah’s and Ndukwe’s survive: one can appreciate the beauty of their art without knowing that a people referred to as Igbo people exists. Beyond the aesthetics, a thematic comparison of the three reveals something interesting.
By making their representations of hope closer to the viewer than the other figures in their paintings, Obi and Umamah favour the belief of perpetual existence being the dead’s ability to continue to exist in the memories of the living. Though for Ndukwe such a state of immortality is achieved only in a plane different from that in which the living exist. It rather resides in Anyanwu, the Sun, that place impossible for humans to inhabit, symbolic of ‘Be Mmụọ,’ the Land of the Spirits. This I hold to be more reflective of the artists’ personal beliefs than that of the people they sought to paint.
Victor Umamah’s work offered me the portal through which I first escaped to 1803, I return to this same artist in my quest to return to the present. ‘Nnwere_Onwe,’ the second digital painting the artist exhibited at the gallery, is the portal this time around. The painting on a black surface has as its focus a male character in black and white fabric with blood-coloured trees close to the edges of the 16*20 inches platform of the painting, behind the man. Some uli-patterned designs are imprinted on the man’s cloth, suggesting, maybe, his Igbo identity; while in his ears are a total of six gold-coloured earrings, two of which are pegs. On this figure’s wrists is a broken chain, the same colours with his decorative earrings and in his eyes is a half plea, half authoritative cry of ‘set me free.’
The unconventionality of this character’s choice of cloth pegs as earrings evokes the picture of an African queer person (in a liberal use of the uli pattern as an ‘African design’). In today’s Uganda, the queer body has become the scapegoated site for the redirection and diversion of the angst meant for the incompetent and inept Ugandan administration. In 2014, in Nigeria, it was used by the then Goodluck Ebele Jonathan’s administration to score a cheap political point disguised in the unfitting garbs of morality and culture preservation and resistance of Western imperialism. Because a government has been marked by cluelessness and confusion and wanton corruption, because the principal actors in that government needed to remain in power (because our democracy is a dictatorship that conducts elections), because the Christian South, almost always at war with the Muslim North, always reach ecumenical peace agreement on their collective homophobia, and because the queer bodies are without protection, criminalizing them therefore becomes a ploy to get public acceptance and approval again. Sacrifice a few queer bodies and retain the presidential seat, it was. Let them be the bloods that water the trees of our greed and hate, the sacrificial lambs that atone for our sins, the Nigerian, the African politicians, have resolved.
The sexuality/sexual orientation of the queer person, one aspect that also adds beauty to their life like the earrings to the physical appearance of the man in ‘Nnwere_Onwe’ therefore becomes the weapon with which the society has chained them. Like the man in ‘Nnwere_Onwe,’ they simultaneously plead and vehemently demand for their freedom.
Today, transatlantic slave trade has been consigned only to the pages of history and story books, but not so is homophobia and the persecution it engenders. Our people are no longer chained and transported as commodities to be bought and sold because of their skin colours, but the descendants of these brave and resilient ancestors of ‘unconventional’ sexual orientation or sexuality are still being meted with the subhuman treatments their enslaved ancestors faced. Many of them, like their ancestors, tribesmen, countrymen and fellow Africans did in 1803, have sought means of exiting the world on their own rather than live as ‘second class citizens,’ in perpetual chains and fear and some of them have achieved that. ‘Nnwere_Onwe’ asks, why have the oppressed turned oppressor?
That is the awakening: the realization that a queer person in chain for being queer is like the black person enslaved just for being black. It is a question on the collective humanity of our specie.
Ugochukwu Anadị is the Book Review Editor at Afreecan Read and a Fiction Editor at The Candid Review. He has also interned as an editor at Counterclock.
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