from Research in African Literatures Volume 29, Number 1

African Mythology and Africa's Political Impasse

Isidore Okpewho

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One of the most exciting areas in the growth of African oral literary study within the last two decades has been the specialized interest in the continent's heroic epics: stories about great warriors, empire builders, and culture heroes like Sunjata among the Mandinka of Mali, Lianja among the Nkundo of Zaire, Shaka among the Zulu of South Africa, Ozidi among the Ijo of Nigeria's delta country, and many others. So widely has this interest grown--involving the collection of hitherto ignored epic texts and the critical study of them--that Indiana University Press, without doubt the sturdiest publisher of African studies in the United States, has seen fit to establish an African Epic Series to enshrine this body of work within the canons of higher education. With so much that has come to light, it is no longer possible to doubt, as was the case up to the 1970s, that the epic is a characteristic feature of Africa's oral traditions.

And yet, if we took time to look beyond the walls of the academy, and projected our study of the epic within the larger context of the realities around us, we would find reason enough to temper our enthusiasm for this subject with a certain concern. In the more than three decades that African nations have been free from the colonial shackles that held them down for pretty much one century, most of them have been ruled by indigenous leaders who have done much worse to their people than the foreign usurpers. If we looked closely at the power profiles of these recent leaders, we would find them uncomfortably similar to the heroes we have grown accustomed to glorifying in our studies: leaders who held absolute power, exercising total proprietorship over the material and perhaps spiritual lives of those who lived under the shadow of their might.

We should, of course, continue to give full attention to heroic epics for whatever they are worth as legacies of our past, and no less for their usefulness in helping us to resist the "epistemic violence" (Spivak) done to our history by champions of European political and cultural hegemony. However, if we learn no other lessons from them, especially against the background of the painful realities of contemporary African politics, then we will have failed in our duty as intellectual leaders to provide some answers to the problems that continue to frustrate the lives of our people.

Having played some part in the growth of interest in the African epic, I can hardly escape some responsibility for the blinders that have shielded our timely grasp of the problems I speak of. In my more recent study, I have come to look hard at the evidence of oral traditions from my part of Nigeria for what they tell me about the dynamics of power relations within our rather complex political life. My forthcoming book, Once Upon a Kingdom: Myth, Hegemony, and Identity, uses the relations between ancient Benin and communities around it, for whom life became a nightmare under the stupendous military machine of the kingdom, to see what the traditions of our past tell us about the quandary in which we find ourselves in the present.

The old kingdom of Benin, which flourished from about the tenth century until she fell to British imperial forces by the end of the nineteenth, continues to hold a powerful sway on the imagination of many. From the late fifteenth century, when she struck commercial relationships with various European nations, she began a career of military campaigns whereby she brought many communities far and wide under political and economic control. It was a hard-won ascendancy. Today, those communities that once lived in the pale of Benin's power still tell stories that show traces of their ingrained resentment of the kingdom.

The career of Benin has been the subject of diverse scholarly interest, due largely to the fascination of Benin's artistic relics housed in numerous public and private collections across the world. In 1956 the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, established a Scheme for the Study of Benin History and Culture, under which scholars from various disciplines (especially anthropology, history, archaeology, and art history) were to collaborate in investigating the enormous achievement of the old kingdom. The picture as seen from Benin's point of view became something of a master-text for this project. Unfortunately, the career of the Benin Scheme was short-lived, primarily because Nigeria became involved in a hegemonist crisis--inspired largely by this agenda of privileging one group over others--that grew into a civil war and continues to threaten the fragile political unity of the country.

Since 1976, I have been collecting tales from some of those communities--Igbo-speaking towns and villages west of the River Niger, in present-day Delta State of Nigeria--that formed the eastern sector of what has been fashionably called the Benin empire. Many of these tales are conventionally set in the old realm of Benin (ani Iduu), though in some of them the political or other connection with the fabled menace of Benin are not so easily discernible. But a close look at these tales convinced me that they were in a fundamental sense driven by the determination of the narrative culture to assert itself against the historical claims of Benin over it.

Before I give a sampling of such tales, let me state that, despite the overall hostility towards Benin revealed in them, the communities concerned share several cultural commonalities with Benin, so that anthropologists have often treated the region in question--the erstwhile Bendel State of Nigeria--almost as one large culture area. One reason for this may be that, in view of the contiguity between the various ethnic/linguistic communities within the area (Bini, Akoko, Etsako, Igbo, Urhobo, Ijo, etc.), there has been a long tradition of exchange between them at many levels. Another reason may be that so many people were dislodged from their settled lives during the four troubled centuries of Benin's military activity (internally and externally), that there was an inevitable diffusion of culture traits within the region. Definitely, Benin did emerge as the dominant political force here at the time, and there has been a tendency among anthropologists and other scholars to consider her responsible for the cultural homogeneity observable across various groups.

What similarities have these scholars observed? There are essentially two of these, and one of them is linguistic. It has been known for some time, of course, that a considerable store of vocabulary is shared by citizens of the old city state of Benin, identified as Edo both ethnically and linguistically, with those of a large number of communities in this region (Etsako, Urhobo, Isoko, Owan, etc.). More recently, however, some work has been done by scholars like Ben Elugbe of the University of Ibadan in probing the syntactic and phonological links between speech forms across these groups, so that it has become possible to posit the existence of an integral linguistic unit (Edoid) as part of the Kwa branch of the Niger-Congo language family (see Elugbe, "Comparative Edo Phonology" and "Some Tentative Historical Inferences").

A second and perhaps more palpable similarity has been found in the area of social organization. Here, it has been shown by various scholars (Bradbury, Benin Kingdom and Benin Studies; Ikime, Niger Delta Rivalry and Isoko People; Otite, among others) that Benin shares with most communities in the erstwhile Bendel State certain organizational structures: at bottom, the village or town as the basis of the sociopolitical structure, marked by a division of the male population into three or four age-sets for the purpose of distribution of labor roles; superimposed on this is a paramountcy--in the case of Benin, an Oba--working in studied counterpoise with a network of titled organizations into which men of achievement and of means could enroll. A final similarity is a marked agnatic or patrilineal bias in the kinship systems of these peoples, which distinguishes them somewhat from various Ijo communities especially in the eastern Niger delta.¹

I suggested above that the political ascendancy enjoyed by Benin in the four centuries before her fall to British forces has led not a few scholars to credit her with having influenced the cultural uniformity I have just outlined. Indeed, so eminent was the image cut by Benin in that era, even in the eyes of peoples who had little reason to love her, that it became fashionable for many of them to link their histories with the fortunes of Benin: a good majority of them make a place for Benin somewhere in the oral traditions recording their foundations and the origins of various aspects of their culture. Alan F. C. Ryder rightly dismisses such claims as "certainly the product of hankering after prestige, or simply the adoption of the most likely story, given the canons of traditional historiography" (3). But it is clear that Benin made such an imprint on the lives of these peoples as to dominate their historical imaginations.

Let us survey a few of these traditions. Of the Esan to the north of Benin, both Jacob O. Egharevba, the Benin palace historian, and C. G. Okojie, a native Esan scholar, tell us of emigration from Benin, though while the latter dates this to the reign of "Oba Ewuare the Selfish" (Okojie 21), the former locates the event in the era of the first (Ogiso) dynasty of Benin (Egharevba 5). Benin continued to impose her military might on the Esan, who lived a sort of vassal existence whereby their paramount rulers (enigie, sing. onogie) were statutorily appointed by Benin. Further to the north, even in regions where Benin was threatened by other powers like the Nupe and the Igalla, Benin is still acknowledged as the ancestral home by the Etsako, who cite the "period of oppression and civil war in Benin" as the reason for their exodus (Bradbury, Benin Kingdom 101).

Because of the nature of its vegetation, the delta part of this region was not easily amenable to Benin military activity. Yet most Urhobo and Isoko clans in this area claim Benin origin and, out of regard for the political and ritual power of Benin, seek her blessing on their choice of a paramount ruler--ovie, a variant of the Benin ogie (Ikime, Niger Delta Rivalry 6, Isoko People 21).

Other peoples in this region, like the west-Niger Igbo and the (western) Ijo, do not consider themselves "Edo" as the Esan and the Urhobo, for instance, are accustomed to be classified. Yet their histories have been no less impacted by Benin in ways that evoke varying degrees of awe. Although most Ijo communities consider themselves autochthonous, some (like the important Mein clan) nevertheless claim their ancestors left Benin in the days of the kingdom's internal wars, and continue to seek her blessing on the appointment of a paramount ruler, pere (see Alagoa).

The Igbo west of the Niger--and east of Benin--constituting the largest proportion of the region's non-Edo stock, trace two major sources of derivation. Certain towns, like Asaba, Igbuzo (Ibusa), Ogwashi-Uku, the Ubulus, and Obomkpa claim to have been founded partly or entirely, directly or indirectly, by emigrants from communities and antecedent civilizations east of the Niger (e.g., Nri). Others like Agbor, Obior, Onicha-Ugbo, Onicha-Olona, Ezi, and the Iseles are reputed to have been founded by noblemen from the kingdom of Benin (such as Ovio and Chima) who, having fallen foul of the monarchy, fled for life accompanied by their families and closest associates. Whatever its derivation, each community lived constantly under the threat of a Benin military expedition designed either to assert vassal rights or to punish an assumed affront to the monarchy (Ohadike, Jos Oral History and Anioma). Despite this, not a few of them revered Benin as the ideal of pomp and power, designing their political structure after the Benin model or indeed seeking the instruments of office for their paramount rulers (obi) from Benin.

The circumstances surrounding these communities' coexistence with Benin should suggest that, however much they admired her and sought affiliation with her, they could never quite ignore what harm they may have suffered from her in the past nor what dangers she posed to their existence. Inevitably, therefore, they felt a certain resistance toward her which reveals itself rather vividly in their narrative traditions.

Take some of the figures and images, in tales told by these communities, that may have been borrowed from Benin. In his study of Benin oral traditions, Daniel Ben-Amos draws attention to two figures in particular--Agboghidi and Aruaran--who feature in professional Benin storytelling events as rebels against the monarchy: the Oba looms in the background as a force they can hardly contend, and they are summarily brought to grief by his forces ("Two Benin Storytellers" and Sweet Words). In the narrative traditions of more remote communities, however, some transformation is imposed on the scheme of events that may be traced to psychological factors. In some cases, the figures who are judged rebels or "deviants" in Benin monarchical traditions are portrayed as heroic defenders of the oppressed, who elect to fight to the death against the Oba: this is clearly the image of Agboghidi in an Etsako variant of his story (Edemode). In other cases, these characters from Benin tradition are accorded a heavily reduced importance and treated as figures over whom local heroes triumph in the evolution of their communities' systems of values: this is arguably the case with Agbogidi and Ogueren (Bini Aruaran) in the Ozidi epic of the delta Ijo (Clark-Bekederemo).

Such cases suggest that, however much in their ceremonial forms these communities bow to Benin's political and other glory, their narrative traditions are the ultimate repository of their estimation of themselves, the final sanctuary of their identity in the context of their relations with Benin. In the following pages, I will briefly present some tales I have myself recorded, showing how the west-Niger Igbo, who trace from civilizations of which they are justly proud, pit their fortunes and their values against the hegemonic claims that Benin has traditionally made over them, sometimes with the assent of official institutions.²

At 9 p.m. on 13 October 1980 at Igbuzo, I recorded from the late Christopher Ojiudu Okeze a story about a war between the town and Benin. Briefly, a hunter, who needed a wife just so she would have a meal ready for him when he got back from the bush, continued to behead one wife after another because they failed to live up to the order. He was finally tamed by one who, pretending to be ailing seriously around the groin, lured him into his first-ever contact with the female genitalia; a few more happy visits of the kind, and his wife bore him a set of male twins who grew prodigiously, as all future heroes do.

Their chance to prove themselves came when the Oba of Benin made a standing order that their father must have a tooth pulled from him every year, by imperial guards sent for the purpose, for use at a special annual ritual performed by the Oba in honor of his ancestors. Initially wondering what this was all about, the twins finally let their father know they would no longer tolerate that state of affairs. When the next set of emissaries--a dozen stalwarts--came from Benin, the twins killed nine of them, asking the rest to report to the Oba what had happened. Incensed, the Oba sent a company of soldiers to deal with the impudent youths. The "younger" of the twins--the one who had emerged from the womb first--was left to rout the Benin pack all by himself, but when the Oba proceeded to despatch the rest of his army, the "elder" joined his brother in systematically mowing down every one on their way, right up to the Benin palace. Here they executed the Oba, installing their father on the throne as the new Oba.

"An Igbuzo man," I asked the narrator at the end of his performance, "ruling as Oba of Benin?"

"Of course," he said. "Don't you see that section of town over there? Benin was very close by in those days."

Ojiudu Okeze obviously had a set of images operating in his mind in this response. One was the ubiquitous presence of Benin forces in an era when she incessantly harassed communities in this region, the other the constant stream of refugees fleeing from Benin's onslaughts and founding new settlements within the vicinity. On the surface, then, Ojiudu's story is an account of the courage shown by his people in calling the bluff of Benin and turning the tables of political hegemony on her; the hunter and his twins may thus be seen as a portrait of the extraordinary men who led the defense of their nation against the invader. There is, indeed, other evidence from Igbuzo oral tradition confirming that the town did defeat a division of Benin forces led by an Oba (Ohadike, Western Igbo 130).

However, a more detailed analysis of the story--aided on the one hand by discussions held with Ojiudu after the performance, and on the other by researches into Igbuzo social and political history--soon led me to discover that the narrator was concerned with issues much broader than a single moment of national glory. To begin with, Igbuzo is a classic example of bipartite social structure formed by two different settlement histories occurring at fairly close intervals. One group of founders was led by Edini of Nri, the other by Umejei of Isu, both men hailing from communities east of the Niger. Although earlier on both groups struck a pact of peaceful coexistence, in the course of time disagreements arose between them which has continued to plague their relations; they still exist as segments of the same town, but conduct their cherished traditional rites quite separately.

A second issue concerns the history of paramount rulership in this traditionally republican polity. A man (Ezechi) from the Isu segment of the town, a hunter who had led a heroic defense of the town against a Benin invasion, was rewarded with the kingship (obi). Unfortunately, he had a self-assertive wife who insisted on participating in the king's councils (contrary to tradition) and dominating the proceedings. One day, one of the councillors made bold to defile her with obscene language, forcing Ezechi not only to abdicate the throne but to exile himself and his family to a village some 25 miles away called Ejime (Twins). For a long time Igbuzo did not have any more paramount rulers. When later they adopted a watered down form of the system, they nevertheless took care to disfranchise the Nri segment of the town, on the basis of an old claim that the Isu elements were the town's initial founders: the name Igbuzo, according to this claim, was formed from the ancient pact of coexistence which recognized the Isu elements as first on the scene (I bu uzo = You were first).

On the surface, therefore, Ojiudu's story is a classic west-Niger Igbo tale of resistance to Benin's hegemony. Beneath this, however, it reveals itself as a mythmaker's honest exploration of his people's troubled history and his hopes for the realization of a truly harmonized society. It seems clear enough that the image of twins is an attempt to capture the bipartite structure of the town's origins, and the final coronation of the hunter an act of wish-fulfilment by one who would see his troubled nation reunited once more under a titular head.

A second story, performed by Ojiudu's friend and accompanist James Okoojii on the same night as the above story, takes us into the realm of Igbo metaphysics. The story is set partly in the prenatal scene of creation--where the protoself negotiates, with God and its guardian spirit, what its destiny on earth would be--and partly in the land of Benin. Briefly, a young man, observing what beautiful human forms are being released for birth in the world--he has just exchanged glances with a young woman who will become a Benin princess--is unhappy with God's pace in molding him. God will not be rushed, of course. In his impatience, the young man rushes away with an uncompleted body: God has not yet fashioned his penis! When his parents find they have given birth to a sexless baby, they are driven to the limits of despair; not long after, they both die. An old woman living on the outskirts of the town takes pity on the child, and raises him to be a full-grown, charming youth with a gift for music.

One day the princess sees a young man playing a thumb piano past the palace walls, recognizes him instinctively, and lets her father the Oba know she is determined to marry the music man. The Oba is not so happy with her choice of a partner, but acquiesces, and decrees the wedding. One morning a palmwine tapper, observing from a tree-top that the princess's husband has no penis, rushes down frantically and reports this to the king, pledging his life on the truth of his report. The Oba issues a proclamation across the realm, naming a date on which everyone must assemble before the palace and strip thoroughly naked. The young man, who so far has not dared to make sexual play with his wife the princess, is absolutely downcast, and reports his plight to his foster mother. She assures him he has nothing to worry about. Throwing a spell on him while he sleeps at night near his wife, she sends him on a spiritual journey back to his Creator and his personal god.

Bold as ever, the young man's spirit braves its way: sword in hand, he challenges everyone he confronts in the spirit world, including his guardian spirit and even the Creator, to a fight, blaming them for the error in his creation. Luckily for him, the old woman has provisioned him with kolanuts and some white chalk, offerings that will insure him the goodwill of his hosts. These items mitigate the young man's impudence, encouraging God to fit him finally with an organ that more than compensates the initial error, and to speed him safely back to the world. He and his wife awake to a joyful intercourse. When the day appointed for public nudity arrives, he exposes himself all too proudly to the nation, and the Oba wastes no time in delivering to the palmwine tapper the penalty he was overzealous in choosing for himself.

There is an Igbo proverb that a palmwine tapper should never reveal what he sees from the top of his tree, but that is merely the surface message of this tale. The tale is set in the nation of Benin, but it has been told from an Igbo cultural sensibility. I think it is against this background that we may best appreciate the latent meaning of the young man's metaphysical drama and the way the narrator's culture construes itself vis-à-vis Benin.

For a start, Benin has traditionally been ruled by a divine king who, as conventional scholarly wisdom tells us, was held to be the temporal representative of the supernatural order: a ruler who so survived the historic challenges to his authority that he not only held the power of life and death over his people but was indeed seen to superintend their spiritual welfare, being a god himself (Bradbury, Benin Studies 75; P. Ben-Amos, "Men and Animals" 246; Kaplan 79; Schaefer 77). The Igbo, on the contrary, are a traditionally republican culture so respectful of the freedom of the individual that--while they have no firm memory of monarchical traditions among them prior to contact with polities like Benin--they see a "king in every man" (Henderson).³

This leads us to the concept of personhood as reflected in our story of flawed fate. The concept that every human being has a spirit double or guardian spirit has been found among several African societies: the Bini call this spirit ehi, while the Igbo call it chi. Like the Igbo, the Bini also have stories in which a person dissatisfied with his/her lot on earth makes a spiritual journey back to the Creator to seek a redress. In the available Benin stories, however, these journeys are often timorously undertaken, and end in an unbending confirmation of the destiny negotiated at creation between the protoself, the personal god (ehi), and the Creator, Osanebua (Bradbury, Benin Studies 271-82). On the contrary, in our story of the young man whose spirit challenges God to a duel and still manages to win a reversal of his unhappy plight, we have an instance of a republican culture asserting its fierce individualism against an autocratic monarchy by turning the image of the divine king as god upon its head.

Finally, I would like to turn my attention to a key gender issue raised by the last story, in the image of the old woman on the outskirts of the town. Stories about Benin are fundamentally stories about power and, as in stories of this kind, the elements within the society sidelined by the configurations of power have a way of getting back at the system that has robbed them of their just deserts. The motif of an old woman who aids heroes in their quests has been acknowledged by folklorists as a universal folk narrative phenomenon, and there is no doubt that it is as native to Benin narrative traditions as it is to those of the west-Niger Igbo.⁴ In these west-Niger Igbo narratives, however, the motif achieves a special significance against the background of the people's cultural history.

On 12 October 1980, I recorded from Charles Simayi of the village of Ubulu-Uno a story of polygynous conflict set within the royal court of Benin. Briefly, an Oba, having failed to have a son who will rule after him, employs the services of a herbal doctor in his efforts. The doctor has a seed of alligator pepper buried deep in a pot of yam meal, and invites the Oba's wives to help themselves to portions of the meal. The last to answer the call is the despised wife of the Oba, who lives by a garbage pile on the peripheries of the palace. Gathering the left-over crumbs of the yam meal, she retires to a quiet corner to eat; when she complains that the meal is peppery, she is ignored by the other wives. These women later observe she is the only one of them to get pregnant, and watch her closely. When she is due to deliver, they rally round her secretly and deliver her of her child; on finding it is male, they cast it into a river, substitute it with a bundle of trash, and demand that the Oba execute the woman for bearing him an abomination.

Meanwhile, an old woman living by the banks of the river, on the outskirts of town, scoops the floating child from the stream and, knowing all too well what has happened, nurtures the child with extraordinary powers in preparation for his return to claim his rightful place in the court. He soon joins other boys like himself in the palace grounds for games, and frightens them by winning all the prizes.

Word soon reaches the Oba that a strange child from nowhere has been causing confusion in the land. When the boy is brought to the Oba's presence, and asked to identify himself, he replies that the old woman had told him that he was the Oba's son. To determine which of the Oba's wives his mother might be, the women are asked to prepare each a meal for the boy to taste in a public display. While most of them strive to outdo one another in the richness of their stew, the despised wife prepares a coarse broth from fetid ingredients gathered from the surrounding bush. Yet the boy, dismissing the array of sumptuous dishes laid out by the favored wives, settles down to slurp up his mother's gruel with gusto. The Oba, whose instincts have left him uneasy since the first day he met the boy, is only too glad to acknowledge him as heir apparent, and takes steps to prepare him for succession.

Now, who is this figure of an old woman who infiltrates the closed world of the Oba from outside, saving helpless children from an unkind fate and using them to restore a needed sense of order and justice in an otherwise pitiless system? Notice that she never gets close to the palace: she only prepares the young men she rescues for an interaction which ultimately ensures them a favored place in the world of the court where, we may be sure, they will make a positive difference.

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that this is one of those tales that may have travelled with emigrants fleeing the menaces to life in Benin for a more settled existence elsewhere. We have reason enough to read this figure of the venerable but marginalized old woman as representing females who, for as long in the history of the kingdom as we can account for, have been steadily kept out of the circles of control in this patriarchal culture. Perhaps no figure, in Benin's monarchical history and culture, comes closer to our purposes than the iyoba, the queen mother. Tradition informs us that, in the reign of Oba Esigie (sixteenth century) it was ruled that, three years after the accession of a new Oba, his mother should be removed from the palace and ensconced in glorified exile as the Iyoba of Uselu (a suburb of the kingdom), with juridical powers and other functions that came to an end when Benin fell to the British (1897).⁵ The figure of the old woman in such a tale may thus be seen as a symbol of the female excluded from the circles of monarchical power, now come to haunt the system and teach it certain ethical lessons.

While this is granted, it would be safer to assume that the motif persists in the traditions of the Igbo largely because, as I think Jungian psychoanalysts have usefully suggested (see Drake, for example), there is a comfortable cultural environment for it. If this point is accepted, then we may more justifiably look to Igbo cultural history for our explanation of the figure. More recent studies of traditional Igbo society, especially by female scholars like Kamene Okonjo ("Dual-Sex Political System" and "Women's Political Participation") and Ifi Amadiume (Afrikan Matriarchal Foundations and Male Daughters), have amply revealed that it was structured on the basis of a distribution of roles in a way that made women no less central and crucial than men to its functioning and survival. It was indeed because Igbo women were so entrenched within the power structures of their society that, when the colonial authorities tried to trample on their traditional rights in the determination of the economic sphere of life, the women resisted on a scale the authorities had never seen before.⁶

In fact, this motif of the liminal old woman, ever haunting the environments of power, gains in significance when placed in counterpoise with the standard image (in these Igbo tales) of the wicked Oba, which is hardly characteristic of traditional Benin tales.⁷ If the tales conclude by presenting the Oba as bringing harmony to the realm by virtue of just and humane acts, as we saw in the above examples, it is precisely because, in the political traditions of the narrators' culture, a ruler was supposed to use his office more for benevolent and democratic than for cruel and autocratic ends. The Igbo, of course, never had rulers of the Benin model prior to their intercourse with Benin; although some Igbo communities borrowed the model from Benin at some point in their histories, the people were too republican in outlook and temper to allow their rulers to exercise the sort of power Benin rulers had over their subjects. So, even if we allow that tales like the above came with Igbo emigrants from Benin, we may safely take their humanization of the Oba "to represent," as Chukwuma Azuonye has forcefully argued, "a traditionalist rejection of the power and influence of imported types of [kingship] in favour of the people's own democratic institution" (69).

In these west-Niger Igbo tales, therefore, the resistance to Benin may be explained not only by the people's collective memory of traumas sustained in the days of Benin's military ascendancy, but indeed by an instinctive withdrawal from shades of "epistemic violence" brought upon their traditions by that ascendancy. This point becomes clearer when set against two factors. The first is the people's pride in their own cultural history which, in some important respects, precedes the well-advertised achievements of Benin. For instance, it is well-known that the ritual culture of the Nri Igbo (from which many if not most west-Niger communities descended) played key roles in the religious and ceremonial life of the Benin kingdom. Some crucial articles of worship in Benin are traceable to Nri;⁸ besides, early British colonial officials reported Nri claims that the Benin nation was subject to them and that the Eze Nri (Nri king) crowned the monarchs of Benin and generally superintended the religious observances of surrounding communities (Afigbo, Ropes 60).

Obviously, it irks the Igbo pride for Benin's claims to be held above those of a people who guided her cultural achievement, so to speak. This leads to the second factor which puts these tales within the focus of the postcolonial political engineering of the Nigerian nation. These west-Niger communities have often reacted with suspicion and indeed pique to the privilege enjoyed by Benin in official Nigerian circles and records. For instance, one of the many informants I interviewed on the origins of the Ekumeku war--a war of resistance fought by the west-Niger Igbo against the British for some thirty years (Ohadike, Ekumeku)--thought Benin had a great deal to do with colonial policy at the time.

Shortly after the British occupied Benin (1897), said my informant, the colonial Resident paid an official visit to some western Igbo communities, accompanied by the newly-installed Oba (Eweka II). The ostensible reason was to make peace between Benin and those communities (e.g., Ubulu-Uku) with which she had been at war in the past; but the people later found that the government was only using Benin to try to infiltrate the leadership of a movement (Ekumeku) they had been unable to crack since it started (1883). When Benin's collusion with the British became clear to these peoples, some of them that had continued to give Benin the privilege of approving their installation of a new ruler ceased to have any more such dealings with her.

An equally telling resistance to Benin's privileged standing with the authorities may be seen in an effort by the Agbor elite to revise an "official" account of their historic relations with Benin. Egharevba's Short History of Benin, first published in 1934, contained the claim that Agbor was a Benin colony, that its first Obi (paramount ruler) was a Bini man, and that Benin had been responsible for settling all its succession disputes to the satisfaction of the people. Five years later (1939), the Agbor Patriotic Union petitioned the colonial government (whose hand the people saw behind Egharevba's claims) against what they considered a gross misrepresentation of their town's history. On the contrary, they claimed, Agbor was "the parent stock of all the tribes in the area including Benin"; before the advent of the British, it was Agbor that incessantly harassed Benin with wars, which was why the Bini built a huge moat around their city to protect themselves (Afigbo, Igbo and Their Neighbours 15-16).

These counterclaims against Benin's hegemony are, of course, not unique to this part of the world or even in the tradition of historical record generally: no one wants to be seen as a loser. In the oral literature fieldwork projects I formerly supervised at Ibadan, one of my students, a Sierra Leonean, once collected a version of the Sunjata story from a part of her country inhabited by the Susu. In that version, Sunjata was cast as the villain to Sumanguru's hero, and the reverses suffered by the former took up a disproportionate part of the struggle between the two men for ascendancy in the region.

As I said, there is nothing unusual about ascendancy claims in intergroup relations. They are fundamentally driven by each group's anxiety to defend its integrity and its interests in the context of new political formations, so that an undue imbalance is not created in the new dispensation between peoples who had in the past dealt with each other on equal terms. In the creation of the Nigerian state, it suited the British government to pursue a policy of divide and rule by favoring the claims and interests of certain groups over those of others. The tragedy of Nigeria's postcolonial history is that it adopted this hegemonist paradigm, not only in showcasing cultural traditions she thought competed favorably with the best anywhere in the world, but in setting the structures for its post-independence governance. The relations between "majority" and "minority" groups is an old pattern in the political life of nations across the world; but in Nigeria it has been pursued with such vengeance that the country may appear to have spread the disease to the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, while many other countries have done their best to contain the explosive potential of competing claims and interests among their constituent groups, the phenomenon has been responsible in Nigeria not only for a tragic civil war but indeed for an intractable canker of distrust in the body politic. The clear message of the tales of resistance to Benin discussed above is that every group wants to be recognized in its own right. It stands to reason that the most realistic mode of governance in a pluralistic country like Nigeria is one that ensures a level playing field for its constituent communities. In the more recent meetings convened to work out a constitution for the country that would avoid the tragic errors of the past, a few voices have been raised in favor of establishing such a level playing field. But, just as determinedly, others have been raised in defense of the old imbalance: "I would not," said one member of a constitution drafting committee, "want my ethnic group of ten million to be given equal treatment with any other group of one thousand," (in Osaghae 252), obviously taking a simplistic numerical view of equality.

One solid lesson the above stories about Benin also teach is that, just as there are epic and other accounts celebrating the officially recognized heroes of Africa's history--the Sunjatas, the Shakas, the Samoris, etc.--so there are numerous accounts by communities they are fabled to have overrun but which are just as determined to contest the favored claims of their former rivals. Contemporary history--in Africa as elsewhere--makes it abundantly clear that no community is content to have its interests ignored. In both arenas of humanistic study and political engineering, it is about time we attended to the voices of the underrepresented.

NOTES

1. The limitation of some of the studies in this area has been in the short shrift given to the roles of women within the social organization. This has been corrected, as far as the west-Niger Igbo are concerned, by the work of Kamene Okonjo (especially 1976).

2. In one of his published lectures, J. F. Ade Ajayi has pointed to the policy of Nigerian governments in "[sponsoring] research into the cultures of dominant ethnic groups" (19), a policy that has helped in no small way to establish a hegemonic agenda that has steadily doomed the nation's efforts at social and political engineering.

3. The king of the ancient Igbo civilization of Nri--whose archaeology was championed by Thurstan Shaw (see his Igbo-Ukwu) under commission from the Nigerian government--was merely a "priest-king" in the sense that he superintended the worship of the protective deity of agrarian life, Ala; he held no summary political powers over citizens of the land the way the Oba of Benin did.

4. See Thompson's Motifs N825.3 (Old Woman Helper) and H1233.1.1 (Old Woman Helps on Quests) for examples. For women who help heroes and thus get their revenge on powerful family members who have cast them out of the circles of power, see Johnson109-26 and Innes and Sidibe 43-58.

5. See Ben-Amos, "In Honor of Queen Mothers" 79-80 and Ebohon 30-33 for various accounts of this disempowerment. Mba (15-20) further points to the total marginalization of women in most spheres of Benin life prior to the consolidation of British rule.

6. On the Aba Women's War (often disparagingly called the Women's Riot) of 1929-31, see especially Perham 202-12 (=Leith-Ross 23-39); Afigbo, Warrant Chiefs 207-48; van Allen; and Mba 73-97.

7. Ben-Amos has usefully pointed out that tales of anti-monarchical resistance are the stuff of narrative traditions of "rural" communities, outside the kingdom proper (Sweet Words 54).

8. The Igbo religious effigy, ikenga (see Jeffreys; Boston), seems clearly to be the model of the Benin ikegobo (Bradbury, Benin Studies 252-70): Bradbury in fact cites (262n) Jeffreys's article for "a more satisfactory etymology" of the Benin word.

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