Ways of the Rivers: Arts and Environment of the Niger Delta.

Edited by Martha G. Anderson and Philip M. Peek

UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, Los Angeles, 2002. Distributed by the University of Washington Press, Seattle. 364 pp., 50 b/w & 430 color illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography. $50 softcover.

One of the unfortunate circumstances of Niger Delta art history is that it is a sidebar to conversations elsewhere--a dumping ground, say, for the "Lower Niger Bronze Industry"--overshadowed by research on the Yoruba, the Benin kingdom, and the Igbo. To be sure, the Niger Delta has its champions. The historian E. J. Alagoa, the anthropologists Robin Horton, Philip Lets, and Marida Hollos, and the linguist Kay Williamson are stalwarts. The anthropologist Philip Peek and the art historians Joanne Etcher and Martha Anderson lead the regatta too, as do other contributors to this catalogue and the related special issue of African Arts (The Niger Delta and Beyond, Spring 2002). But in the cacophony of Nigerian voices, those of the metropolis are more audible and less diffuse.

The Delta is politically sundered and economically disenfranchised despite its oil production. But factor in those four- or five-foot masquerade headdresses and geometrical shrine carvings, and the Delta has a lot going for it. Horizontal helmet masks of sharks, sawfish, and crocodiles, and hippos of Cubist proportions endow Western and African art history. Angular and bold, sometimes vibrantly painted and dangling with palm fronds, they are paraded atop performers' colorful costumes, the gestures playfully threatening. Since villagers associate lagoons and rivers with wealth and fertility, performances are celebratory. Both land and water dwellers believe in river spirits, and aquatic masquerades reflect a shared ethos. Canoe races and nautical displays are hosted where a warrior ethic prevails. In a nod to global affinities, motorized land regattas inspired by the Rose Parade in Pasadena, California, tool along Warri's main drag.

By contrast the rain forest is home to bush spirits, harbingers of evil. To safeguard the community, life-sized wooden sentinels are posted, and four-legged, fanged wooden ivri serve as talismans, as incredibly conceived as the mystical dangers they protect villagers from. There is ambivalence about the shallows, the intermediary space between water and land, abode of pythons, crocodiles, crawdads, and mudfish, anomalous creatures that are as good for thought as they are to eat. Meanings vary, from village to village, and similarities are countered by small differences that promote corporate identities of sorts. These are generalizations, but the Niger Delta is a generalization.

As a category concept the Niger Delta is an imaginary construct that includes peoples east of the Brass River, which is nut geographically part of the Delta. Articles in the African Arts issue extend the boundary to Cameroon and the southern Igbo. As a household concept, rough and reads economical and summarizing, the notion "Niger Delta" (The Ways of the Rivers in the book's title) suggests peoples who share an ethos. Or is it a common heritage submerged in a swampland of diversity at every bend in the creek?

As a gate-keeping concept the Niger Delta is a canoe laden with meanings. The art historical labeling of regional styles glosses over agency and pluralism. Economy in denotation and connotation can prohibit thought as well as promote it. While exploring the Niger Delta concept, this book (and the related exhibition, see p. 82) reviews the ebbs and eddies in the area's social history, arts and environment, cultural and artistic identities, and the nagging issue of the Lower Niger Bronze Industry.

Right off the bat is size. Is the Delta 20,000 square miles, a conservative estimate, or the 75,000 square kilometers (approximately 47,000 square miles) suggested by A. A. Derefaka and F. N. Anozie, who extend the region beyond the Forcados River to the west and the Imo River to the east (in African Arts, "Economic and Cultural Prehistory of the Niger Delta," p. 78)? Is it the largest (Derefaka and Anozie) or second largest (Anderson and Peek, "Introduction," catalogue, p. 25) in Africa? If geography doesn't satisfy how about canoe trade: a region of rivers and inlets from Douala in Cameroon to the Lagos Lagoon in the west.

At the Tenth Triennial Symposium on African Art (1995), the panel "Do All Currents Flow to the Delta?" set the stage for the exhibition and catalogue. Organizer Joanne Eicher proposed to "investigate similarities and differences in art forms and styles in mid around the Niger Delta and along fine adjacent coasts." The panel needed to address the role of water in the transmission of art forms as well as its corollary: how art reflects the riverain environment. Either posed two questions: How unique is the area environmentally and how typical is its art compared to that from the rest of sub-Saharan Africa? An intriguing part of her proposal asked panelists to address a "Niger Valley Proto-Culture" or a "Creek International Style" that could account for the distribution of "certain art forms by proposing contact between geographically distant peoples, such as the various mainland and Delta Edo subgroups, or Ijo and Kru mariners." For purists this pushes the boundaries of the Delta way too far east, west, and north, which may be why the articles by Rosalinde Wilcox ("Commercial Transactions and Cultural Interactions from the Delta to Douala and Beyond") and Eli Bentor ("Spatial Continuities: Cultural Interactions between the Delta and Southeastern Nigeria") were sidelined to African Arts. There is only so much room in the manse.

Americans have some idea that the Delta is an important source of oil for the United States. Or it may be that educated Americans came to know about the environmental degradation caused by Shell, BP, and Mobil oil companies after the execution by hanging of the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and other MOSOP (National Youth Council of the Ogoni Peoples) leaders. May heralds of angels succor the innocent. The Delta still fights for its share of oil revenues, including the suicidal risks villages take of occasionally blowing themselves up by illegally siphoning natural gas from the pipelines; and most Nigerians knew that oil sales revenue was piped to the discretionary fund of the late head of state General Sunni Abacha.

Most Nigerians see the Delta as a backwater on the way to who cares. Their minds go to scoring the torching of churches versus mosques, arguing over petrol and food, and figuring out how to get a U.S. visa. Nigerians chalk up Saro-Wiwa as a life surrendered in a no-win game, a stupid gesture in national politics. Like bayous everywhere, in the Nigerian scene the Delta is nowhere.

The geography is freshwater swamps and borderline forest, saltwater mangroves of mud and silt, and sandy beach ridges. The economic niches are saltwater fishing and freshwater fishing combined with farming and agriculture. Social organization ranges from descent-based cultures suitable for farming economies to social designs with open criteria of identification. Throw in civil service jobs and the new economy, and we have the bifurcated anxieties over identity illustrated in Ngozi Onwurah's award-winning documentary Monday's Girls (1993). Palm oil production, fish, and now black gold and natural gas are major resources, as is education. The trading states of the coast (such as Bonny, Okrika, Calabar, and Warri) historically had interdependent relationships with peoples in the Igbo hinterlands, across the Delta, and to Cameroon. Add to this scenario the Atlantic slave trade and Ijo pirates, the Benin kingdom and European imports, summarized by E. J. Alagoa's essay "From Middlemen to Missionaries."

The contributors (E. J. Alagoa, Martha G. Anderson, Lisa Aronson, Kathy Curnow, Henry John Drewal, Joseph Eboreime, Joanne B. Eicher and Tonye V. Erekosima, Sonpie Kpone-Tonwe and Jill Salmons, Philip E. Leis, Keith Nicklin, Philip M. Peek, Kay Williamson and E. E. Efere) skirt environmental determinism, a naive--American, really--version of Karl Marx's economic determinism. Aware that ecological factors figure in social structure, interpreted here as congruent or shared art traditions, they show that the Niger Delta is unbounded, its objects and styles borrowed, traded, and manipulated. Its art is placed in a matrix of transnational contacts, crosscutting social categories, and political ideologies. Teasing out analogies in such a multiplex region is a daunting task: autonomies and convergences slice through each other, resulting in cultural minced meat. Robin Horton told Nigel Barley that what united the Delta was cuisine! Periwinkle soup, anyone?

If the environment is murky and swift flowing, where are art history and identity in this scenario? Anthropologists are fond of the culture word and the ethnicity word, both too calcified to handle shifting allegiances. I recall George Peter Murdock's sleeved map in his Africa: Its Peoples and Their Culture History (McGraw-Hill 1959). Like National Geographic inserts, its black-and-white certitude struck one with total awe: hundreds of ethnic categories printed as bounded tribes and closed frontiers. Murdock, Joseph Greenberg--even Rene Bravmann in a way--created artificial solidity, impermeable boundaries that, like national borders, reflect one "tribe," one language, one style. G. I. Jones and Sidney Kasfir deflated that idea in African art.

Ways of the Rivers is a modern phrasing of a broad take, like the research on Eastern Nigerian art by G. I. Jones, and maybe Kenneth Murray, but difficult to think through without lapsing into descriptive excesses. The field and object photographs and the essays make an odd couple: there is a curiously shared visual idiom, but the essays connote divergence and a lawyer's hedge. Intrusions and diffusions abound. The catalogue toys with the study of regional art styles, happily settling for a fine-grained focus: the Delta as the Balkans. To monitor these eddies requires a cultural thesaurus and an obsessive love of the area. The mind-boggling task is to look for unity in variety, or variety in unity, or variety and unity, with the caveat not to trivialize local identities, as individuals and communities navigate them. This catalogue satisfies the thirst for the specific and the general, the ant's perspective and the bird's-eye view.

While contributors to Ways of the Rivers are receptive to murky waters, Eli Bentor in the companion African Arts issue capitalizes in a seriously sociological way on the Jones and Kasfir argument against neat categorization. The southern Igbo butt against Deltaic groups, and his synthesis parallels that of G.I. Jones in marking out how masquerades, religious beliefs, identity, and trade shift independently. It is a sophisticated essay, that, read carefully, shows how carving styles and meanings move separately and not necessarily in the same direction.

A lot of movement is by canoe. Rosalinde Wilcox (in the African Arts adjunct issue) examines the transregional importance of the canoe for commerce and communication, drawing on the history and aesthetics of carved canoe prows from Cameroon. Martha Anderson (in the Fowler book, "From River Horses to Dancing Sharks: Canoes and Fish in Ijo Art and Ritual") goes beyond the canoe as a mode of transportation to its meanings: the ethnography of the can(m; the cultural construction of canoes; canoes as metaphor for a journey; the canoe as divination or as myth; the canoe as a key element in status, ritual, and religion. Clearly there is a lot one can do with the idea of "canoe." The canoe serves as a model for other things, as conscious and unconscious symbolism. Like Pierre Bourdieu's idea of habitus, it has symbolic value. Villagers cannot distinguish their construction of it from their interpretation of it.

While the canoe is a metaphor for movement and contact--cross-river or metaphysical--there are water-world lovers that one needs to disengage from, and imaginative water creatures that demand propitiation; and there are crocodiles and hippos and manatees and assorted half-human/half-animal forms that Henry John Drewal describes in his wide-ranging comparative essay about Ijebu-Yoruba and Kalabari Ijo masquerades ("Celebrating Water Spirits: Influence, Confluence, and Difference in Ijebu-Yoruba and Delta Masquerades"). Fantastically encyclopedic and absorbing in the way the author concatenates information, it bails water in its wishy-washy summation.

Philip Leis's valiant preface, "Cultural Identity in the Multicultural Niger Delta," veers to situational ethnicities, an anthropological approach popular in the 1970s. Leis says "the now generally accepted thesis [is] that most African societies were not sharply delineated in ethnic terms until the imperatives of colonial administration." Frankly; one tires of the hype that the natives were happy until the white man came, but Leis's idealization of the past and his historical myopia about colonial ethnic creations should not divert from his synthesis, a broad-based companion to Bentor's.

Leis mentions that the Itsekiri speak a Yoruba language but are culturally closer to Benin. True, but in an attitudinal survey of ethnic preference I did a few years ago, the Itsekiri do not accept any political affinity with Benin, so that in terms of social distance they are presently about as far apart as two divorced people can be. Kathy Curnow's contribution, "Everyone to His Quarter: Ethnic Interaction, Emulation, and Change in Itsekiri Visual Culture," offers a ringside seat in the Urhobo-Itsekiri identity wars. Since a quarter of Isekiri children have Urhobo mothers, the Itsekiri are burdened by some of the same problems as Israeli Arabs. They express their disdain for the Urhobo in grand fashion, culling royal regalia from Benin, with the wealthy favoring Indian madras cottons (and the ever popular george), and lace bodices with filigreed jewelry courtesy of early trade contact with the Portuguese. Men sport English derbies or top hats, but these sartorial bequests are giving way to--you guessed it--cowboy hats, inspired by Texans manning the oil rigs. For the Itsekiri, clothing is the message, their cultural copyright copied from others. The Itsekiri are an amalgamation anyway, with elitist pretensions.

That spirit of cloth as ethnic aggrandizement applies to the fine art of Kalabari Ijo funerals (Joanne Eicher and Tonye Erekosima, "Fitting Farewells: The Fine Art of Kalabari Funerals"). The lavishness of these mortuary rites says something about categories of the self, but the gorgeous arrays and display of the dead are really for the accumulation of family prestige and power. The Eastern Ijo (Lisa Aronson, "Tricks of the Trade: A Study of Ikakibite [Cloth of the Tortoise] among the Eastern Ijo") have the "cloth of the tortoise," the calico (but not the tortoise symbolism) introduced from India through Britain and the Ijebu; it is worn for women's coming-of-age rituals (iria) and employed by priests and rulers. The Itsekiri, Kalabari Ijo, and Eastern Ijo employ cloth as authentication. The essays show that to the degree a Nigerian group chooses to claim distinction, distinctiveness alters. Even if the content of ethnicity appears identical to forms from earlier periods or other groups, if underlying meanings alter, we cannot assume the same significance.

Eicher and Erekosima, Curnow, and Aronson jump over one hurdle in the standard application of the culture concept. This convention derives from the idea that a group has or possesses a culture. This is culture as legacy, something neither created nor invented but bestowed. These essays offer a more serviceable sense of how "cultures" operate in the Delta, because they emphasize rather than occlude agentive and operational interests.

The material culture of the Niger Delta consists mostly of wooden objects and a tradition of large-scale sculpture. For those who get their kicks out of metals, Philip Peek and Keith Nicklin's essay, "Lower Niger Bronze Industries and the Archaeology of the Niger Delta," offers a decant summary of stylized carnivore skulls, the high-market-end bronze antelope hunter (the "hunter style," as Fagg labeled it), and the Ijebu face bell. Yet, except for the archaeometry done by Nicklin and S. J. Fleming, there isn't enough metallurgical analysis or onsite archaeology to replace speculation about source--Benin, Ijebu-Ode, the Niger River passageway, Andoni are all possibilities. Without the science, iconography cannot handle border styles well enough to do justice to these pieces, although Peek's essay on "The Isoko as a Delta People" does tackle origins and the historical and cultural relationships with Benin and neighboring peoples. (The article by A. A. Derefaka and F. N. Anozie in the African Arts issue discusses the "Economic and Cultural Prehistory of the Niger Delta," and while archaeological test pits are constrained by mangrove swamps, there are intriguing excavated terracotta figures and heads.) The appendix by Kay Williamson and E. E. Efere ("Crosscurrents and Confluences: Linguistic Clues to Cultural Development") displays Williamson's relentless linguistic sorting following Greenberg's tradition of classification.

Ways of the Rivers is Anderson and Peek's baby. Of its twelve chapters, plus introduction, conclusion, and thirteen shorter contributions called "interleafs," they co-author three and are individually responsible for ten and four respectively, while Peek also co-authors one with Keith Nicklin. After their expert overview that frames the essays, Anderson and Peek's conclusion is inconclusive. How could it be otherwise? The essay "The Arts of the Ogoni" by Sonpie Kpone-Tonwe and Jill Salmons describes so much individuality of expression in such a small area that it needs itemizing, from sweetly articulated puppets to softly subtle oval human- and animal-faced masks to scary and monstrous headdresses, with the huge understatement that Ogoni arts are "far more substantial than the nonrepresentational collections in the West would suggest" (p. 278).

Anderson and Peek share a lot of territory. Missing are Robin Horton, Perkins Foss, and Nigel Barley. Never mind. The contributions are strong and descriptive, supported by great field photographs. A gap such as an essay on the Urhobo that could highlight the Fowler's holdings, or on Mammy Wata, women, and matriarchs, is made up by interleafs. These are the rivulets that hold the complexity together. Interleafs work for short takes on the merchant princes (Martha Anderson) including Chief Nana of Koko (Joseph Eboreime) and the contemporary art of Bruce Onobrakpeya and Sokari Douglas Camp (Anderson again). Anderson's discussion of Onobrakpeya's plastographs (colored epoxy resins on linoleum) of boat regattas and festivals and of Camp's steel sculptures of masqueraders captures the stylized frenzy of festivals and regattas, and links these spectacular entertainments to new visual media of expression.

Sumptuously illustrated, Ways of the Rivers succeeds as a comprehensive survey into the art and dynamics of a region where the watery environment is synonymous with cultural identity and spiritual sustenance. Although the waterways would seem to serve as obstacles to contact and interaction, they are also connectors, to spirits and strangers. Sadly, some of the unabashed energy that goes into performance and the stark assertiveness of the Delta's figurative sculptural traditions also find a more direct outlet, as in the clashes last August between the Ijo and Itsekiri in the city of Warri that were rooted in disputes over oil wealth and political power. The complex artistic expression of an entire region parallels a unique history of shifting and conflicting affiliations and identities.

Joseph Nevadomsky, professor of anthropology at California State University, Fullerton, has carried out research on Benin art and ritual and, more recently, spatial analysis of Benin palaces, contemporary brass casting technology, and NSF-sponsored LA-ICP-MS metals analyses of Benin brasses. He is also a consulting editor of African Arts.