The Cross River Forest and the people's traditions

Muri Cobham, the Clan Head of Efut Ifako, Creek Town, is considered among if not THE most knowledgeable Ékpè leaders alive in the Calabar region today. His cap sports a red parrot feather, a leopard pelt, and a porcupine quill. On the back wall hang leaves from the 'Ékpè tree', called Oboti in the Èfìk language; on the table is a plantain leaf. 2010.

The peoples living in the huge forest-belt of West Africa used its flora and fauna as key ingredients in their cultural ways. Most communities had forest and water reserves that were taboo for all but ritual specialists.

 Oboti leaves (the 'flag' of Ékpè), as well as palm fronds hang from the entrance to the lodge to keep non-initiates out. Èfé Ékpè Efut Ibonda, June 2010

P.A. Talbot, an early British colonial officer, documented some of these sacred spaces in the Ìbìbìò-speaking and Ejagham-speaking regions of the Cross River basin: “Like the Lake of the Dead in the Oban District, many Ìbìbìò sacred pools and groves serve as a place of sanctuary, not for human beings alone, but also for wild things."

The Oboti trees and stone (ítíát in Èfìk) mark the shrine of a lodge. The empty bottles were left after pouring libation to ancestors. The raffia-woven basket with egg and other edibles is a gift to the river goddess (Ndèm in Èfìk, or generically 'Mami Wata'). Èfé Ékpè Efut Ibonda, June 2010

Talbot recognized that in some cases, the 'sacred groves' served to protect the forest from destruction by farming and iron smelting:  “. . . a dense evergreen forest . . . This bush . . . now exists, in its primeval state, only on the borders of streams, in sacred groves or the comparatively small proportion of uninhabited country.”

Idem Ikwo, an Ékpè masquerade known in the historical literature as 'Ékpè runner', is the most public of Ékpè masquerades. The masker holds Oboti leaves in the left hand; the suit is woven from palm raffia. Èfé Ékpè Iboku, Creek Town, 2009

In a region impacted by the trans-Atlantic slave trade for centuries, the 'sacred groves' could protect enslaved peoples, who would then become 'servants' of the grove. Talbot wrote:
“Not far from Idua Oronn is the sacred grove of Abang ‘Ndak, whence no branch might be cut, or leaf plucked, on penalty of death. This was a place of refuge for escaped slaves and of sanctuary for those guilty of manslaughter.”

View from the Ikom-Calabar road of a volcanic cone in the Ekuri community forest, Akamkpa Local Government Area. Ekuri people call the cone Ágàmlògón 'mother of whiteness', because of the morning mists around its peak. Stones used in Ékpè practice derive from this mountainous region.

Surplus wealth entering communal societies became a factor in dealing with humans who broke taboos of the 'sacred groves'. Talbot wrote:
“Should a man be proved guilty of cutting down the trees in this or any other sacred grove, he was put to death, unless his family were rich enough to ransom him by payment of a very heavy fine.”

Èfé Ékpè Asibong Ekondo (Obutong) in Calabar Municipality. The lodge pole at the front door shows mythic movement from water to land with totemic animals, at bottom the python, then crocodile, then leopard, and finally the founding ancestor Asibong Ekondo. January 2010

The relationship between cultural ways and the forest was not lost upon the early colonists and missionaries who struggled to open the region to European commerce.

The 'high-table' where Ékpè title-holders sit, is covered with plantain leaves, the 'table-cloth' of Ékpè. The red and white 'chalk' is used to initiate members. White for peace (ancestors/ lunar energy) and red for activation (solar energy). The white is kaolin clay from the earth; the red is derived from the center of the camwood tree. Èfé Ékpè Efut Ibonda, June 2010

Talbot rounded up his book-length study of the cultural habits of the Ìbìbìò people with thoroughly European-centric views of what progress should look like in Nigeria: “. . . with the coming of railways, and consequent opening up of the country, we may hope that progress will be still more rapid in the future."

Ékpè ceremonies occur in the night, the time leopards move through the forest. This young man is being initiated at Èfé Ékpè Efut Ifako in Creek Town. See the similarity of his body markings with those on the iron 'gong'. These marking show the deep relationship between Ékpè and its music. 2010.

Talbot continued: "Possibly, too, the darker aspects of many rites and beliefs may be attributed, in great part at least, to the shadow cast over the minds of the people by that dense tropical forest which covers such vast stretches of the West Coast, or by the mangrove swamps which surround the low-lying lands."

Ukara cloth, the hand-dyed cloth used only by Ékpè title-holders, covers the entrance to the 'butame', the inner sanctum where  the Voice of the Leopard resounds. Its symbols include pythons, crocodiles, leopards, tortoises, and chameleons. Èfé Ékpè Efut Ibonda, June 2010.

"In the open sun-lit country, like the wide plains of Northern Nigeria and the Sudan, the more revolting customs seem to be dying out, as was the case in Egypt with the cutting of the bush, and in Europe with the thinning of the great forests.”
        P.A. Talbot. Life in Southern Nigeria: the Magic, Beliefs, and Customs of the Ibibio Tribe. (London, 1923)

Wooden gong on the front patio of an Ékpè lodge in Ikom-urban with crocodile and tortoise symbols. 2010. In Éjághám speaking-regions like Ikom, Ékpè is known as Mgbe.

Talbot perceived ecological destruction as part of the ‘civilizing’ process, and he was not alone.
        A recent book by Ìbìbìò-speaking author Okon Antia describes the attempts of his grandfather, a nineteenth century local leader, Obong Udo Antia II of Ikot Aba, to protect his community's inherited life-ways and sacred forests from destruction, in this case by the celebrated Scottish missionary, Mary Slessor:

Elder (Dr.) Okon R.U. Antia, Village Head of Ikot Aba. November 2010

“He resisted the white missionary efforts to destroy his people’s shrines and forests. No wonder why he strongly and successfully opposed the felling of the great ‘Mkpa Tree’ — a symbol of his family shrine by Mary Slessor’s workers while opening the old Itu-Ikot Ekpene road which passed though his village— Ikot Aba."

Sacred grove at the Ékpè lodge (Osam Mgbe) of Ikot Ansa (Nkonib), Calabar Municipality, 2009.

"According to Efiong Udo Antia ‘When Mary Slessor failed to heed Ete Nyin’s warming not to fell the tree, but divert the road and to save the trees he used a contingent of his soldiers and policemen to drive away Mary Slessor’s workers. This incident led to a serious and open confrontation and quarrel . . . He seriously opposed the stripping of himself and other traditional rulers of their economic, political, social and judicial powers by the westerners.”
        Okon R.U. Antia. Akwa Ibom Cultural Heritage: Its Invasion by Western Culture and its Renaissance. (Uyo, Nigeria, 2005).

Ékpè chiefs sit at the high table wearing leopard teeth and skin, porcupine quills, and red parrot feathers; A sting-ray tail lies upon the table, a symbol of Ékpè discipline. The two at center are the Ntoe of Ikot Ansa and the Ntoe of Akim Qua. Ikot Ansa (Nkonib) Osam Mgbe, 2009

Issues related to the ecology and to the royal traditions of communal societies, to the impact of slavery and surplus wealth, and to forest conservation and Christianity, rage on into the present.

The Cross River National Forest, Cross River State, Nigeria

Greetings!

For several years I have been living in Calabar, port city of the Cross River region in Nigeria.

It is a beautiful part of the world with a profoundly rich cultural diversity, matched only by the majesty of the forest, which is fast diminishing due to illegal logging. I created this blog to share some  ideas and images from my experiences in Nigeria and Cameroon.

In June of 2010, I trekked through the Cross River National Park forest for five days in Boki Local Government Area, starting at the Park headquarters in Butatong, moving through the villages of Okwa I and Okwa II, Balegete, and finally up into the Obudu Cattle Ranch.

The images seen on this page express the most pristine views . . .

In what follows, I am juxtaposing some favorite passages that describe this forest region, by animal collector Gerald Durrell, who spent time in the upper reaches of the Cross River, near Mamfe, Cameroon, in the 1940s:

“At Bakebe [we lived]. . . perched on top of a hill above the village. This vantage-point gave us a magnificent view over an endless, undulating sea of forest, to the French Cameroon borders and beyond. . .

 
Every conceivable shade of green seemed to have been used in the composition of this picture, with here and there a bombax tree glowing like a great bonfire, its branches full of scarlet flowers and sunbirds. . . .

There were feathery, delicate trees in pale green; thick-set oak-like trees with deep olive leaves; tall, spreading-aristocratic trees, whose pale silver trunks stretched up elegantly several hundred feet from the ground, and whose slender branches negligently supported a mass of shimmering yellow-green leaves, as well as the deep green, untidy bundles of orchids and tree ferns that clung to its bark. . . .

Curious hills rose from the forest on all sides, hills shaped as perfect isosceles triangles, as square as bricks, or ridged and humped as the back of an old crocodile, as each one covered to its summit with the shaggy cloak of forest. . . .

In the early morning, looking out from under our hill-top, the forest would be invisible under the blanket of white mist; as the sun rose this dispersed, twisting and coiling in great columns up to the blue sky, so that it seemed as though the whole forest was on fire. Soon the mist would only cling round the curiously shaped hills, so that they looked like islands in a sea of milk.”

“N’da Ali was the largest mountain in the vicinity. It crouched at our backs, glowering over the landscape, the village, and our little hill. From almost every vantage point you were aware of the mountains’ mist-entangled, cloud-veiled shape brooding over everything, its heights guarded by sheer cliffs of gnarled granite so steep that no plant life could get a foothold. . . .

Every day I had looked longingly at the summit, and everyday I had watched N’da Ali in her many moods. In the early morning she was a great mist-whitened monster; at noon she was all green and golden glitter of forest, her cliffs flushing pink in the sun; at night she was purple and shapeless, fading to black as the sun sank. Sometimes she would go into hiding, drawing the white clouds around herself and brooding in their depths for two or three days at a time. . . .

Every day I gazed at those great cliffs that guarded the way to the thick forest on her ridged back . . . I found out that N'da Ali really belonged to the people of a neighbouring village called Fineschang, and naturally the mountain had a ‘ju-ju’ on it. . . . while the people of Fineschang were allowed, by the terms of the ju-ju (if I may put it like that), to hunt and fish on the lower slopes of the mountain, only one man was allowed access to the summit. . . .”

“In every direction stretched the forest below us, miles and miles of undulating country, here and there rising into a curious shaped hill, all of it covered with a thick pelt of trees in every shade and combination of greens. . . .

In front of us the forest rolled away to the French border and beyond, and to our right, seen dimly shimmering in the heat haze, more like a faint fingerprint on the blue sky, I could see Mount Cameroon, nearly eighty miles away. It was a breath-taking and beautiful sight, and for the first time I fully realized the vastness of the incredible forest. From the plain below where we sat the forest stretched, almost unbroken, right across Africa, until it merged into the savannah land of the east: Kenya, Tanghanyika, and Rhodesia."

(Gerald Durrell, 1953. The Over-loaded Ark. London: Faber & Faber Limited)