Bastions Butting Heads: On Reading “Mmirinzo” and then Re-Reading “The Bottled Leopard”
Chioma Ezekobe’s debut novel, Mmirinzo, explores, as its central theme, Igbo Spirituality. Ezekobe handles the subject with insight and care and her work recalls the African classic, The Bottled Leopard by Chukwuemeka Ike. Both books are similar enough in narrative arc: as a gifted young person rises through the ranks in an institution of western/colonial civilization, they have to confront, in Igbo spirituality, the limits of western education and so, western knowledge.
In Mmirinzo, the gifted young person is Olivia, the book’s central character, and the institution of western civilization is law practice. The practice of law in Nigeria carries markers of the country’s colonial history: British common law continues to be a valid source of law in Nigerian courts and Nigerian lawyers are required to wear the British legal garb of horsehair wig, white bib, and black gown. Olivia is a fast-rising legal star, a student of Arbitration and other forms of Alternative Dispute Resolution. Early in the story, she is headed to an Alternate Dispute Resolution professional training and the prestige of the training is quickly established: “This is a training for the United Kingdom Chartered Institute of Arbitrators membership…” The reader gets the sense that the training is supposed to be important because It was tailored for students in the United Kingdom.
However, as it turns out, the machinations of Igbo spirituality do not excuse lawyers, not even those trained on a United Kingdom syllabus, and before long, triggered by the movement and sound of water, Olivia succumbs to a fainting spell, right there at the training center. The fact of Igbo spirituality’s capacity to permeate all aspects modern life is emphasized throughout the book. As Amaoge, one of Olivia’s Facebook friends and a practitioner of Odinani, a sacred Igbo spiritual practice, explains, spiritual forces in Igbo cosmology are able to inflict recalcitrant subjects with Agwu — a temporary madness — to bring them into conformity with their spiritual obligations.
Olivia is inflicted with Agwu. What starts off as fainting spells and mid-day trances which escalates into what presents as bouts of schizophrenia with extended periods of incoherence and comatose. Finally, Olivia must return to her ancestral home at Umuduha in south-eastern Nigeria to make the spiritual journey and embrace her destiny as a rainmaker or risk hurting the people she loves and the career she has spent years building.
Amobi Ugochukwu, the central character and gifted young person in The Bottled Leopard, is a first year secondary school student at Government College Ahia, which in 1947 — the period the book is set in –, is a bastion of western civilization and education. New students into the school, as part of the informal induction into their new life are required to recite,
“I come from the bush village of [insert ancestral/family home] where people eat toads for supper. I am a fag, a stinking fag, like all fags, to be seen, not heard. As from this day, I promise to discard all my rustic and outlandish behavior, and to become a worthy student of this great college.”
Amobi, even if curious about some aspects of college life, is happy enough to discard all rustic and outlandish behavior. However, his Igbo ancestry has expectations of him.
Amobi’s spiritual journey starts off with just dreams — he dreams of a leopard and while he is a little disconcerted by his alarm, rather than relief, when the leopard is about to be killed, he quickly puts the dream out of his mind and continues with student life. However, his next two dreams, both occurring while he is visiting home, are harder to forget. In one, he breaks out in a fever and hives and in the other, he wakes with a tuft of animal hair between his teeth. After the third incident, Amobi and his family decide to consult a dibia. The dibia reveals that Amobi is his late uncle, Nnyanelugo, reincarnate. Nnanyelugo was the last great leopard man in the family, so Amobi carries the powers of a leopard man, too. Being a leopard man means that Amobi is able, with some ritual practice, to channel his spirit into a designated leopard and have that leopard do his bidding. If these powers are not harnessed, again through ritual practice, then his leopard will be left to roam free from control. Amobi must decide if to place his trust in the instructions he has received at the government college which claim that matters of Igbo spirituality are false and intended to deceive, or if to follow the guidance of the dibia who claims experience and expertise in these matters.
The LIMITS of Western Education
Ike’s The Bottled Leopard is unabashed as it insists that Western Education is painfully limited in its knowledge of the ethereal forces and truths that guide Igbo communities. The book concedes points of superior knowledge to western education, such as the masters at the Government College Ahia providing an explanation for an eclipse of the sun while the towns people of Ndikelionwu simply attribute it to unexplained spiritual forces bringing the world to an end. In many other instances however, Ike makes it clear that western education is good enough for what it is and nothing more.
For example, Amobi is dismissed by his college masters when he asks questions about the possibility of a human being transferring his spirit into a leopard and controlling the animal at will. It takes a dibia in Igbo spirituality to provide answers to Amobi’s questions and in some ways, rest the young student’s angst.
In another instance, Nma, Amobi’s love interest, tells him of a girl who is afflicted by some malevolent water spirits– Mammy Water. The girl’s father is said to have refused the ritual prescribed by the dibia because “as a professed Christian, he would not be a party to any heathen rituals.” The girl eventually dies, “presumably taken away by Mammy Water”
Nma too is attacked by a malevolent spirit and her symptoms of occasional but debilitating headaches confound the medical officers in her school’s hospital and defy all prescribed medication. Eventually, through divination and ritual practice by a dibia, Nma is cured of her aliment.
Ike peppers the book with several anecdotes and quips to not only demonstrate the limit of western education, but the emphasize the ludicrousness of its claim to absolute knowledge. After hearing the bible story of Jesus Christ casting away evil spirits into swine, Amobi cannot help but draw comparisons with the Igbo belief of leopard men. However, his British teacher who affirms the bible story of a spirit moving from man to pig as gospel truth, dismisses the story of a spirit moving from man to leopard as “mumbo-jumbo.”
As The Bottled Leopard ends, the principal of the college says, “Finally I want to emphasize once again, that this school is set up to liberate all of you from the fetters of superstition and juju. All that talk about men going about as live leopards is utter rubbish, is that clear?”. This statement, after Ike has expended the length of the book demonstrating that Amobi is indeed a leopard man who is able to “go about as a live leopard”, is an inside joke from author to reader about the ignorance and arrogance of western education.
Similarly, in Mmirinzo, Ezekobe writes about Igbo spirituality with a clear conviction about its truth and validity. While the characters in the book make a slow journey to embracing Igbo spirituality, we the readers, are left in no doubt from the start of the book that Igbo spirituality a real thing and that it carries the answer to the problems Olivia faces.
Mmirinzo opens with a prologue. In opening scenes, Olivia is once again in trance, in an ethereal plane with a young girl and then an older woman. The girl tells Olivia that they are both one person and points out the Mbubu, sacred markings that indicate Igbo spirituality, on her chest. The old woman has a bullet wound on her waist and its location and shape is identical to a birthmark Olivia has on her waist. These scenes are presented as data-points to help the reader register that Olivia is experiencing something intricately connected to Igbo spirituality. Still, it takes Olivia several chapters, and multiple attempts with conventional medicine, before she accepts that she must return to her ancestral home and embark on a spiritual journey to resolve the problems that threaten to unravel her modern life.
Many artists in Nigeria have used various medium to reiterate this point about the limits of Western education. In Tunde Kelani’s classic film “Thunderbolt: Magun”, Yoruba medical and health practice is in question. In Magun, a jealous husband sets a long-known ritual curse against his wife whom he suspects of infidelity. The curse is expected to cause harm (or death) to both cheating spouse and third-party while they the duo are in a sexual tryst, or soon thereafter. However, the catch is that if the wife is not in fact unfaithful, as is the case with the heroine in Kelani’s film, the curse will still kill her after a specified period of incubation. It is a race against time as the characters try to rid the wife of her affliction.
Magun ends as indigenous health practitioners rescue a medical doctor who, in a quest to debunk indigenous medical beliefs, willingly exposes himself to the disease. As the indigenous practitioners explain, Magun is “the sacred power of our ancestors from time immemorial” and it defies all attempts to be digested by conventional medical knowledge.
Igbo Spirituality as a Cult
One of the many negative appellations used against Igbo spiritual practice is that it is a “cult” and so must be evil. Ezekobe tackles this cult allegation head-on. She makes clear that while it is true that many aspects of Igbo spiritual practice bear some similarity to occultism in that they limit participation to only its initiates, many institutions imported through colonization also share this characteristic. In Mmirinzo, Olivia’s grandmother says to her,
“If we call it initiation, you will want to pee in your pants. It is not different from the school you have attended…who are those called to bar? Only people who had undergone training and learning with you, right?”
By equating the initiation proceedings into the Nigerian bar with the initiation practices into Igbo spirituality, Ezeokobe inevitably demystifies the shroud of evil cast on initiation rituals into Igbo spirituality.
Similarly, by setting his story in Government College Ahia, a bastion of western education accessible only to a select few who are handpicked after rigorous testing through multiple examinations, Ike makes a point about initiation rituals being a sine qua non to access into exclusive spaces. Indeed, when Amobi and Chuks return to school after suspension, they have to be re-initiated by a re-entry ritual.
The point being made by both authors is clear: there is often a barrier to entry into important societies all around the world and indigenous religions should not be singled out for castigation.
The Caricaturing of Our Priests
A fundamental tool that has been used to sustain the demonization of indigenous spiritual practices is the caricaturing of various aspects of the ritual practice, especially the priests who guide and supervise these rituals. Film and TV, both nationally and internationally are rife with grotesque images of indigenous priests: topless, their bodies marked with chalk and war paint and amulets tied around their bodies. Often, these images are presented without important context and the message being inevitably passed is that priests and practitioners of indigenous religions are regressive and aggressive and should be regarded as uncivilized savages.
It is impossible to pinpoint an exact reason for this misrepresentation, but Ike offers some guidance. In The Botted Leopard, one of the few Nigerian masters in the government college tells Amobi,
“The European missionaries and traders who came to this country lumped together everything in our culture which was strange to them and branded this paganism.”
Both Ike and Ezekobe take care to address and correct this impression. The priests and practitioners in their respective books defy the stereotype. In Mmirinzo, as they prepare for a ritual initiation, Olivia observes of a rainmaker,
“She looked like a friend you could have by your side and boldly challenge an Agbero…. Her hair was in rich black Ghana-weaving cornrows to the back. Her skin was like Lola’s caramel, beautiful.”
It is a clear statement that Ezekobe has chosen to treat her practitioners of Igbo spirituality as humans first, as ordinary people that could be easily engaged in the business of everyday life. Indeed, all her practitioners and priests lead ordinary business and social lives, not unlike the pastors of churches or imams of mosques who are permitted the dual realities of being both ordinary humans and spiritual heads.
Ike, too treats the representation of the Igbo priest in his work very seriously. Amobi goes into the dibia’s house for consultation expecting to confront his worst impression of an African voodoo priest. However,
“The sitting room resembled any ordinary sitting room, to Amobi’s surprise. Four wooden folding chairs lined each of the two long sides of the sitting room. And various family portraits decorated the walls, including a portrait of a soldier in the uniform of the Royal West African Frontier Force… The greatest surprise of all was the dibia himself as he stepped into the sitting room from the rear door. In his fifties, looking very fit, robust and handsome, unlike the traditional image usually portrayed of the dibia as a tottering old man, white with age, carrying a walking stick, and instilling fear.”
As with Ezekobe’s priest, Ike’s Dibia Ofia too was a secular businessman, dabbling in many trades until he received the call to serve the religion of his ancestors.
Ike and Ezekobe are not alone in the ways that they have humanized priests and practitioners of Igbo spirituality. In Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”, the Priestess of the Earth God is a market trader known and loved by her community. In true duality, she is able to give her service to Ala one night and the next morning revert to the well-known, light-hearted neighbor the community knows.
Belief Backed by Proof
Finally, both authors are clear: Igbo spirituality is not a whimsical belief sustained by the fantasy of its practitioners. The authors take time to demonstrate clear instances that can only be explained by the potency of Igbo spiritual practice. Their position in this regard is not unique to them, or even to Igbo spirituality.
In Thunderbolt: Magun, Kelani makes sure to give indigenous medical practice its due regard as he depicts the ritual of curse-breaking. In the film, not only is the wife and doctor’s life saved by practitioners of Yoruba spirituality, but the saving is also done in the presence of practitioners of contemporary medicine who look on, confounded as their colleague is rescued from death.
Similarly, in Things Fall Apart, Achebe handles the Igbo belief of Obganje in a way that affirms its validity. The Ogbanje in Achebe’s story performs a ritual unearthing of her tether to the spirit world and after the ritual is performed she is able to go on living without the shadow of sudden death. Another child in the story, who is also Ogbanje, returns to the world bearing an identical mark of the mutilation inflicted on the corpse of his late sibling. This peculiar mark validates the indigenous belief that the newborn child is the same spirit as the previously deceased child.
Both Ezekobe and Ike also dedicate their books to affirming Igbo spirituality. Does not Amobi’s mysterious experiences and dream cease when the leopard is eventually bottled? Does not Olivia become a practitioner of rainmaking and rain holding at the end of her ritual initiation? This care to write in proof of Igbo spirituality serves as a check against the mainstream instinct to view work steeped in indigenous spirituality as fantasy or futurism.
Conclusion
Indigenous spiritual practice, in the wake of western colonization of African communities, suffer bad PR. The symbols and practitioners of our spiritual truth have been turned into boogeymen that frighten because of some vague notion that they are evil or ignorant. Our writers of old like Chukwuemeka Ike and Chinua Achebe have written about the truth and sacredness of indigenous Igbo spiritual practice, and the new generation of writers like Chioma Ezekobe continue to reaffirm the truth that our ancestors have told.
Ezekobe pays homage to Ike. In Mmirinzo, Olivia is asked by dibia Eloka “Did you read the Bottled Leopard by Chukwu Emeka Ike?” Olivia affirms that she has read the book and asks the Dibia if the story is true. He answers,
“Olivia, have you heard of totemisim? You can read that up later. You see truth is stranger than fiction sometimes…when you have understanding, you can decipher what is fiction, what is fiction influenced by truth, and what is an absolute recanting of the truth.”
Those with understanding have deciphered that African spirituality is an absolute recanting of the truth so we must regard it as true.
