CORRUGATED CARDBOARD IS WHAT I HAVE FOR RIGHT NOW: AN AFRICAN TEENAGER’S PURSUIT OF A FUTURE IN AESTHETICS

by Gitti Salami

(A paper presented at the 46th annual meeting of the African Studies Association, Boston, Massachusetts, 30 October to 2 November 2003)

            Joseph Michael Ajoka, a seventeen year old peasant boy from Lekpangkom, Bikobiko, Ugep, in Cross River State, Nigeria, wants to be an architect. For the past four years he has been constructing architectural models out of cardboard which resemble estates built by the richest of Ugep’s citizens. His houses inadvertently draw attention to an emerging class structure in the society. As such Joseph’s creations are at odds with an agenda promoted by traditional Yakurr priest-chiefs, who, in collusion with the bulk of the population, rather than acknowledge changes in their society, which are due to increasing nigerianization of the culture, desire to maintain an empowering ethnic identity that sets Yakurr people apart from the state. While Joseph merely intends to demonstrate his talent and his perhaps unusual resolve—he hopes his persistence will someday provide him with a sponsor willing to pay for his basic education and professional training—his creations have accomplished much more. They synthesize seemingly disparate aesthetic systems, in Ugep an aesthetic based on indigenous Yakurr cultural practices and a simultaneously existing (very different) aesthetic emerging out of an increasingly modernized and homogenized country.

The astonishing thing about Ugep, which prides itself on being the largest village of West-Africa, is the degree to which the traditional government of Yakurr people continues to command unswerving respect. The chiefs are fully in command of this modern town of about 250,000 inhabitants, despite the fact that changes to the economy, to the religious belief system, and to the social order have been far reaching and, one would think, undermining to the basis of the chief’s authority. 

            Less than seventy years ago, despite then instituted colonial rule, the power of the traditional rulers of Ugep still depended on the priest-chiefs’ ritual expertise. Able to either manipulate influential spirits concerned with particular matrilineal families, or spirits associated with important patrilineally owned institutions the chiefs were able to create economic advantages for themselves and institute a gerontocracy.  Today the priest-chiefs continue to function as representatives of their matrilineal and patrilineal relations and, within the limits of national decrees, uphold customary law.

            However, although they meticulously go through the motions of rituals that  once had irrefutable spiritual significance and were handed down to them as inviolable, the power invested in the priest-chiefs by the community no longer derives from peoples’ fear of overwhelming supernatural forces nor from complete economic dependence on the elders. Careful examination of Yakurr traditions in fact reveals, that over the past sixty years Yakurr ritual protocol has changed significantly and that all that remains of originally spiritually important customs are those facets which involve public display, e.g. pouring of libations at public shrines, and processions of priest-chiefs through town.

It appears, the priest chiefs, who like most members of the society have long since converted to Christianity, are charged with the mission to visually “presence” traditional Yakurr values through the performance of seemingly unaltered ritual practices which are rooted in an egalitarian past. To do this, they conceal the very social inequalities to which Joseph’s architectural models draw attention, for acknowledging the same would undermine the basis of their power and betray Yakurr society’s thorough enmeshment with a wider world and integrated global economy. The chiefs, as icons of the indigenous culture, imbue everyday Yakurr existence with a sense of security and pride. Within this context boys like Joseph growing up in Ugep spent much of their life observing Yakurr indigenous practices, absorbing their underlying value structure. They are initially socialized into and “aesthetic-ized” to Yakurr culture through initiation into Legomi and Korta, societies primarily concerned with age grade formation and protection against poisoning.

Additional initiation into Obam or a number of other hierarchically organized warrior societies teaches them the fundamentals of Yakurr social etiquette, most importantly subjugation of their personal desires to the group and respect for elders. Contact with ferocious masquerades helps them to confront their fears. Exposure to beheading of goats accustoms them to the bloodshed they are expected to encounter during warfare, in this region of the world conducted face to face with machetes. As kebunga initiates boys endure possession by a spirit which compels them to uproot trees with their bare hands. Subsequently having to defend them selves with whips against the audience’s ridicule further cements the Yakurr ideal of male prowess. Preparation for Egbendum dances during which boys emulate adult societies allows them to organize a social club and practice leadership roles. Imitative of adult’s processions, the Egbendum dancers, carrying ceremonial knifes and smoking pots, solicit gifts from a delighted audience.

Participation in Saa during a harvest festival allows boys to let their aggression loose on unwanted evil spirits which the priest-chiefs, with their assistance, drive out of town.  Of equal importance in Jospeh’s environment, but not acknowledged by the people as being relevant to a specifically Yakurr identity, is what I refer to as canopy culture: customs, which emerged in Ugep only in recent decades, ultimately as a result of European contact and conversion to Christianity. Celebration of birthdays, Christian weddings and funerals, Christmas, national holidays, or unveiling of public monuments are ever-present. They are spatially organized around plastic canopies, which take over public arenas blocking streets, sometimes for several days. Such events usually involve modern Nigerian dress, seating of VIPs at “high-tables”, long speeches facilitated by blaring Public address systems, fund-raising, sometimes singing of the National Anthem, and always lots of balloons, satin bows, cutting of ribbons and even of frosted cake. When children are not privileged to partake in such events directly, they nevertheless watch from the margins awaiting distribution of surplus food. 

Although indigenous and modernized culture actually coexist and penetrate each other, as is seen in this wonderful embrace of an indigenous mud and thatch house by a contemporary cement building,Yakurr people view the traditions I described as strictly separate, associating one set of customs with being Yakurr, the other with being Nigerian.Against this background Joseph lives with his parents and two siblings in a small mud house off Calabar-Ikom highway on swampy acreage infested with mosquitoes. The parents are subsistence farmers and tend to a mixed yam and cassava farm at the outskirts of town on communal land assigned to them on a yearly basis by the father’s paternal clan.

Joseph is as of yet four years short of obtaining his secondary school diploma and is currently not privileged to attend classes. As many other parents, who send their children hawking goods (here during school children’s Independence Day Celebrations) Joseph’s parents simply cannot afford to pay school fees for all three of their children. Instead of furthering his education then, Joseph spends most of his days assisting his parents with farm labor. He occasionally earns a little cash taking snapshots of people’s private occasions such as birthday and graduation parties.

Some of the money earned he contributes to the household, with the rest he buys art supplies: corrugated cardboard, glue, whatever shiny paper or foil he can find, some paint, including gold enamel, and varnish. Josephs’ workspace is rudimentary. It consists of a mat woven of telephone wire spread out on the dirt ground or draped over some cement blocks underneath a tree. His tools consist of a pair of scissors with dulled blades, crudely sharpened pencils, a machete, and a pair of pliers. In 2001 I followed the progress of one of his creations. Joseph’s model is afforded two entrances. Here a back door leads passed a barred porch to a kitchen area. The house is standing on a foundation supplied with a sloping gutter for sewage disposal, the assumption being that the interior is furbished with bathrooms and flushing toilets, even if running water in Ugep is as of yet a pipe dream. Tiled floors and an air conditioner in the tropical heat allude to pleasant conditions inside. The backside of the house at this level is rather unremarkable, but does provide a garage with a driveway. Impressive here is the tangibility of the space. Joseph pointed out that the interior rooms are all fully articulated even where they cannot be seen from the outside, and later, when the structure was completed, admirers’ eyes, children’s and adult’s alike, were invariably glued to the doorways that allowed imaginations to enter and fantasize about the luxurious life inside. Louvers constructed around windows shield the interior from direct sun light. Arched brackets reaching up to the overhanging floors of the second story promise further complication of a space that already juxtaposes geometric shapes of every kind: squares, triangles, and half circles.

The brackets ended up supporting a balcony with a balustrade revealing modernist inclinations, but on the front of the building Joseph’s embellishment gave way to preference for the architectural vocabulary of classical antiquity.

Here a short gilded column with an inventive capital best characterized as an inverted impost block, nevertheless alludes to the Corinthian order because of stuccoed tendrils on the surface above it. The column and the sweeping arch inscribed by this decoration anchor the diverse jutting and recessing spaces.

In the finished building the short column is balanced by a taller one, which awkwardly gives rise to a rotunda from outside the boundary of the foundation. A stark golden grid of tracery fitted into a pediment on one side and draped around the curved tower on the other, unifies the diverse spaces of the third floor, which, given the complicated roof structure that covers them, might otherwise appear to fly apart. The top level is furbished with a water tank and pipes on its backside. To the right of the structure Joseph has added separate boy’s quarters.

In a subsequently constructed building Joseph stretched columns to unimaginable heights and eloquently combined such unlikely design elements as glass blocks, Corinthian capitals, and intricate wrought-iron fences.

The houses which Joseph imitates are large estates owned by rarely present ex-patriots, politicians, lawyers operating out of Lagos, Port Hartcourt, and Abuja, or, as is the case with the house shown here, engineers working for overseas oil companies in Rivers State. The homes are occupied by the owners’ extended families, and by house girls, who provide the upkeep in exchange for school fees. Drivers, the owner’s business manager, and other personnel are often accommodated in secondary, much smaller bungalows located within the same compound.Such estates are heavily fortified. Large iron gates tended to by armed night guards, and barbed wire or broken glass bottles set into cement on top of high walls, are the norm. They protect accumulated wealth, but also underscore anti-social attitudes not condoned by Yakurr people, who refer to rental apartments within such compounds as “Mind your own business.” It is interesting to note that access to Joseph’s houses is not barricaded. When the owners of estates make an appearance, life in such a compound changes dramatically. Whenever Chief Obeten Okon drives up in his Landrover—he is the Yakurr people’s representative at the National Assembly in Abuja—the compound suddenly fills with dozens of cars belonging to people clad in business suits gathering for a meeting or wanting an audience. A generator blasts throughout the night providing electricity for every imaginable electronic gadget, which the chief likes to show off in his parlor. Live turkeys presented to the senator as gifts wander about shaking the ground outside, while women hustle to prepare basin after basin filled with food to be served to a large constituency under canopies outside the compound walls.Clearly, the men whose houses Joseph finds inspiring are plugged into the global economy and spread some of their wealth through paternalistic clientage relationships. Chief Obeten Okon, for example, is known to contribute large sums of money to local projects. But as a high-level politician his propagandistic philanthropy is easily associated with post-colonial Nigerian corruption and I suggest that, given Joseph’s upbringing with indigenous culture, Joseph has admiration for the man’s property rather than for the man. The glamour the boy may associate with boundless wealth and possible oversees connectivity probably grows out of familiarity with a much nobler, indigenous institution then contemporary Nigerian politics, namely Ledu, which similar to capitalist accretion, encourages the accumulation, but also redistribution of wealth.

Ledu is the highest title that can be achieved by any man in Yakurr culture. It involves, upon meeting of other requirements and paying of a huge initiation fee, that a man proof himself through tying of 400 sticks of yams in a single year. “Ledu officials will ask: ‘What has the man done to be a man?’”Early in 2002 Barrister Clement Iwara, over many years gradually able to increase the plots of land allotted to him and able to solicit the labor of members of his age grade, paternal and maternal relations, all of whom he paid and fed throughout the planting season, after having proven himself to be a generous man, reached his goal and earned the title.

His achievement was crowned by an impressive procession through town, which included performances by his age grade members, retired military personnel, various cultural organizations, and the pride and joy of Yakurr culture, maidens wearing brass bangles.The barrister explained: “It gives the whole family very high esteem. You tie a very big wrapper every time. You carry a stick. People will call you a chief.” Like the senator Chief Iwara distributes his wealth and provides people with opportunities. But he does so to the detriment of his own finances out of love for the culture and the people. All he hoped to get out of years worth of effort, besides the Ledu title, was a car. 

It should be obvious that Joseph’s houses, which embody Yakurr boys’ dreams of an opportunity to prove themselves as Yakurr men, as they reference current Nigerian architectural practices, far surpass their models in terms of visual complexity. It may not be apparent that they also successfully portrait the essence of an indigenous Yakurr visual sensibility. Formal analysis reveals substantial similarity between Joseph’s houses and Yakurr body arts. The asymmetrical distribution of design elements such as windows and solid wall spaces, seemingly conceived on a grid of squares, for example, which sets up expectations that are immediately defied; broken pediments, whose missing lines are visually completed by independently existing forms; and repetition of shapes which are suddenly altered to disrupt an established rhythm, are descriptions which

equally pertain to Eblami, a form of indigo painting applied to women’s bodies during the Leboku festival. Eblami’s bold dynamic design and playful inventiveness, also drawn over an imagined grid and full of unexpected twists, is virtually identical to Joseph’s plastic form in terms of the visual strategies employed. When viewed from above, the complicated roof structure of Joseph’s models inscribe a compact field filled with triangles, squares, and concentric circles, all of which are, in imitation of corrugated iron, articulated through closely spaced parallel lines.

This is reminiscent of Ibalibali painting. In Ibalibali women use an irritant to temporarily etch the skin of young women into a subtle three-dimensional design to create a sensuous surface achieved through closely spaced parallel lines which are arranged in concentric circles, squares, and triangles. As in Joseph’s house, where these two forms of design described here complement each other, so Eblami and Ibalibali are juxtaposed on a single woman’s body.While Yakurr adults and the traditional rulers of the society, whom they charge with the mission to preserve their indigenous culture, desirous of disassociation from a largely dysfunctional and corrupt state, ignore class difference in their society and reinforce values associated with an egalitarian past, Joseph, giving voice to all he lacks and desires, draws attention to it. Joseph has sold some of his models to rich men who handed them over to architects for actualization, but what Joseph is after is the opportunity to become an architect himself. In 2002 he packed one of his houses on his head as if it were the head crest of a masquerade and carried it through town to solicit support from the editor of a local newspaper and other town leaders while incidentally reaping donations from passers-by who sprayed his forehead with money. Joseph’s work clearly is not child’s play. Rather, it constitutes a body of material objects designed to facilitate a better future for Joseph. But it also embodies a futuristic vision of Yakurr culture. While perpetuation of indigenous culture in Ugep is persuasive, because its specific nature permits careful concealment of social inequalities, Joseph, as do all children, synthesizes discrepant referents to tradition and to modernity into one coherent culture and aesthetic, one to which he naturally simply refers to as “our culture.” 

Endnotes:

Given the policy of indirect rule through which the former British Colonial Government (in place between 1898 and 1960) administrated Nigeria,  the continuation of traditional governments is nothing unusual in the country, but the power of the traditional government of the Yakurr people is. One is, for example, hard pressed to find any evidence of the Obong of Calabar on an ordinary visit to that town and in 2002 had to search out the city’s stadium to witness his installation and see evidence on a grander scale of the traditional culture. In Ugep, it would be impossible to miss any event of such magnitude.

In 1975 the population consisted of approximately 81,000 people and was estimated to increase to 168,000 by 1990. NdianConsult, Lagos. Final Master Plan for the Urban Centre of Ugep, Obubra Division, September 1977. (Calabar: Ministry of Lands, Surveys and Urban Development, Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1977), 15. Oka Okona provides an estimate of 300,000 for the tail end of the 1970’s for the Yakurr population. According to Okona the final report of the 1991 census, which sets the official figure for a population estimate at 134,772, left out the settlements of Ugep, Nko, Mkpani and Idomi and only counted the population of Ekori, after Ugep only the second largest Yakurr village. Oka Okona. “Matriclan Priests and Fertility among the Yakurr of Southeastern Nigeria,” paper prepared for the IUSSP XXIV General Population Conference, Salvador, Brazil (18-24 August, 2000): 5.

  Record 142, Okpebili of Ugep, Conversation with the author, 12 August 2001.

   Record 195, Clement Iwara, Conversation with the author, 12 October 2001.