November 2008 Archives

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln threw its annual Ethnic Studies Week this past week, and I managed to attend three very cool events.  (There were way more, but the rest of life didn't, alas, slow down.)

#1
Nwando Achebe visited us from Michigan State to talk about the intersections of power, indigenous cultural practices, and gender politics in Igboland in Nigeria.  Dr. Achebe is the author of Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings:  Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900-1960 (and the daughter of world-famous writer Chinua Achebe--which I hesitate to include, because it must be tough to be always in the shadow of such a father, but it's too interesting a factoid to omit).

Vibrant, friendly, and endlessly knowledgeable about her field, Nwando centered her talk on the unusual historical figure of Ahebi Ugbabe, who was born in the late nineteenth century and died in 1948.  As a 13-year-old girl, she was dedicated as a living sacrifice to the goddess Ohe to compensate for her father's crimes--but she refused to submit and instead ran away to a nearby region.  She traveled, supported herself through sex work, and learned four languages.  When the British first patrolled the area in 1909, Ahebi's linguistic mastery gave her political power to act as a negotiator within competing colonial and indigenous orders of power.  She was young, beautiful, and dependable, and she worked to satisfy the sexual and colonial appetites of the British, helping them conquer her own people.  (Her story kind of reminded me of the legendary Mexican figure of Malinche/Malintzin/Doña Marina--a woman horribly betrayed in childhood by her own people who, in making do, was later seen as a traitor to her culture.) 

The British, to erode traditional power, which was elder-based and community-based, made young Nigerian men into "warrant chiefs," which were sort of the equivalent of local rulers, and they made Ahebi a warrant chief, too--the only woman in Nigeria to become one. 

Ahebi wasn't content with this; she wanted to be an eze (sp.?), a king.  Not a queen, mind you, not a woman who had power due to marriage, but a king in her own right.  Long story short, she became one.  Her palace served as a sanctuary for women who'd run away from abusive husbands, and Ahebi "married" them.  Those women's children (from sexual relations with distinguished guests, both British and Nigerian) were considered her children, and they carried Ahebi's name.  She opened a primary school, and she bought and kept slaves, who worked her fields and built roads at her command.  About 20,000 people were under her rule.

When she tried to participate in the religious ritual of masquerade, however, the Igbo people drew the line.  They'd had enough.  According to traditional norms, to mount a masked figure (representing an ancestral spirit) in the masquerade required not only being biologically male but also having undergone an initiation.  Ahebi fulfilled neither of these requirements, so an indigenous legal group ruled against her.  Total smack down.  And the British didn't back her up.  Her fall from power was so extreme that she threw her own funeral while still alive, in order to be assured of receiving the proper rites and honor, because she so doubted that others would perform them after her death. 

Her foray into power went only so far:  she could function as a king, but when it came to religious power, no way.

Interesting story!  And I learned about female marriage in Nigeria.  Marriage and children are so culturally central that if a woman is infertile, she can marry another woman. That woman has sex with men (considered to be irrelevant sperm donors), who have no jurisdiction over the resulting offspring.  The two women raise the children together.  Curiously, it's not a lesbian thing:  Dr. Achebe said that while gay sex sure occurs in the culture, it's not necessarily a component of such marriages, which focus on childrearing.  Huh!  Who knew?

#2
The second cool event was a talk by my UNL colleague in Anthropology, Carleen Sanchez, titled, "Songs of the Ancestors:  Musical Instruments of the Ancient Maya."  Carleen, who's an archaeologist (and also a good friend), reminded us that only material objects can be excavated; we can never recover the sounds of a culture or its belief system. 

So how do we know what the music of the ancient Maya sounded like? 

Particularly given that many musical instruments were made of organic material (wood, reed, antlers, turtle shells), they've degraded in the intervening centuries, so most of the evidence comes from extant murals and painted vases.

Carleen did this great presentation with images and sound files, and lucky for you, the article on which her talk was based exists online in the journal Istmo.   It has links to all the images and sounds--you can get a total education on the topic.

My favorite instrument (I played this sound file for James like six times this morning) was the friction drum, which has a single strand of sinew strung vertically upward from a floor drum.  You hold the strand of sinew taut, and then you scrape it with a rasp.  It sounds like a jaguar, which was the most dangerous animal in the jungle in which the Mayan civilization flourished.  (Wearing a jaguar skin meant you were super-powerful; only the elite got to.)  Go to this cool site to hear it; go to LISTEN, then click on the larger square image with the line connecting to Guatemala.  It's totally cool. 

Carleen showed us images of musicians playing at state events like feasts, sacred ball games, burials, etc., but I was thinking about how the elite (to whom such instruments were apparently restricted; sigh) could have terrorized commoners with such a noise.  (Have you ever been inside a Mayan earthwork?  Dark and spooky.  I was imagining walking along one of those pitch-black tunnels and suddenly hearing the friction-drum jaguar noise behind me.  It would have been a great way to enforce power-over.)  But all that was just my imagination running away with me.  Carleen stuck to the knowable facts.  If you have any interest in the music of the Mayans during the Classic Period (400-900 A.D.), check out her piece.    

#3
Lastly, James and I went Saturday night to a free screening at The Ross of a new documentary, Native Nations:  Standing Together for Civil Rights.  Its focus was diffuse, but one story it illuminated was the strong presence of the Lutheran church in the activism for civil rights for Native Americans. 

The documentary made the point that most of us are aware of the strong presence of the church in African-American civil rights struggles, but we're not as aware of the Lutheran church's contributions to the American Indian Movement, and one cool thing is that they pledged not to try to convert to Christianity any of the Native Americans they helped:  they were giving their help because it was, they felt, the right moral and political thing to do, not to increase their own numbers.

It actually made me a little sad, though, because if I'm following the money correctly, the documentary seems to have been funded by the Lutherans.  It lauds their contributions--but they were only involved with Indian rights for eighteen years, and then they dumped the cause.  They also imposed extremely stringent requirements for the grants they doled out--more stringent than is typical even for business, the film suggested.  And the grants were for $4500, max, when the poverty and needs of Native Americans were/are blatant and extreme.  It felt to me like the film had to be nicer to the Lutherans than the Lutherans maybe deserved (and that there were more urgent stories that the writers were itching to tell).  Still, the documentary told an interesting story, and it fills a gap in the historical record.

Two of the (Native American) producers, Syd Beane and Frank Blythe, were there at the Ross doing Q&A, and one thing I really liked is that, after decades of organizing and activist efforts, they took on the project after they retired.  You would think that after all those years of labor and struggle, they might feel entitled to a nice long snooze in the sun.  But instead of sitting around watching TV, they made TV.  They got their own voices and the stories of their people out there into the world.  (ABC picked it up, and the National Geographic channel might be looking at it soon.) 

I thought that was a really beautiful thing in terms of love and work for the community.  "Service is the rent we pay for living," as Marian Wright Edelman says, and living doesn't end the day we turn 65.  As elders, Beane and Blythe are being great role models for the rest of us.