"My Juju No Go Gree", "The Spiritual Powers I Work With Will Not Permit It": Deities that Do Not Want to Be Publicized: Spiritual Adventures in the Niger Delta
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
"My Juju No Go Gree"
"The Spiritual Powers I Work With Will Not Permit It"
Deities that Do Not Want to Be Publicized
Spiritual Adventures in the Niger Delta
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
A magnificent structure of shrines in a nondescript house on an untarred road, off another untarred road in the outskirts of Agbarha-Otor in Nigeria's Niger-Delta, a place largely without electricity, a zone leading towards remote, undeveloped regions as houses thinned out onto uncultivated land.
I asked the priestess of the shrines, a powerfully built yet exquisitely curvatured middle aged woman, if I could photograph the shrines, an assemblage of wonderful unity in variety that museums, anywhere in the world, would be proud to dedicate an entire room to. I also requested to shoot a video of her talking about her shrines as she stood by them, and place these visualizations online.
"My juju no go gree", she responded in Nigerian Pidgin English, the only language we shared, since I did not understand her native language, Urhobo.
"The spiritual powers I work with will not permit it", as her words may be rendered in Standard English, a language she does not use, but the language in which I am compelled to tell what I know of her story and that of others like her, whose achievements reverberate at a universal scope, but which are far from visibility beyond their ethnically centred environments.
I was puzzled.
I was offering to publicize to what I expected would be an appreciative world the singular achievements of a great shrine artist, beautiful by any standards, a superb configuration of diverse materials powerful in their choice and juxtaposition, and the creator of this glorious assemblage had declined that opportunity of exposure.
"I know say e go make people know me but e go be as if say I dey sell my juju" she explained.
I remained perplexed. She had admitted that such visibility would make her better known, and, even though she did not mention it, it could increase her client numbers as more people consulted her for herbal and spiritual work and paid for her medical and spiritual services.
But such openness of her practice could suggest she was selling the integrity and privacy of her spiritual partners, her pidgin English words suggested, expressing her fears that such a move could indicate she was exchanging the sacred trust bestowed on her for material gain.
I was stunned.
In a world where the struggle for visibility, for leveraging the local to arrive at the universal is a defining force, a person without what I understood as breadth of visibility was demonstrating such a radical commitment to a spiritual calling in a way that I saw as cutting herself off from the global information stream.
Her husband also explained to me that though the shrines were constructed by his wife and himself, some of thembelonged to their clients, on whose behalf the shrines had been built, clients who would not be pleased to see their sacred forms online.
He also told me that his wife and himself kept a low profile so as not to attract negative attention from ill wishers who would want to subordinate the spiritual practice of the couple to their own.
On the high street, the central road in Agbarha-Otor, I met Ochuko Moses, in his shrine by the side of the road, another unprepossessing place, but shaped interiorly by a striking complex of shrines to various deities.
Ochuko received me graciously and even gave me money, money with which I prayed for him, as is the Urhobo custom on receiving visitors.
He told me the story of how he left his work as a seaman and palm tree tapper to become a priest to a central deity, around which other deities he also works with are constellated.
I was free to write about everything he told me, except the account of how he was called by his central deity nor could I take pictures of himself or any of his shrines.
"You must not write anything about Ekene" one of the devotees of the water spirit Ekene in Agbarha-Otor had also warned me.
"If you write, you must not mention my name. I'm trying to protect my head and my life because I could be seen as having told you secrets which are not to be shared" he emphasized.
"But I've been writing about Ekene well before I met you" I countered.
The discussion almost broke down.
"That thing you said, that you are writing about Ekene, I did not hear it", he concluded, suggesting distancing himself from dangerous information, which could not be unheard but could be denied.
I was perplexed.
What was going on?
Benin and the South-West are not far from Agbarha-Otor. Yet the spiritual cultures of those places are heavily depicted in pictures and have generated a growing industry of scholarship.
Why should a place so near Benin, relatively speaking, be so unusually tight fisted with information about its more prominent spiritualities, this depth of reticence underlined particularly by the total ban on photography on anything to do with Ekene, its shrines, sacred groves, ritual activities and masquerade, creatively potent as all these are.
"Some deities do not want to be publicised", responded Juliana Osaigbovo, a water spirit devotee in Benin, when I told her of these encounters.
Amazing.
In a world in which history has been decisively shaped by spiritualities whose deities are described as eager to be known and whose devotees consider the spread of their faith central to the existence of that faith, some spiritual identities behind certain faiths are understood as insisting they prefer guarded exposure to fully open visibility?
Ochuku Moses attached his smartphone to his bluetooth speaker, showing me Tik Tik videos of various spiritual practitioners in artistic action, dancing and singing, but his central deity has forbidden such online visibility for him in their work together, he told me.
How did I come to be in such a place , dedicated as I am to the sharing of information, a disciple of the Information Age in which democratization of access to knowledge has accelerated at a pace unknown ever since humanity began to exist on Earth, a practitioner of various spiritualities I had learnt about through books?
I had arrived in Agbarha-Otor to attend the 26th annual Harmattan Workshop organized by the Bruce Onobrakpeya Foundation founded by the Agbarha artist Bruce Onobrakpeya, one of Africa's best known artists and one of the greatest artists of all time, in my view.
I was there to make observations that would enrich my work on my ongoing biography of Onobrakpeya, the first effort known to me to dig deep into the master's life and emerge with a definitive exploration of his experiential, cognitive, and artistic journey.
Response by scholar, writer and artist Temi Esan to my account of my efforts to learn from spiritual practitioners in Agbarha-Otor:
I agree with them really....one does get tired of being the subject of anthropology....the reason the Westerners are able to get so much from them is because they are not part time......the Westerners take abode and are fully domiciled with their study areas and live with those they are writing about so they are accepted. They are not occasional students.
The only solution is for you to be domiciled with them for a long while. Then they can trust you. Anything else is like theft.
What are you giving in return for what you are taking....their specialised knowledge? They are not interested in being famous....and being famous solves not one of their issues....ask the Benin....so whether you write about them or not is really not their issue.
The fact that you even only want to know and leave....
It is long, convoluted....but the work that needs to be done is only for fully committed people searching for neither fame nor fortune but simply to know and transmit.
It calls for Africans who passionately LOVE those Ancestors that have preserved and sustained and done the work of transmitting that knowledge from generation to generation till it has come to us today....it is a love of self and a deep pride in being descendants and inheritors of [ this knowledge].
Too much writing [ is being done] because it really cannot be explained or put into words....a fierce commitment and a deep dedication to the collective that is the African people [ is what is required].
Africa has lost so much knowledge because Africans have been disconnected from their selves, societies fractured and the Africans hence no longer participate in the living, activated processes and systems and documentation and multimedia transmission systems that kept the Knowledge system ALIVE and activated for the thousands of years it took to get to us.
Like Baba Ayi Kwei Armah says, he is not a writer ...so I am not a writer....for now, it is a vehicle for communicating intellecting possibilities in the midst of separation and disconnection of our reasoning activated selves...