Bongos Ikwue... The Missing Cultural Limbs Of Idomaland

IT is probably no longer news that the mercurial legend, Bongos Ikwue, is returning to musical creativity, after more than 20 years of 'stepping aside' in favour of the life of architectural artistry. He has, according to newspaper reports, held the 'Come-Back Celebration Night' at Otukpo in Benue State. This is indeed an exciting news from that corner of Nigeria although Bongos cannot be appropriated by Idomaland or any ethno-racial or religious groups for that matter because, as an artist, he is a property of the world, not of his ethnic or religious identities or even of his own family.

However, this does not diminish the cultural factor of the Idoma universe in his creativity. This is a controversial claim in that we all carry multiple identities. Interestingly, Bongos has demonstrated his sense of Idomaness and this is manifest in his Idoma musical numbers and titles like "Otachikpokpo", "Eche Une", "Ella Kunogo", "Owuno" "Ihotu" among others.

If the Idoma were a majority ethnic group, these numbers would have been appreciated more than the ones rendered in English such as "Still Searching", "Cockcrow at Dawn", "What's Gonna be Gonna be", "Amen" etc which are not as deeply philosophical as the ones rendered in Idoma. Unfortunately, Idoma is not a majority cultural or language group. In fact, it is part of the cluster of communities and people defined as constituting the periphery of the (Nigerian) periphery of the (Western) centre.

Like every other theory, centre-periphery theory has its own limitations. Be that as it may, the point is that, by the nationality configuration of the Nigerian state, the Idoma constitute a minority. With a total population hovering at only about two millions in a nation of ethnic nationalities like the Hausas, the Fulanis, (there is nothing like Hausa-Fulani); the Igbos, Yorubas, Ijaws, Tivs and their respective Diaspora, the minority status of the Idoma is beyond argument.

This is not to accept the demographic sense of minority because the concept of minority can only be understood in power terms, not in numerical terms. For, there are what is known as historically dominant minorities such as the Fulanis and the Afrikaners. Even the Idoma are not doing too badly given its qualitative presence in the military, Judiciary, academia, diplomacy, bureaucracy, media, politics and other professions. But it is only a qualitative or intrusive but not a historically dominant minority.

As with all groups perceiving themselves to be minorities, the Idoma feel weak, marginalized and dominated. So, they keep devising and demanding guarantees such as the creation of Apa State, an ancestral name taken from its base in the extinct Kwararafa Confederacy. There is nothing wrong with creation of new states as a diversity management therapy except that state creation can no longer mitigate diversity crisis in Nigeria any more because the crisis has escalated already. Apa State or not, the point is that the Bongos Ikwues of this world are, today, strategically located in relation to both Idoma cultural essentialism and to its Dialogue of Civilizations.

In Bongos's case, this flows from his mastery of Idoma cosmography and the creative utilization of same in both English and the Idoma language, thereby becoming the only communicator of cultural authenticity alive whose message cuts across class, gender, generational, linguistic and geo-political diversities in Idomaland.

In the age of the CNN and home videos when our own children cannot speak their mother tongue, it means Bongos Ikwue, via his musical numbers rendered in Idoma language, is the only source of and inspiration in the language itself. This is particularly so as there are no Idoma language newspapers, no essentially or predominantly Idoma language radio or television stations. Even the Idoma translation of the news on Radio Benue is so incoherent and almost incomprehensible if you did not listen to the English version previously.

Meanwhile, television has killed the culture of "tales by moonlight" by which young people are inducted into communal consciousness. This is the case in the urban centres while "albanti" (free sex) has taken care of that in the case of the villages where television is not the dominant culprit. In a way, scholar activist James Petras must be right when he claimed, "In the contemporary world, Hollywood, CNN, and Disneyland are more influential than the Vatican, the Bible or the public relations rhetoric of political figures".

I rely on the authority of my lecturer in Language and Conflict at the University of Ibadan, Professor Iwara to assert that any child who cannot think in his mother tongue cannot think properly. Yet, the reality is that most mother tongues in Africa are dying. They are overwhelmed by Hollywood, CNN, and Disneyland, hence the lamentation by some scholars that "...the declining African countries are today under an electronic siege, ...The very fabric of our societies is being rewoven or ripped apart as a result of new technology in information".

This is a terrible certainty in the age in which it is claimed specifically by Samuel Huntington, the American scholar of civilizational determinism who died recently, that "The most important distinctions among people are not ideological, political or economic. They are cultural. People and nations are attempting to answer the most basic questions humans can face: who are we? And they are answering that question in the traditional way human beings have answered it, by reference to the things that mean most to them. People define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs and institutions. They identify with cultural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, nations and, at the broadest level, civilizations. People use politics not just to advance their interests but also to define their identity. We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against".

Without agreeing with Huntington's seeming rationalization of cultural essentialism, the question is still that of how do we know who we are as a pre-condition for relating with who we are not within the context of peaceful co-existence. This is where artists who have the mother language power like Bongos Ikwue comes in, whose creative competitiveness in the invocation of the idiom, icons, totems, rites, pathos and similar existential vistas of the Idoma world and fitting them into timeless themes of love, survival, death, mourning/dirges recreates the 'paradise lost' and, therefore, civilizational continuity. This is the strength and sobriety of his music in Idoma language.

That is also why Bongos is the inheritor of the musical tradition in Idomaland pioneered by such people as Barrister Joe Omakwu who sang the classic, "Achenche". He, along with others like Joe Akatu, Ada Atama (aka Joe Onyela), Igbe, Ichicha, Peter Otulu, Oleje Oona and the masculinist Oglinya dancers from my own native Edumoga constitute the referents in cultural creativity in spite of differences in genres and creative impulse between them. Idomaland is now worse that almost all of them are gone by way of death or their exclusion from the stage by a more muscular modernity.

The late Joe Akatu, for example, had a wonderful repertoire of Idoma proverbs and which he wove either in making a hero of or ridiculing anyone or any action from the point of view of the moral categories of good versus bad. Above all, he could mimic his fellow musicians in Tiv, that being how I came to know that there was a Tiv soloist famous for saying that "the dead does not weep at his own funeral". The late Akatu's musical praxis is, therefore, a refutation of the impression of hostility between ordinary Idoma and Tiv people. That certainly came with us - the elite and our manipulation of cultural differences so as to gain political power.

The Idoma have been most unfair to this artistic representative of that nationality. This is because it is doubtful if there are many Idoma people today who have preserved much of Akatu's musical numbers. At Otukpo where his music is sold, it is by an Igboman who, obviously does not understand the language and is, therefore, incapable of knowing when one track has ended and another has started. Buying Akatu's records from him is, most times, buying mumbo jumbo. But even then, he deserves an Idoma national award for doing what an Idoma man should have taken up. This is more so that Radio Benue's collection of Joe Akatu's records is miserable, reflecting our general lack of preservation and documentation of records in Nigeria. I have no idea of what it could be like in Joy F. M. at Otukpo, which is a rather recent creation whose acquisition may not extend beyond its year of birth.

We need these culture bearers because even as dynamic as culture is, the cultural ingredients do not perish. We remain prisoners of lived experiences, especially the experiences of the earliest years and its lessons on the big question of what is right and what is wrong. The media, peer group and religion may influence the cultural comprehension and praxis of this question later in life but they rarely add or subtract much from it or we wouldn't have to contend with the reality of the haunting bodyguard of conscience.

The reference to the bodyguard of conscience is not to endorse the excessive stress on empathy and over consideration for the other person that defines the typical Idoma man, these being qualities, which the world today is too pragmatic to appreciate. I do appreciate how difficult it would be for the typical Idoma man to get out of that obsession with his self-image because it is an age-old problem. Someone once told me that a colonial officer once exempted an Idoma personal staff from a 'trial' apriori on the ground that an Idoma man is incapable of stealing. Although corruption and rascality have gone nuclear in Idoma land today, there is still a nugget of truth in that colonial ethnic profiling of the Idoma. Even the way Bongos Ikwue executes his contracts proves the point substantially in that he does not collect money until he has a finished product and the taste must be upper scale. Whether that tendency observable among the Idoma is still a virtue is something that should be debated in a world in which the rain beats the good man because the bad man has smartly and ruthlessly snatched the good man's umbrella.

The idea that the cultural ingredients do not perish explains the tragedy I was to discover on a recent visit home whereby, right now in my mother's village, the last of the elders who can recite the final burial chant has been converted to the church. He is automatically barred from carrying out any such exercise anymore. More than that, he has no audience anymore because the burial rites as we knew it when growing up some 40 years ago around Edumoga District of Okpokwu LGA has simply withered away in the face of aggressive Christianity in the area. This, I think, is sensitive enough to invite those like Reverend Father Mathew Kukah who must have the authoritative position on it. Is Christianity still inherently conflictual with local cultures in Africa in the age of identity? What happened to African Christianity with particular reference to cultural narratives that carry genealogies and information like that, such as the funeral chant I am talking about?

Let me quickly correct the impression that Idomaland might have been swamped irreversibly by the counter-cultural momentum. I learnt from Professor Elaigwu recently that around Otukpo, the young men have a mastery of such things as oral traditions of origin and the meaning of ancestral signifiers. I would be surprised if this is common in many parts of Idomaland.

The other such good news is the Idoma bibliography Professor Idris Amali gave me in lieu of the pounded yam I couldn't wait to savour in his house when I was at the University of Maiduguri recently. Published in 1992 by the National Council for Arts and Council when Dr. Sule Bello was the Director, the bibliography is a rich documentation of things we ought to know but which we are too 'busy' to appreciate. It shows that Idoma Nationality has been well studied and also well documented, from its cosmology to its literature to its culture, politics, economy and inter-state relations. It also showed that Idoma Nationality has been studied but not in exclusivist or chauvinistic terms but in the context of, first and foremost, Nigeria and in the context of Idoma kindred and Idoma related people and polities or neighbours along the Niger-Benue confluence, such as the Ete in Enugu State; Iyala in Cross Rivers; Alago in Nassarawa; Igala and Igbirra (Ebira) in Kogi and so on.

Whoever ventures into the 101-page bibliography will find whatever information s/he is seeking regarding the Idoma nationality in its historical, cultural and geo-political interconnectedness and interdependence.

It is from the amplification of the accumulated knowledge here that the Bongos Ikwues would emerge as the iconic referent. This is in terms of his cultural repertoire and linguistic competence in communicating the self-apprehension that would define Idoma negotiation and engagement with the radius of multi-culturalism which the Americans have inaugurated by electing Barack Obama, thereby sending an identity management message to the world.

It is a message embodied and already echoed in Bongos's symbolism of "Cock Crow at Dawn". The cock that crows at dawn may belong to a household but when it crows, the entire community hears it.

Two, in African history, cock crow at dawn is the signal that terminates the bliss of the early morning sleep and signals the commencement of another day of nightmares and hassles in the way a magnate once captured it.

With the 'Cock Crow at Dawn symbolism', Bongos has been drawing attention to the insecurity attendant on misery in Africa and its implications for the management of global diversity.

Finally, Bongos instructively preceded his return to music with building his own material capacity so as to be in a position to think and move into action corresponding to the 'crazy' ways of an artist, unencumbered by deprivation. Therefore, Bongos, like Obama, is a practitioner of "yes, we can". That is the philosophy of the disadvantaged on how to reach the top through competitiveness and personal excellence instead of quackery, rascality or waiting on uninspiring godfathers. That is Bongos Ikwue, the portrait of the artist as a bundle of symbolic messages to each and every one of us.