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Elaborations II: Secret Societies

IF DEMOCRACY MEANS PARTICIPATION, THESE SOCIETIES WERE democratic, even extremely so. Ingeniously, coherently, they resisted the alienation of the individual from the springs of community action. Their very patterns of self-rule supposed an ever present awareness of exactly where the power lines ran, and through whose hands and precisely for what purposes. Their politics were intimate, immediate, always close at hand, not faceless or remote. Much more than with the exercise of power these systems were concerned with its everyday control. Even the label sometimes given them by modern research, ‘segmentary societies’ speaks loud in this sense. Essentially they were composed of counterpoised ‘segments’ or lineage groupings of a given whole, each contained within itself but dependent on the others.

This kind of government was possible for small or fairly small communities. One may even regard it as the major political instrument evolved by Africans for populating their continent with its sparse ancestral communities. Even when small communities became transformed into large ones, minor governments into major governments, village states into farspread empires, these foundations in segmentary self-rule were never entirely lost.

Today they may perhaps be seen in their ‘purest’ condition among peoples who have remained numerically few in lands beyond the skyline of the beaten track. Yet it would be a mistake to think that only numerically small peoples continued to practise segmentary self-rule, or those who least felt the influence of change. Nobody has shown this better than the Ibo. They live in fertile and densely populated country east of the lower Niger, and must have numbered several millions long before the general explosion of population which has occurred in modern times. These peoples have always enjoyed a reputation for restless enterprise in trade. They have combined a positively Athenian eagerness for any new thing with a corresponding distrust of authority; and their many village governments have reflected this.

In a typical Ibo forest village, deep in the tall timber east of Onitsha, there would be fifteen or twenty ‘extended’ or ‘nuclear’ families. Government was by council of elders, the ama-ala, whose permanent members were the fifteen or twenty recognised family heads. ‘However, any adult male held the right to sit on the council. Normally this right was not exercised, but if a decision was to be taken which vitally affected an individual he could insist on his right . . . an important check upon elders who inclined to take decisions without proper consideration.’ In everyday affairs it was customary for the council of elders to rule by decree and proclamation. ‘But where decisions likely to produce disputes were to be taken the ama-ala could order the town crier to announce a village assembly.’

All men could attend assembly and discuss contentious matters. ‘Every man had a right to speak, the people applauding popular proposals and shouting down unpopular ones. Decisions had to be unanimous and it was here that young or wealthy men with records of service or dedication to the village could influence policy. If the elders tried to enforce an unpopular decision the young men could prevent any decisions through the operation of the unanimity rule. If the ama-ala acted arbitrarily and refused to call the assembly the people could demand it by completely ignoring them and bringing town life to a halt. The village assembly was considered the Ibo man’s birth right, the guarantee of his rights, his shield against oppression, the expression of his individualism and the means whereby the young and progressive impressed their views upon the old and conservative.’

Flexibility was the keynote of the Ibo system. They seem to have played with a relaxed and easy skill on all the possible chords and rhythms of segmentary organisation, using age sets, lineage loyalties, cross-cutting kinship relationships, ancestral cults and other such techniques whenever it happened to suit them. Their judicial system had the same mood of experiment. ‘A man might attempt to settle with the individual who had aggrieved him. If this failed he could appeal to a respected elder to intervene or call members of the two families together. He could also appeal to the ward or village elders. There were no set rules as to where he should begin his appeal for redress but he could appeal against the decision of the families to the ward elders and finally to the ama-ala of the village.’

This flexibility was perhaps a function of the natural fertility and farming wealth of Iboland. Density of population could blur the rigidities of precedent. So could variety of occupation. By the sixteenth century, and probably much earlier, simple forms of subsistence economy flanked by a minimal exchange of manufactures, locally produced, had given way to more complex economies in which a division of labour was able to support markets every four days or eight days. Though these were not fully-fledged money economies, they permitted an intensive commercial life in which currencies such as the cowrie shell were increasingly used. In this respect it appears probable that the peoples of western Africa were economically in advance of most other African populations except along the northern and eastern seaboards. Here the mechanisms of change springing from labour specialisation and trading opportunity had long ago their deep effect.

The earliest written account of Ibo life, that of Olaudah Equiano in 1789, makes this clear. Taken in slavery to North America, the enterprising Equiano regained his freedom and went to England, where he became active in the anti-slavery campaign of those years. His book is full of useful detail. He stressed the farming base of Ibo society, praising the natural richness of his country and pointing out that ‘agriculture is our chief employment, and everyone, even the children and women, are engaged in it’, but adding a good deal about craft industry and trade. He said that ‘our women of distinction wear golden ornaments which they dispose with some profusion on their arms and legs’, although there is no gold-bearing ore in Iboland. ‘When our women are not employed with the men in tillage, their usual occupation is spinning and weaving cotton, which they afterwards dye, and make into garments’, a craft which certainly goes back to a remote past in these regions. Writing for an English audience very conscious of the processes of manufacture, he agreed that the Ibo manufactured little: still, apart from their cottons, they made ‘earthenware, ornaments, and instruments of war and husbandry’—and, he might have added, much excellent sculpture.

Specialist communities served a demand, developing from centuries before Equiano’s time, for various goods and skills. Ibo of Nri near the Niger became noted for their priests and diviners; those of Awka for their herbal doctors, metalsmiths and carvers; those of Nembe for their salt production; those of Ilelima for their potting skills; those of Nkwerri for their commercial ventures; those of Abiriba for their mercenary soldiers; and others for different goods or services.