Iba Mmuo: The Ordeal of Becoming a Masquerade in Juju Land

Iba Mmuo, meaning ‘initiation into the spirit’, is mostly practiced in Igbo land in south-eastern Nigeria, the term ‘spirit’, in – and only in – this particular instance, implying ‘masquerade’. Not that masquerades are spirits, but Igbo folk prefer to delude themselves with the lie to preserve the mysteries and excitement surrounding the culture prior to the arrival of the British in the country.

Who is a Candidate?

The candidates for Iba Mmuo are boys between five and ten years old. The initiation might sound interesting at the moment so much that one might contemplate having his child enrolled, but considering the ordeal these children pass through, one would discover that Africa in not such a great place for children to grow up in. The candidates do not volunteer, anyway; they are chosen.

The processes Involved in the Initiation:

1. The Visitation
The spirits (masquerades) leave their shrine on the scheduled midnight to visit the homes of the chosen. Once the town criers announce their arrival, folk turn off the lights in their homes and send their wives and children into their houses, as women and children are forbidden from seeing masquerades at night.

Then the spirits begin to bellow the names of the chosen one after the other. The fathers of the beckoned usually gladly hand the children over and the spirits then convey them to the shrine where they begin their three-day initiation.

2. The Initiation – Day One
Before the lights are lit, the spirits force the children to lie face down on the floor of the shrine. They yell with eerie voices that the children, at their ages and without proper preparation, are too young to see the faces of spirits and will die if they so much as have a glimpse.

However, this is merely a means of separating the brave from the cowards – by frightening them. The so-called spirits would go on, making creepy sounds with their mouths.

Those of the children who become so afraid that they shiver and cry out are sent out of the shrine. But then, their parents, to avoid the shame of their boys been dubbed weaklings, buy the children back into the initiation.

3. The Initiation – Day Two
The next midnight, the masquerades teach the children signs, languages, chants, and their ways. They tell the children that it is a spider that a masquerade holds between its lips to produce its strange sounds. But then, it’s actually papaya pipes laced with wool or webs that masquerades wield.

In addition, this is where the children learn most of their villages’ traditions.

4. The Initiation – Day Three
This is the most inhumane part. The spirits pair the children in twos and, giving them whips, force them to engage themselves in bloody whipping challenges. The ones who fall or cry are sent home, while the others are made spirits (masquerades) in the end.

One might wonder why put the children through such a bad experience simply to make them masquerades. Up next, I will post about Masquerades and Modernisation, and there you will discover how Nigerian masquerades run their affairs – what these children become.

Handling the Disappointment of Rejections

Along the road to becoming a successful novelist, every writer bumps into a set of unavoidable potholes, one of the most devastating being rejections.

Of course, those depressing replies will always come – worse, in dozens. It doesn’t matter how many months or years it took you to write and polish your manuscript. And sometimes it doesn’t even matter how good and refined you are. If you doubt that, ask J. K. Rowling. You’d be daunted by the number of rejections she received before the sun smiled on her first Harry Potter book.

But how do you handle the disappointment?

Yesterday, I was reading up on tropical rain forests. Do you know why they have little undergrowth, despite their luxuriance? That’s because there is competition among the trees. Each tree longs for sunlight – photosynthesis. They hope. They aspire. Just like writers.

But then, when one falls on the chainsaw of one of those advocates of desertification, all that would be left of its years of growth is a stump. More like an aspiring writer who persevered for months or even years and hammered out a good story, only for his hopes to be hacked down by shedloads of rejections.

Should he/she linger in the disappointment?

The good news is most trees – the tough ones – wouldn’t. And for their stumps to push forth shoots anew, they need fertile soil, rain, and sunlight.

So when your manuscript is pelted with rejections, be mindful that your imagination is still fertile; that you have the sun – better still, the stars – to look up to; that with more experience and information, you can water your story ideas until they are better stories that would gnaw at editors’ attention.

So, quit beating yourself up. Query more agencies and publishers. And most of all, keep writing. And you may yet stand tall like one of the buttress-rooted giants of the tropical rain forests.

Walter Dinjos, Author of “Beyond Bermuda” and “The Forbidden Sea”

I just had a wonderful interview with Pat Betram. Follow the link below.

Walter Dinjos, Author of “Beyond Bermuda” and “The Forbidden Sea”.

By the way, did you know that in many parts of Nigeria Town Criers are still very much active? They roam the night striking their ogene(s) or ekwe(s) and crying out their messages with the voice of the mountains.

One would think that with the existence of radio and television stations as well as newspapers and the Internet, the tradition would have died. However, after interviewing a few village elders, I discovered that science and technology don’t sit well with the older generation, and the use of Town Criers is one of their ways of trying to preserve their dying culture.

One actually said, “I hope that after I’ve met my grave, my children would not forsake the traditions that birthed them.”

I will be covering this topic in the future, but for now, check out the interview at Pat’s site

My Eyes Have Seen My Ears

I must point out that at the time it happened I had no mirror or a picture of myself with me. Neither was I near anything glassy. I was girdled by village elders who sit on carved stones, drink wine – palm wine, by the way – from cattle horns, and are as addicted to snuff as Bob Marley was to marijuana.

Before they drink their wine, they first break cola nut and thank the gods of the land by tossing a few pieces to the ground and offering the soil some wine – this time, they used the palm wine that cost me an arm and a leg. Ah, goats have eaten palm frond on my head!

For comportment, for the story ideas their acts inspired, I simply downed my spittle and, as I waited, prayed today’s tale from their folklore bore something about which I can blog.

One finally cleared his throat and said, “Have you heard of Eke-ite?”

I perked up, licking my lips. “No.”

“Eke-ites are big snakes like pythons,” he explained. “They snare their prey by vomiting their glittering eyes.”

“Vomiting…their eyes? Is that a fact?”

He nodded. “They do have eyes like other snakes, but those are false eyes. Their true eyes are diamonds,” he said in all seriousness.

My ears frowned. As fascinating as this sounds, and much as it reminds of the first ‘Clash of the Titans’ where three witches shared an eye, it’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Well, not the dumbest, but one of the dumber things I’ve ever heard, and it suggests some parts of Africa are still in the Iron Age.

The elder went on to say the snake vomits its diamond eye, retreats to a cover, and wait. Then when a human sees the diamond and, in excitement, attempts to take it, the snake would slither out of its cover and swallow the human.

So to trap the snake, fortune hunters visit forests with mortars – you know, the ones their wives use in their raffia-roofed mud kitchens – and when they see a suspicious diamond, they quickly cover it with the mortar, thus blinding the snake if around. When blinded, the reptile would start flogging the ground with its body, until that kills it, and the hunter is left with meat with which to celebrate his diamond.

Obviously, I love the tale to have blogged about it, but I find the elders insistence on its trueness irritating. They say Eke-ites exist and actually have real diamonds as eyes, and my attempts to subdue that shameful belief of theirs were woefully unavailing.

Imagine your eyes seeing your ears without using a mirror, water, camera, glass, or anything at all. That’s how impossible the bloody snake and the tales about it are.

Bush Babies: Facts and Fictions

When I was little, my village elders would fascinate and frighten my peers and I with fables about bush babies at moonlight gatherings. Back then, we thought the tales were true, and I used to picture bush babies as dollish creatures the size of a three-year-old, but now, I scoff and shake my head wistfully at their ridiculousness.

Recently, I decided to scour the internet for articles on bush babies and discovered that, although the moonlight tales were imaginary, they – like any other fictional story – are hugely influenced by reality, and that is what brings them to life. I also refreshed my memory of the myths about the animal by interviewing some elders of my village.

Below are facts and fictions about bush babies, as I have gathered them, paired according to their similarities to one another:

FICTION: My village elders say bush babies cry like a lost baby in nearby woods, especially at night, as a way of attracting captives-to-be.
FACT: The name bush baby comes from the animal’s babyish cry.

FICTION: When mothers take to the market and fathers intoxicate themselves in the bear parlour, bush babies steal into their homes and abduct their babies. Then when these folk return and find their children missing, they rush outside bearing gongs and bells, and begin striking and ringing them respectively in the hope that the bush babies, known to despise noise, would return the children in order to end the noise.
FACT: Bush babies are nocturnal creatures, hence their other name ‘galagos’, which means ‘little night monkeys’ in Afrikaans. I doubt they would come out in daylight to kidnap children.

FICTION: They say bush babies send birds and grasshoppers into people’s gardens to lure children out of their homes and into the woods. Village elders use this tale to scare children from playing or hunting far away from home.
FACT: Bush babies communicate, definitely not with birds and grasshoppers, by calling to one another and by marking their paths with urine.

FICTION: Some say bush babies capture and keep children captive by clinging to the children’s backs like a baby.
FACT: Bush baby mothers carry their infants in their mouths.

FICTION: They say bush babies can hypnotise or bewitch children with a look in the eye.
FACT: Bush babies have large eyes for good night vision. The eyes are scary too.

FICTION: Bush babies possess the power to disappear.
FACT: With their strong hind limbs, bush babies can jump up to two metres vertically, despite their small sizes, and however far they can jump horizontally, I doubt that would make me think they can literally vanish at will.

FICTION: With their magical powers, bush babies hunt in people’s refrigerators to sustain themselves and their captives. At least they have a sense of responsibility. But appearing in people’s refrigerators…? I cannot believe I welcomed that when I was little.
FACT: The males leave their mothers’ territories after puberty, but the females tarry, establishing communities made up of closely related females and their younger siblings.

FICTION: Bush babies force their captives to scratch their backs or fan them.
FACT: A male bush baby mates with all the females in its territory. Those who do not have territories sometimes establish small bachelor groups. Ha!

FICTION: Bush babies feed on the items they find in people’s refrigerators and sometimes sleep in holidaymakers’ beds.
FACT: Bush babies feed on insects, fruits, tree gums, and small animals; and they often sleep in groups in leafy nests, and tree branches and holes.

FICTION: Bush babies keep children as dolls or pets, and before they return a child (they do this by teleporting the kid into their parents’ refrigerators), they leave a bite mark on the child’s neck as a sign that the child has been claimed once and should not be claimed again by other bush babies.
FACT: It is not advisable to keep bush babies as pets, as like many other non-human primates, they are possible sources of diseases that can defy species barriers.

FICTION: Bush babies’ dollish brown hair, as told in fables, is a costly ritual ingredient and is highly sought after by jujuists. Therefore, to snare – or escape – a bush baby, wear it a necklace of tiny bells; they hate noise and would stay still if they discover that moving creates the noise. Just make sure you are not nearby if the bells mistakenly slip off its neck.
FACT: The picture at the beginning of this post clearly disagrees that bush babies have dollish brown hair, but, please, jujuists do find bush baby fur priceless.