stories my mother and elder sister told me had the immemorial quality of the sky and the forests and rivers.”1 Christianity and the Western literary tradition seemed to him traceable in time—for wasn’t his father one of the earliest Christian converts in Ogidi? But there was much to be admired about the timeless world of his ancestors, and he was instinctively drawn to its oral and artistic expressions.
Achebe dazzled his teachers and fellow pupils at St. Philip’s Central School, Ogidi, where his ability to take down dictation earned him the nickname of “dictionary.” But apart from reading, writing, and the standard fare for primary schoolchildren, he learned an equally, if not more, important extracurricular lesson, which foreshadowed his future writerly concerns. The anecdote deserves quoting in full:
On a hot and humid day during the wet season our geography teacher decided to move our entire class outside to the cool shade of a large mango tree. After setting up the blackboard he proceeded to give the class a lesson on the geography of Great Britain. The village “madman” came by, and after standing and listening to the teacher’s lesson for a short while, walked up to him, snatched the chalk from his hand, wiped the blackboard, and proceeded to give us an extended lesson on Ogidi, my hometown. Amazingly the teacher let all this take place without incident. Looking back it is instructive, in my estimation, that it was a so-called madman whose “clarity of purpose” first identified the incongruity of our situation: that the pupils would benefit not only from a colonial education but also by instruction about their own history and civilization.2
This act of historical reinscription was to stay with Achebe for a long time. But it was not the only colorful—yet profoundly influential—educational experience that he would have in those early years.
In 1942, the young Albert went to live with his brother, John, at Nekede, about four kilometers from the southeastern Nigerian town of Owerri. It was the custom in those days for young men and women to take in one of their younger siblings upon leaving the family home. These live-in charges would keep house as they proceeded with their studies. The move to Nekede would have opened up exciting prospects for Achebe’s formal education—a new school, new teaching methods and textbooks, perhaps a better-stocked library. But it so happened that Nekede was, Achebe’s own words, “a treasure trove of Igbo culture.”3 It was also a repository of colonial history. At Nekede, Achebe first heard stories about the tyrannical district officer H. M. Douglas and the killing of Dr. Stewart at Mbaise, which led to the Bende-Onitsha Expedition, fictionalized as the pacification of Abame in Things Fall Apart. And it was here that Achebe would encounter a singular precolonial art form, which was also a spiritual offering and process, called mbari, which existed only in this small section of Igboland, and which would prove to be of abiding influence.
Mbari consisted of ornate architectural complexes housing clay sculptures, commissioned (through the mediation of a diviner) by and dedicated in a sacrifice to the earth goddess Ala and other powerful local gods. The art form featured a repertoire of images, shaped by rituals and artistic conventions, handed down through generations and innovated upon by emerging ndioka (artists).4 Its functions were spiritually and socially didactic, and in this and in its use of vernacular, grotesque, and mythical images, it is analogous to medieval church sculptures. While it is impossible to situate the origins of mbari, oral accounts confirm that it was already well established in the mid-nineteenth century. The apogee of mbari was in the 1920s and ’30s, but it was very much alive at the time of Achebe’s residence in Nekede. As the culmination of an act of worship, in fact a sacrifice to atone for a disaster, such as the spilling of blood in warfare, and sometimes as a thanksgiving ritual, mbari complexes—some containing more than a hundred modeled figures—were supposed to be transient. And yet, despite the ravages of time, many mbari houses, some with surrounding “cloisters,” lasted long enough to be observed and meticulously studied by art historian Herbert Cole before their precipitous decline during and after the Nigerian Civil War (1967–70).5 By the 1980s, the art form, as it was originally conceived, was extinct. The late 1970s saw the creation of several government-sponsored concrete mbari houses. However, these revival attempts were neither built by expressly trained local mbari artists nor conceptually or cosmologically indebted to the precolonial originals.
If we look only to the handful of occasions on which Achebe alluded to mbari in his biographical and essayistic output, we might be tempted to think that his engagement with mbari was cursory. The best-known connection is probably his suggestion that its name be given to the network of artists formed in Ibadan around 1961, of which he was a founding member. Elsewhere, he praised “the sophistication of Igbo phenomenological thought” inherent in mbari and ndiokas’ understanding of art as a communal process rather than a cultural outcome, and described the ways in which mbari captured the perceived attributes of threatening alien forces—most notoriously colonial Europeans, but also local enemies—and domesticated them to ensure the continued well-being of indigenous society.6
Nevertheless, as the literary critic Anthonia Kalu posits, such African works as Things Fall Apart are “seen as portraying African culture and traditions rather than emerging from them,” resulting in the exclusion of the “use of African thought, rhetoric, etc in the analysis of African literature.”7 Kalu, as well as Herbert Cole, has pointed to the fact that Achebe’s indebtedness to mbari is more significant than appears at first sight. This is not only of historiographical importance, but “facilitates a new reading of the African writer’s efforts to synthesize a transitional culture.” In what follows, I will take up and extend this argument, discussing this singular art form and its documentations of colonialism while tracing an aesthetic and ideological continuum with Achebe’s work.
The gestation of an mbari began when, through signs and dreams, the goddess Ala communicated to her worshippers, through a diviner, her desire to be honored and placated, normally after a disaster in the community. The period from conception to completion could be up to ten years. The creation of an mbari was a sustained, ritualized, and exacting process, kept from the prying eyes of the uninitiated, even though community members knew what was happening inside the mbari-concealing fence. Before it was unveiled to the public, a group of elders surveyed the result. Their criticism could, in some cases, lead to modifications. The completed mbari not only reflected its cosmological motivations and the spiritual regeneration experienced by its creators but was also a cornucopia of life—a veritable stage on which the divine, the sinister, and the mundane danced to a harmonic symphony, a place in which “all the real or latent evils [were] composed artfully within an ordered, compartmentalized, open environment in which they may be apprehended and thus, perhaps, controlled.”8 Imitative semblances of living people were typically not included on the mbari stage; it was believed that doing so amounted to offering the person up as a sacrifice to Ala, with deadly consequences. Still, in keeping with its serious origins, mbari was also meant to educate as well as to elicit mirth and laughter.
Despite the socio-religious thrust and entertainment value of mbari, aesthetic excellence was not a subordinate concern. It is true that its formal merits are intricately entwined with “excellence in concept, purpose, and result,” but this was achieved, in great part, through the artists’ dedication to producing beautiful, yet visually and conceptually complex, tableaux. Neither were the art form’s historical-cum-regenerative qualities of secondary interest. For beyond the presentation of sculptures reflecting historical occurrences, which it did by documenting “a cultural history of conflict resolution particular to its specific location and period of construction,”9 mbari was “a reiteration of cosmic beginnings, a contemporary image of renewal and regeneration that links the real world with creation, tying man to his supernatural forebears, revitalizing the community by reactualizing sacred history.”10
However, mbari did not idealize indigenous society. Achebe negates neither traditional religious beliefs nor the veracity of supernatural interventions in the life of his characters. Mbari’s didacticism was also connected to the insertion of “detailed symbols of traditional religion . . . brought in to remind the now Christian community of its spiritual roots. Everything here is hardened, figuratively and literally, to provide object lessons, a diorama of the past,”11 an aim very close to Achebe’s proclaimed wish to teach his “readers that their past—with