THE MINISTRY OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS
The Reinvention of Nsibidi
- ILLUSTRATIONS: UKANDI ATSU / THE REPUBLIC.
THE MINISTRY OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS
The Reinvention of Nsibidi
- ILLUSTRATIONS: UKANDI ATSU / THE REPUBLIC.
Chiadikōbi Nwaubani was ten years old when he held the Ukara cloth for the first time. It was a gift from his grandmother, and though he did not realize it at the time, it would shape his philosophy for the rest of his life. Ukara is a fabric, made of cotton and typically dyed indigo blue. It is inscribed with white symbols, which transform an ordinary piece of clothing into a ritual cloth of the Ekpe society; a traditional society of the Ibibio people that many call secret due to its esoteric, fraternal and hierarchical nature, historically restricted to men. Nwaubani knew nothing of its famous lore as he held his new Ukara, he was only fascinated by those white inscriptions—signs and symbols known as Nsibidi.
THE EVOLUTION OF NSIBIDI
Nsibidi, also known as Nsibiri, is an ancient writing script that dates back to the fourth century. It is peculiar to the Cross River region in Nigeria and can be traced largely to the Ibibios, Efiks and Arochukwus in Nigeria’s South South and South East regions. Samuel Gregory Effiong, a senior lecturer at the University of Calabar’s Department of Fine and Industrial Arts, told me the writing script originally had about 500 symbols, but has since increased to over 1,000 due to the influence of Nsibidi enthusiasts, some of whom have gone on to create neo-Nsibidi. Neo-Nsibidi simplifies and expands Nsibidi, attempting to alphabetize the script, to ensure easier usage in modern times.
Unlike other ideograms, Nsibidi goes beyond written symbols. This is why initiates of the Ekpe secret society can communicate in Nsibidi using objects and intangible elements. Effiong, who is also a member of the Ekpe society, said:
Nsibidi had been in practice amongst the people of the Cross River basin even before the advent of Ekpe, but [the society] took what it wanted and explored it. Ekpe made some interpretations which are used as sacred signs so that only Ekpe members would understand. It is now transcribed into their spoken and gesticulated languages.
Nsibidi’s versatility also makes it easy to enhance and create new symbols from existing swirls, curves, and strokes that take on new meanings. This is why it was possible to increase the original scripts significantly.
For enthusiasts like Nwaubani, it was a complex endeavour learning glyphs that are almost extinct. ‘Nsibidi was used ideographically, for a general idea of a thing. Neo-Nsibidi is a more honed-in design for representing specific words,’ Nwabuani said. ‘I design symbols based on the idea I am trying to convey. For example, a symbol for a hat would be made by taking a Nsibidi symbol for a person and drawing a hat on it.’
Nwaubani eventually learned enough to create the neo-Nsibidi script, Agwu, which he says makes it easier for people to learn Nsibidi without it being a replacement for the original script. So, when the Black Panther team reached out to him to contribute his knowledge of Nsibidi to produce the 2018 film, he was glad to be able to share more of such ancient heritage with modern audiences.
Years after his first encounter with Nsibidi, Nwaubani started the blog Ụkpụrụ̄, which means footprints in Igbo language, to record his research and share his findings. Today, the 30-year-old visual artist from Abia State is regarded by several Nsibidi enthusiasts as a huge influence on both raising awareness of ancient Nsibidi and spreading the adoption of neo-Nsibidi. This took him by surprise as he never intended to influence anyone. In his words, ‘I only wanted to explore my heritage and tell the world that Nigeria was learned, complex, and civilized before colonization.’
For fashion designer Ugochukwu Chukwuemerie, Nsibidi has inspired his modern-day version of the Ukara cloth. His fashion brand, Ugochukwu Emerie, is in part dedicated to making pieces that reflect his heritage and belief system inspired by his studies in Philosophy at the University of Port-Harcourt. He recalled that,
During my studies, I looked more into African philosophy and our culture. This interest began when I read what the Westerners say about Africans—that we do not have a writing system, philosophy, reason or logic. That made me shift from what I was doing before, and I came across Nsibidi. So, in 2021-2022, I released my first collection inspired by Nsibidi and the Ukara cloth.
Similar to Chukwuemerie’s discovery of Nigeria’s cultural heritage, Nwaubani only began to understand the importance of the Ukara cloth and Nsibidi the longer he researched. ‘I think I knew the clothes were quite important when my grandmother bought them,’ Nwaubani said. ‘She was selling textiles and even she said it was a rare find. But I had no idea that what was on it [Nsibidi] was infinite. There are secret parts of it known only to [the Ekpe society] and they are sacred.’ Nwaubani further noted that he, ‘only started understanding the meaning behind these things when I started my blog in 2010, and I wanted more people to know about Nsibidi.’
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INCORPORATING NSIBIDI INTO ART
Nwaubani is not alone in the quest to promote a resurgence of the ancient writing script. For over 30 years, renowned visual artist Victor Ekpuk has created artworks primarily made in and inspired by Nsibidi. Ekpuk told me that,
In art school at the University of Ife, we were instructed to point our attention to our rich cultural background, which informed some of the Western ideas that we were then taught to study. Basically, the whole curriculum of art was to teach the colonized Africans to look to the colonizers for ideas about art, when the colonizers themselves were taking [inspiration] from us.
The idea of creating art restricted to this mindset did not sit right with Ekpuk. He believed that modern art would not have come into existence if Western artists had not encountered African culture and aesthetics. This spurred his passion for creating indigenous artworks that tell the true stories of Africa and Nigerians. In the course of his research about indigenous Nigerian cultures, Ekpuk began to look inward, quickly realizing that there was a writing system he grew up seeing but had overlooked. He recalled that,
I was seeing lots of this culture practised in the compound of my maternal grandfather, who was a titled chief. I had just never really given much thought to it because it was just what people did, but college opened my eyes to it. I was like, ‘Whoa, I’m part of all these, it’s part of my DNA.’ I started experimenting with it, and it stayed with me. I became interested in that form of abstraction. Reimagining these writing systems in a form of abstraction gave it much more elasticity than a rigid form.
While Nsibidi served as a reminder of Ekpuk’s cultural DNA, it represents a form of connection to many other Nigerians, especially those living in the diaspora. In 2022, Austrian-Nigerian tattoo artist, Emmanuel Uchenna Item, started incorporating Nsibidi into his designs to feel connected to his Nigerian heritage. He first learned of the script during his second visit to Nigeria in 2019, the same year he started tattooing professionally. However, his main motivation came during his visit to Morocco in 2018. While buying a vintage traditional mask, Item asked the seller about its origins and was told that it either originated from Congo or Mali. He bought two of the masks. A year later, he discovered the mask’s creator was actually from his hometown in Ebonyi State, Nigeria. Item recalled:
I was speaking with some old people in my village, and they were telling me about some artists, and books and the history of our place. I pulled out my phone to look them up and while I was checking…I saw old photos of a specific mask. I recognized it because I had something similar. I was surprised when one of the old men told me the masks are from our village, it’s used for the new yam festival. It was shocking because the seller in Morocco had claimed that the masks came from somewhere else.
Item was even more determined to showcase Nigerian identity and have a deeper connection to his Igbo culture. He started learning Igbo alongside Nsibidi. Now, he has done Nsibidi and Nsibidi-inspired tattoos on over 40 clients.
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AN INTERSECTION OF CULTURES
For over a decade, more people have been ‘exploring the possibilities’ of the ancient ideogram. Jordan Williams, an African American of Afro-Cuban heritage, has spent a larger part of his young adult life researching and exploring cultural and ancestral histories and languages in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia.
His first encounter with Nsibidi was through the sacred language of the Abakua secret society in Southern United States of America, which has ties to the Ekpe society in Southern Nigeria. Much of the practices, hierarchical structure and sacred communication of the Abakua originates from the Ekpe. Noticing the correlation between the characters used by the Ekpe and Abakua societies, Williams paid close attention to them and began keeping records of them. During this time, he started working with Nwabuani to show a new side of the ideograms. According to Williams:
[Nwaubani] was seeking to look at the characters in a new light, and I have many records of these characters, on this side of the world. So I decided to collaborate with him on this project and began to search for Nsibidi in British museums. We also have some here on our clothes and walls and our writings on the floor. They’ve been used in military charms as well, for good luck, prosperity and protection. Our graveyards also have Nsibidi. A lot of these signs and writing traditions amongst black people here in the South [America] is often very hard to find because of our treatment here, our past here. But decoding the symbols was very interesting to me because, despite everything, these are the symbols that survived.
In his 2000 paper, ‘A Secret Society Goes Public: The Relationship Between Abakua and Cuban Popular Culture’, cultural historian, Ivor Miller, states that the Abakua society, established in 1836, is one of the least-known yet most powerful examples of West African cultural influence in the Americas. The Abakua is derived principally from the male leopard societies of the Abakpa (Ejagham), Efut, and Efik peoples of the Cross River basin (old Calabar), in southeastern Nigeria. These societies are called Ngbe and Ekpe after the Ejagham and Efik terms for leopard.
Bassey Ndem, an architect and ‘lord’ in one of the over 36 Ekpe society lodges in Cross River, clarified that while Ekpe is often referred to as a leopard society, the term is simply allegorical. The society also identifies with the attributes of other animals like the crocodile, snake, and tortoise. According to Ndem:
The use of every one of those [animals] in certain aspects of Ekpe is to illustrate particular principles of the society. They show the duality of life and explain what is going on. The crocodile is an amphibious creek creature. It lives in water, and it lives on land. It is comfortable in both environments—duality. At the esoteric level, we are referring to positive and negative energies, darkness and light, yin and yang, inhaling of breath and exhaling of breath. The leopard, called Ekpe in these parts, is known for strength, guile, secrecy and more. So if you need to develop those aspects of your character, discipline, being able to move silently, being deadly as well, then it is the spirit of Ekpe, or the spirit of the leopard that is being referred to. No one is worshipping a leopard, tortoise, crocodile or snake. We use them in a metaphorical manner.
NSIBIDI’S MURKY WATERS
Although some people historically had positive experiences with societies that use Nsibidi to communicate, some others experienced the effects of its negative uses. While Miller states in his paper that the Abakua society bought slaves their freedom, and participated in the independence movements against Spanish authorities, some historical records state that the Arochukwu sold some of their kinsmen into slavery. In the 1987 volume of the Transafrican Journal of History, historian and researcher John N. Oriji stated in his paper, ‘The Slave Trade, Warfare and Aro Expansion in the Igbo Hinterland’ that the Aro oracular trade network increased the slave trade in Igboland, and that 75 per cent of 850,000 enslaved Africans taken overseas were from that region.
Williams claimed that some parts of the Ekpe, particularly the Arochukwu arm, used Nsibidi to communicate in the selling of enslaved Africans. ‘They were able to take the Ekpe masquerade from a playwright, trade, community service and policing to being a slave-raiding institution,’ Williams said, adding,
So while the masquerade is still being played, they were now able to capture people. They used these signs that were for communication and unity to write out messages on who to capture, and what houses to raid. If an Ekpe member was captured, they would have secret signs to say, ‘Hey, I’m an Ekpe member, please don’t capture me’ But in some cases, if they did not agree with the slave trade they would just be sold. This is why Ekpe and Nsibidi got here [America].
Egodi Uchendu, researcher and professor of history and international studies at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, said ancient history books and older records reflect this. According to her, Nsibidi was used for trading, and as a map guide in pre-colonial Nigeria, and could have been used to communicate during the slave trade. According to Uchendu,
Nsibidi could be drawn on the pathway. Only an initiate who comes across it would understand it very well. It was used in normal trade networks, connecting communities within the eastern region and beyond. They traded as far as the Benue axis. For these long-distance traders, they use Nsibidi often times for their trade partners coming with them. Like saying, ‘This is where we turn right, this is where we turn left. Look out for this building, or that sign.’ It was also used in military expeditions between communities. Even when the Arochukwus fought the British, they could well have used Nsibidi to give themselves information on how they moved and what they did.
Effiong claimed that Nsibidi was globalized during the trans-Atlantic slave trade period because some people who were captured from the coast of Cross River continued practising their heritage, sticking together where they were taken. ‘There are still practising Nsibidi in places like Cuba and Haiti. The Caribbeans also have a crux of the Mokos who still practice. Recently, I read that some places in Tobago and Trinidad, still do as well,’ Effiong said. ‘These people were captured as slaves but still practised the programmes and heritage of their fathers, and it metamorphosed into the egg bed and different aspects of Nsibidi that we have now.’
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EMBRACING NSIBIDI: RISING ABOVE THE STEREOTYPES
In a bid to connect more to his Cuban and African ancestral heritage and to find out more about himself, Williams plans to become an Ekpe initiate soon. He believes that the Ekpe society and Nsibidi receive a lot of hate because of the colonial effort to dismantle them. Many see them as demonic and would rather dissociate themselves from such heritage and religion. He said:
Ekpe itself is religious. It’s kind of like a church or a mosque. The building itself can be anywhere but where it is is influenced by the local culture there. That’s when Ekpe can have varying, different perceptions. Because if you’re in a place that has native customs that are different from this place, you might assume the Ekpe of this place is different. There are people in the past who are descendants of this culture through the slave trade. It’s just now becoming a thing here, in the West. So you have these two different kinds of cultures, the old people using Nsibidi here, but also the new that’s being brought from modern Nigeria.
Chukwuemerie says the demonization of African traditional culture has created a deep-rooted identity crisis, resulting in people becoming wary of what should be a part of them. He faults Western education and influences for suppressing our indigenous languages, religions, and cultural practices. However, he is glad that many new organizations and individuals are trying to digitize Nsibidi and make the script available for people to use, ensuring it does not die out.
This is exactly the reasoning behind the creation of Nkọwa Okwu. Ijemma Onwuzulike, a software engineer and founder of Nkọwa Okwu, created the open-source dictionary and Application Programming Interface (API) in 2020 as a way to digitalize the Igbo language and make it accessible worldwide. However, it has since evolved to become a platform that digitizes and archives Nsibidi symbols.
As of writing, Nkọwa Okwu has over 8,000 Igbo words, 26,000 Igbo sentences, 4,500 audio recordings, 25,000 dialectal words, 30,000 Bible verses, and 2,500 Nsibidi scripts. These Nsibidi scripts can be seen at the top of some of the Igbo words in Nkọwa Okwu. With over 170,000 volunteers, Onwuzulike envisions a broader impact of the API in the next few years.
When she started the project in 2020, she did not think of digitizing Nsibidi, until about seven months later, when other engineers and language enthusiasts volunteered to collaborate on the project. Two volunteers in particular, Uche Mụọnagọ and Jordan Williams, were the ones who advocated for the inclusion of Nsibidi in Nkọwa Okwu.
‘At this point, I was very aware of the existence of Nsibidi, I had seen previous work from [Nwaubani]. He was the person who created the base font that is used in a lot of modern digital representations of Nsibidi today,’ Onwuzulike said. She added: ‘[Mụọnagọ and Williams] who joined my slack community were also very well aware of [Nwaubani’s] work. So it has been like a really small cohort kind of effort between the three of us within our Slack community, just thinking of ways to incorporate Nsibidi into the dictionary.’ In expressing their approach towards creating dictionary entries for Nsibidi, Onwuzulike, remarked,
So rather than primarily focusing on sentences or paragraphs or large bodies of text, we wanted to focus on individual words, breaking them down to their stems and spelling variations. We took that same approach with the Nsibidi characters. Even though they can be used to write sentences and paragraphs, we wanted to provide as much lexical metadata to each character as possible. We were able to use Chiadikōbi’s PDF which catalogues around 2,500 unique and simple characters, and we put that inside of our database, and then for each of those characters, we are able to add extra pieces of metadata, like definitions, pronunciations, and examples.
Quelling any belief that digitizing and modernizing Nsibidi through technology, fashion, and art might water down its essence and introduce Western biases to the script, Ndem, a lord of one of the Ekpe societies, says it is doing the exact opposite. These approaches to Nsibidi show its multidimensional side, and considering that it is an old phenomenon, it has a lot to offer the contemporary world.
Ndem explained that Nsibidi is a seven-dimensional form of communication and a tool that has not been fully explored. Words and ideas, sound and movement are some of the dimensions of Nsibidi. ‘That is why it is a journey for you to attempt to use the alphabet. To assume that Nsibidi is just an alphabet, and then try to decipher what it means will only give you one-tenth of what it actually is,’ he said.
While retracing history and creating new worlds and knowledge through cultural heritage can be a difficult and complex endeavour, these creators, researchers, and cultural enthusiasts prove that culture is something you live every day. Heritage will always be a part of you, no matter where you are or what your alternative uses of it are⎈
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