Ozuruimo ‘09 will restore lost divine arts - Ejiogu
Joe Nwachukwu, Owerri
Children of the Headquarters International
Group of Schools, Old-Ife Road, Saw Mill,
Ibadan, doing a cultural performance in
celebration of the 50th anniversary of NTA
Ibadan, held on Friday, October 30, 2009. The Omenimo festival which is an annual cultural event established by the good people of Imo
state started in 1989. The main purpose of the festival is to showcase the rich cultural heritage of Imo people to the outside world.
The lecturer of this year’s colloquium, professor Alloy Ejiogu, Fellow Chartered Institute Accountant (FCIA) of the University of Lagos was among those at the forefront of the now famous Mbari centre in Owerri capital city.
However, Prof. Alloy Ejiogu who was the then commissioner for information and culture was assisted by late Ambassador Gaius Anoka who was at that period the director of Imo State Council for Art and Culture.
Professor Ejiogu while starting the lecture said “kindly permit me to dedicate this lecture to the memory of late Ambassador Gaius Anoka. Gaius was director of Imo State Council for Art and Culture when I was the state commissioner for information and culture. Together we toiled unobtrusively to build up the famous Mbari centre in Owerri capital city. I remember with nostalgia, how every other Friday night in 1989/90, we (Ambassador and I ) would organise the now international Omenimo dance group to entertain the city dwellers at the open amphitheatre of Mbari centre till the wee-hours of the next day”.
According to him, it was indeed fun watching the delectable dance steps of those beautiful sons and daughters of Imo State, interspersed with hilarious rib-cracking jokes of Nze Orji Imo, now of blessed memory, adding that Gius made it happen at Mbari centre.
Recalling the history of Omenimo, Prof. EJiogu explained that the maiden edition of Ozurimo festival was initiated, organised and executed under his supervision as the commissioner for information and culture.
The topic of the lecture, according to him was assigned to him by the governing board of Imo State Council for Arts and Culture titled “The concept of Mbari in Igboland.”
He pointed out that the lecture was not about Mbari, as acronym for Monetary Bay Aquarium Research Institute but a people’s way of life, a very significant aspect of a people’s culture, of the Igbos who inhabited what is now known as Imo State in the South-East geopolitical zone of Nigeria.
He pointed out that Mbari is the Igbo traditional form of arts which provides a record of the people and history which tells the story of the people’s lives, their culture and the deities that play prominent roles in their lives.
Professor Ejiogu explained that a thorough study, even a cursory peep into a typical Mbari House, would reveal it as being much more than the traditional religious belief system of the Igbo. It depicts, to a large extent, the Igbo culture. “It is about the distinct ways in which Ndigbo imaginatively and creatively represented their thoughts and experiences in symbols, offering a deep insight into Igbo cosmology and cosmogony,” he added.
He further added that there was a deep interrelatedness between Mbari and the Muse.
“As we know, the Muse in Greek mythology is anyone of the nine daughters of Zeus (Amadioha in Igbo) and Mnemosyne (his wife), divinities who preside over the arts and inspire mankind. Today, the word, muse has come to be taken as the source of a poet’s or artist’s inspiration,” he submitted.
Professor EJiogu said that it was not a surprise or an accident that in 1961 Mbari club was founded in Ibadan. Founding members of the club included the German scholar Ulli Beier, South African writer, Ezekiel Mphalele and Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo and John Pepper Clark. In 1962, Nigeria’s Duro Ladipo, together with Ulli Beier and Mphalele developed the Mbari concept in Osogbo. There it was called Mbari Mbayo.
With the advent of the colonial overlord, Igbo culture, indeed black civilisation, according to the lecturer, started suffering from series of brazen attacks by the strangers. In their desire to “liberate the dark minds”, he explained, of Africans from “Barbarism and idolatry” the (white) Christian mission stoutly condemned every aspect of the African culture as fetish and barbaric including African languages which were labeled vernacular. “The church missionaries, together with their flag-bearing brothers arrogated to themselves so called manifest destiny to lead the primitive people of Africa to light,” he said.
To them, he explained, “our traditional wrestling is fetish but the Euro-American in human wrestling is civilized. They would rather have our children study Greek than learn to speak and write Igbo”.
According to the lecturer, Mbari as an art form has been making waves in Africa art circles since the nineteen sixties when Europeans began to take interest in local Nigerian art expressions, pointing out that Ulli Beier saw in Mbari an art form worth developing and named the first Nigerian community of artists Mbari.
Mbari, he said, deserves to be revisited, “we hope that the celebration of Mbari in the 2009 Ozuruimo festival will bring back this lost divine art form and by so doing help restore individual and community harmony in Igbo societies. Mbari is the customary way of preserving ecosystemic balance in the Igbo traditional environment. As the traditional expression of the supremacy of mother nature towards the creation of a balanced environment, the return of Mbari to our villages will complete the harmonious equation of the return of Nworie River to the Owerri metropolis.”
In his address on the occasion, the state commissioner for culture and tourism, chief Chuma Nnaji said apart from inspiring their people to cherish their rich cultural heritage, Ozuruimo has served to foster a dynamic re-evaluation of their cultural past with the social and economic changes of their time.
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