WELCOME TO OHAFIA
Ohafia is a town and local government area in Abia State, Nigeria. It is an Igbo speaking region. The ancestral capital of Ohafia is the centrally located village of Elu. The Ohafia Local Government Area also includes the towns of Abiriba and Nkporo.
The ancestors of the Ohafia people were renowned as mighty warriors. This aspect of the Ohafia peoples history remains fundamental to the Ohafia people's sense of identity. The warrior's cap or "leopard cap" (Igbo: Okpu agu) is well known and is an associated product of Ohafia. The Ohafia warrior tradition is embodied in the performance of Iri agha.
Ohafia is home to the third largest military base in Nigeria, named Goodluck Jonathan Barracks. It houses the headquarters of the newly established 14 Brigade and 145 Battalion office Complex.
RITES OF PASSAGE IN OHAFIA
John C. McCall
Department of Anthropology
Southern Illinois University-Carbondale
Children begin to acquire knowledge of their ancestral ties to Ohafia when they accompany and assist their parents in work and social interaction. They travel to the farm, to market and to the compounds of friends and relatives. They are sent running on errands to deliver yams, to fetch water, to bid a neighbour visit, to perform countless tasks assisting in the progress of daily life and sociality. Through this participation in quotidian existence they gain an emerging sense of the cultural environment. They discover the names of places and in doing so learn that residential compounds are known by reference to the men who originally cleared the bush and established the site as cultural space. They learn that access to the constantly shifting mosaic of agricultural plots which demand their labor and yield their food is reckoned by reference to the names of ancestral mothers who farmed those plots ages ago.
This sense of inhabited and embodied history which informs the ancestral presence is not a formal abstraction transmitted by didactic procedures. It is a lived reality which develops over time through everyday experience. As the child navigates this terrain, tending to the small responsibilities assigned to him or her, this landscape of names begins to take shape: the names of the dead, of those people who cleared the land, built the compounds, farmed the land and conceived the people. It is impossible to identify a particular place in the village without making reference to these names. They are simultaneously its history and its topography.
Residence in Ohafia is patrilocal and compounds are composed of large houses, occupied by senior males surrounded by lines of smaller huts housing other family members. Typically, men's huts line one side of a path while women's huts line the other. The overall pattern is one of compact rows of contiguous structures traversed by a maze of paths. Amidst this labyrinth of domestic space are numerous shrines, some hidden, some out in the open. One type, marked by a thin oko tree (Pterocarpus soyauxic) surrounded by stones is found in a small clearing near the patriarch's house. The tree marks the shrine as ezi ra ali, the place where mothers of that compound bring their newborn children to be blessed. The rite is a simple one performed by the eldest daughter of the paternal group. Rubbing the baby with chalk she recites a brief blessing and places the child upon the ground. Until this rite has been performed mothers carefully avoid letting their infants touch the earth. The umbilical cord of each baby born to the compound is buried beneath the stones of the shrine.
Simple as it is, this rite embodies a fundamental relationship between individual, family and land which is the crux of personhood in Ohafia. To question whether someone was ever placed on ezi ra ali is among the gravest of insults. Such a remark suggests that the person has no home, no family -- that they are, in effect, not a person at all. Ezi ra ali means 'compound and land'. In this context 'compound' refers to much more than a cluster of buildings. It is the physical manifestation of the paternal group in space and time, a history of occupation in which a place comes to represent the people, past and present, who have occupied it. The rite of ezi ra ali is an enactment of this identification between person, paternal descent and place. It is a rite of placement, positioning each new child within a terrain, social, spatial and temporal. As children grow older and come to know this terrain they find that it is etched with its own history which is their history as well. In the paternal compound in Ohafia, where generations have resided in the same place for centuries, the successive lives of those inhabitants, whose collective existence anthropologists attempt to capture in the notion of 'patrilineage,' are not only inscribed upon, but are constitutive of, the habitat itself. Naming practices also reflect the sense in which each person is understood, at a fundamental level, to be a living manifestation of the cumulative force of his paternal descent. Men's and women's names consist of their given names followed by their father's name and then their grandfather's name. This is usually the extent to which a name is given for social or legal purposes. But a person's full name is understood to go on and on, from father to father ad infinitum.
In Ohafia, as boys grow up they learn to have a particular kind of relationship with their bodies, one which links their sense of their own masculinity with the ancestral traditions of Ohafia. When a baby boy cuts his first teeth the occasion is celebrated and he is said to have "cut his first head." This bodily transformation is the first in a series of events which are considered to be equivalent to head taking. Customarily, when a baby boy cuts his first tooth neither the mother or father will comment publicly on the matter. They will wait until the auspicious event is noted by a friend or relation. Sometimes this is even prompted by the mother who may complain that the baby has something wrong with his mouth and will ask the friend to examine him. Once it is announced that the baby has "cut his first head" the bearer of this news is responsible to sponsor the celebration of the event. The cutting of first teeth is also celebrated for baby girls. However it is not referred to as "cutting a head" and the celebration is not as elaborate as that for boys. Instead it is said that "she has asked us not to go to the farm," because the family must stay home from work in honor of the occasion.
The traditional rites for girls had largely fallen out of practice by the time Nigeria gained independence in 1960. A limited form of femal circumcision involving removal of the clitoral hood was performed shortly after birth as were male circumcisions. These operations were somewhat perfunctory, and were performed without the ritual elaborations often associated with circumcision in Africa. Because of the absence of symbolic significance attached to circumcision, when medical clinics became established in Ohafia, medical doctors rapidly assumed responsibility for male circumcisions and the practice of female circumcision was abandoned.
When a boy reaches the age of seven or eight his father will provide him with a bow and arrows. These he learns to use in contests with other boys, shooting at balls of rolled leaves or other targets. He develops his skill with the bow because he must eventually kill a small bird. When this is accomplished he is said to have "cut his second head." A celebration follows in which the boy ties the dead bird to the end of his bow and marches through the village proclaiming his victory and singing that his age mates who have not yet killed birds are cowards (ujoo) Those of his age mates who have also "cut their second heads" will join him.
His father will dress him in a fine wrapper and the procession will travel through the village visiting his kinspeople who give him yams and small amounts of money. In many cases it is through this process that the young boy first comes to know his maternal relations, many of whom, by virtue of the dispersed residence of the maternal family, he may never have met. Hence, at the age of seven or eight the young boy constitutes, through this first act of manhood, a new social role for himself. It is a role that allows him to ally himself with his accomplished age mates and to distinguish himself from the "cowards." He is allowed to dress in finery reserved for adults and he becomes a person of interest to his maternal family, the people who will ultimately grant him land and livelihood.
Young boys confided in me that some now use the rubber slingshots which are available at local markets to kill the birds. These simple weapons have a much greater range and accuracy than the traditional bow. But if they do acquire their birds in this manner they must keep it a secret. Elders insist that the boys must use the bows, not because of the greater test of skill, but, as one man explained: "because we must not forget how to use the weapons that our ancestors used." This remark should not be dismissed as mere nostalgia. It is an expression of the fact that, in marking this step in the transition from childhood to manhood, it is not the killing that is important but the production and reproduction of a particular bodily praxis, one rooted in ancestral knowledge. Sometimes, enthusiastic boys are encouraged to raise their own war dance, complete with a small oyaya. In Ohafia it is not enough to remember the stories of warriors of the past. Various rites and performances are specifically aimed at somatically transmitting the knowledge of the Ohafia warrior. Whether this knowledge is embodied in aesthetically structured performance, such as the war dance, or in ceremonial constraints such as the sanctions surrounding the nnu nnu mbu (bird killing rite), the performed aspects of ancestral practices are considered crucial to the preservation of Ohafia identity.
Find below, pictures of Okwanko masquerade, Akanu Ohafia, Carved figures in Obu, Asaga Ohafia, The Ohafia War Dance (iri agha), Obu House.
