Tombo Tombo: Professor Nimi Wariboko and the Dignified Kalabari Nation
Toyin Falola
I am glad to be part of the event Paperworth Books is hosting to mark the publication of Professor Nimi Wariboko’s Kalabari Series. The three books cover cultural ideas: Kalabari Dignity, The Soul of Kalabari Culture, and the Wisdom of Kalabari. I have had the privilege of reviewing two of them for the media.
Professor Nimi Wariboko On Kalabari Dignity, By Toyin Falola
https://toyinfalolanetwork.org/professor-nimi-wariboko-on-kalabari-dignity/
I cannot recall, at this very moment, how many pieces I have written on Nimi Wariboko. A quick search this morning revealed a few:
Contextualizing Nimi Wariboko: Nigerian Pentecostalism and Its Critics, By Toyin Falola
https://opinion.premiumtimesng.com/2020/11/26/contextualising-nimi-wariboko-nigerian-pentecostalism-and-its-critics-by-toyin-falola/?tztc=1
A Light in the Dark, By Toyin Falola
https://toyinfalolanetwork.org/a-light-in-the-dark/
Nimi Wariboko’s The Breath That Remains, By Toyin Falola
https://toyinfalolanetwork.org/nimi-waribokos-the-breath-that-remains/
Nimi Wariboko and Humanistic Pluriversality, By Toyin Falola
https://opinion.premiumtimesng.com/2020/10/10/nimi-wariboko-and-humanistic-pluriversality-by-toyin-falola/
Locating Africanity: Elastic Nimi Wariboko in the Post-colonial and Pentecostal Incredibles, By Toyin Falola
https://opinion.premiumtimesng.com/2020/11/23/locating-africanity-elastic-nimi-wariboko-in-the-post-colonial-and-pentecostal-incredibles-by-toyin-falola/
https://groups.google.com/g/usaafricadialogue/c/F50v09b5ARI
https://opinion.premiumtimesng.com/2020/11/23/locating-africanity-elastic-nimi-wariboko-in-the-post-colonial-and-pentecostal-incredibles-by-toyin-falola/?tztc=1
I can attest to Professor Wariboko’s distinguished career, as reported in the media. I held a major conference on him, following the publication of Toyin Falola's The Philosophy of Nimi Wariboko: https://cap-press.com/books/isbn/9781531010249/The-Philosophy-of-Nimi-Wariboko. In addition, I had a major interview with him: https://toyinfalolanetwork.org/the-toyin-falola-interviews-a-conversation-with-professor-nimi-wariboko/
Prolific and versatile, his writing career shows no end. This year alone, he has published six books and has completed a similar number.
Let me face the future! There is no such language as Kalabari. That's not me trying to provoke. It is what the Kalabari themselves say. When a woman from Kalabari is asked what language she speaks, she confidently responds in her native tongue that it is tomina-ayi, the language spoken by humans. Not a language, but the language. The Kalabari term for the language is shown to be a latecomer, a retranslation back into Kalabari of a label previously set in English by colonial authorities and missionaries. The same confidence shines in the kitchen. Their soup is tomina fulo, the human soup, which subtly implies that every other pot on the globe carries something thinner.
There is arrogance in a boast like that, and many of the Kalabari’s neighbors have heard just that for ages. Or you may hear something philosophical: a people declaring that their method of speaking is not a wall surrounding them but a gateway into what all human beings share. Professor Nimi Wariboko has three new books coming out with Paperworth Books that will not let us rest on this one. They hold both interpretations together, and force us to live with the discomfort. One of them starts with a phone call. The author is in Boston when a Kalabari guy in London calls him and asks him in Kalabari whether he speaks Kalabari. The author replies no, since there is no such language. All his life, the caller had said this, without being reminded that he was doing something wilder and broader than speaking a language.
The humor lies in a harsh piece of history. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Atlantic commerce ringed the Kalabari, and outsiders flowed in. Their neighbor Bonny reacted by closing ranks. It had foreigners trade in Igbo so that its own language, Ibani, would be a secret from competitors. The scheme succeeded so successfully that by the early twentieth century Bonny had almost lost the language it was conserving. The Kalabari went the other way. They made it mandatory for everyone in the area to speak Kalabari and to give up their native tongue. They enforced this requirement by removing anyone who could not pronounce the language correctly. This method created a concept of citizenship tied to three aspects: the location of one's residence, the language one speaks, and the degree to which one comprehends the culture. Not blood. A man introduced into a family as the property of another may even become chief, and to remind him of his origins was a grievous crime.
Keep both truths in your mind. A welcome so broad that a visitor may become a chief, and a test of language imposed by exile. That is the Kalabari self-understanding in simple terms. And that is why I can't present these novels as a brochure for a culture. They are something harder and better: a people’s own son interpreting his people’s words, bodies, and ultimate ideal with genuine honesty, especially when those things turn harsh or fail. When it comes to what the Kalabari people mean when they say what they say, the first volume, titled The Soul of Kalabari Culture, addresses the issue. The second one, titled “The Wisdom of Kalabari,” enquires about the location of these words and proposes that they are found inside the human body. The third is Kalabari Dignity. What does the overall arrangement require of a person? The soul is how a people interprets itself. Wisdom is the way it builds its world. Dignity is the world’s demand upon you.
A village storyteller tells the tale of The Soul over the course of many nights. The Soul is similar to a narrative. These pieces are rather short, each consisting of roughly seven hundred words, and each may be read independently. Only after you end do you know you have been listening to an epic. Its argument is its technique. We were told philosophy was in the huge books written by men who left the hamlet. Wariboko flips that on its head. He accepts a salutation, a nickname, an aphorism about a goat, and gives it the type of attention we generally give to treatises. He believes that language doesn’t only convey the reality of a people, but also helps produce it. If that is true, then the words an infant learns at her mother's hearth are already a course in metaphysics. A culture's philosophers are everywhere, generally unrecognized and definitely underpaid.
Get names. Biobele translates to my inside is tasty. This is not a story of happiness. It is joy as the condition of a whole inner universe, and to address someone by it is to open that world and invite them in. Or Confaa, a word meaning inexhaustible riches. The sound an in Kalabari indicates denial. Confa is lost riches. Confaa restores the loss. In that tiny fragment of language, the author sees a full philosophy of fortune. Wealth is not something you own, but something you replenish, and the exact thing that creates it is the thing that might drain it away. He even juxtaposes this with economist Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction, revealing it was already buried in a name. Then there is Abonnema, the name the British gave it. Its earlier term is Nyemoni; it means desiring what is yours. You have the full book in microcosm, with two names side by side, one forced, one invented. I would make a moral demand to every politician from Nyemoni: leadership should be assessed by whether it allows every individual to bring out their potential for everyone's welfare.
Even the morning greeting is philosophy. Ibate, our happy morning, means your day has burst open, that you have broken through the night. Within, the author hears a question: did you pierce the darkness that impedes your existence today? He imagines a buddy texting it to him every morning and calls it one-word poetry and a daily prayer that you will break through again. Few of our welcomes enquire whether someone is ready to take on the world.
But the book is heavy, because it will not remain in the nice chambers. Drum names were the memorized signatures of clans, chiefs, and locations, played to declare who you were in battle and during festivals. They are a rich archive, and Wariboko points out how little they have been studied. One chief’s drum name refers to women paying their bills with their bodies, which the author interprets as a harsh acknowledgment of the rape of women in conflict. But he won't let us revere the forebears mindlessly, since some drum names are clearly sexist, and women had no drum names at all. The archive we acquired is half a community. “ ...women maintained other archives, and these are the saddest pages. It was formerly expected of every woman to be a poet. When anyone died, she had two or three days to write a song about the family's history, teach it to the other ladies, and sing it at the deathbed in the midst of sadness. Now, the author claims, that talent is mostly gone and is bought by devastated families. There was also a public art form in which two ladies, in a nasty fight, transformed it into a weeks-long performance with songs, curses, and poems, each side with researchers delving into the other family’s background. It was last performed in Abonnema in the 1960’s. Therefore, a culture is not a safe. It is a performance. And performances may end. Our heritage is something we do. We may choose not to do it.
The second book advances from words to the body. The solution in the second book is that there is no door between the two, simply one chamber. We are told that a kid is born twice, produced by the father and carried by the mother. The Kalabari term for mother is the one who bears down, who pushes, who endures. The English term comes from the Latin meaning womb. To put it concisely, as the author does, one language emphasizes the effort of birth, the other its source. The Kalabari term for father denotes one who pulls out, as in fishermen drawing up a kid from a pool of possibilities. It also indicates a leader. Take that image from the hall with you. A parent and a leader, too, isn’t someone who dictates but someone whose attention unlocks what is already in another person.
The most haunting piece is about a name, Erekosima, which means do not name him. It is given to a youngster who is believed dead and comes back, one of a troop of restless spirits. You may say this is a means of coping when baby losses were widespread, and Wariboko resists that shortcut. The name itself is the evidence; it precludes calling, because the kid is known so intimately that even the parents are transformed by it. The Kalabari make statues to name their gods, because a nameless spirit is dangerous. So why won’t you identify the most deadly kid of all? His solution is a vaccination." The spirit is given a little measure of a name that pretends to be the absence of one, enough to retain it but not enough to keep it there. The Kalabari did not wait for the coming of modern medicine. They developed a grammar vaccination.
The body too bears status and ethics. It was in such a cloud of scent that a chief of Abonnema, Chief Moses Membre, strolled that young people came out on Sunday afternoons to stand in it as he passed on his way to church. Below the vanity, there lies an ethic: let my society flourish so that my body may smell lovely. The town’s prosperity is the perfume on the leader’s skin. The Kalabari, the author writes, don’t rate individuals by scent. People experiencing poverty used a lesser cream, half-oil, but no one said the poor smelt, which is a strange thing to say in a culture that has so frequently exploited the nose to rationalize disdain. And then there is the delightful essay on the habit of threes. Three types of spiritual force, three grades of fabric, three chambers for an adult deceased in state. In regard to the Ijo communities, there were three for males and four for women. In all, there were seven, the number of the gods. The author contends that as the Kalabari became a trade state based on violence, the symbolic order shifted toward male dominance: three soared and four waned. His conclusion is worth repeating: the superiority of three and the lowering of women that went with it are the result of history, not of the gods. Many so-called sacred hierarchies are just ancient.
The second book is based on the premise that the Kalabari body has three dimensions: the flesh we share with every animal; the lived body that bears a human identity; and the body that has been named and revered. They are nourished in various ways. Food is flesh. The body eats proverbs and words. The specified entity feeds on deeds. Behind it, the big Kalabari demand tombo tombo, so let a person be a person. In this society, a person is her own subject and her own predicate, a person because she achieves her potential. Even destiny may be negotiated. You tell the Supreme Being the tale of the life you are to lead before you are born; you forget it at birth, but you may go to a diviner and take back your words. And the novel doesn’t disguise the wounds. The Kalabari claim a wound of the mouth never heals. A cut heals, but an insult does not. If words are scissors, then every sneer, every cheap campaign statement, is an act done to a body.
The third book, Kalabari Dignity, opens with two voices in dialogue: a mother sending her kid to university with one admonition to pursue dignity, a guy at a pepper-soup bar joking that dignity is a type of tyranny. The whole of the book resides between that joke and that benediction. Wariboko says dignity is three goals at once: for the individual to become her complete self, for the community to succeed so that one's own body may smell lovely because the community does, and for both to be collected into a particular cultural splendor. To repudiate that objective is no trivial slip. It is a moral failing. Then comes the story of who tries it. An old retired chief from Buguma, who lives in Port Harcourt, wakes up his jobless son one morning and tells him they are going to meet the education commissioner, who will get the kid a job. He dons his bowler, grabs his walking stick, and heads out. The commissioner kept him waiting. After a long time, the older man gets up and says that if the commissioner won't see him, then he won't see the commissioner, and he walks out with his dignity intact. The novel leaves us with the question: whose dignity was served. The chief magnificently. The son was still unemployed. A culture that educates its seniors to walk out of the waiting room has a good sense of itself, and we are right to question what that costs the young.
The book presents a creative mechanism for how such values are handed along, which it calls counterfoil choice. It is an ordinary decision between two living choices. If you choose a counterfoil, you have two alternatives when everyone understands that one of them is not truly in play. Thinking her son an idiot, his mother sends him to the well with a basket. So, the basket doesn't retain water. The true test is if he notices. At her wedding, a bride is presented with dish after dish, but she rejects them all because the food is already hers. When a chief is installed, he is given a yam and a cannonball, and no one ever became a great chief by taking the yam. It is a fantastic teaching approach, and Wariboko recognizes that it is also a machine of compliance. The finest education in a society may also be its most effective technique of keeping people down. And it is the tension that is the nerve of the third book, and that is why we cannot just clap.
“The Kalabari are not proud; they want to be dignified,” he said. Pride is about ownership: possessions, titles, props to be seen. Dignity is a being that cannot be taken away from you without taking you. The difference is in the way people walk. Nineteenth-century travelers noted the Kalabari stride, and the culture has a phrase for the swaying walk of a huge tree in the wind, and another for the carefree stride of someone who has no bearing at all. A stroll in this culture is a statement. Dignity also starts with imperfection. A traditional legend relates that a princess rejects all suitors until a young man comes from a hamlet of incomplete people, each lacking a limb or organ. He begs his neighbors for aid, and they all offer what they can: a hand, a limb, a heart, clothing, and jewels. The community picks him up, and the princess declares he’s the one. The message is that no one is completely alone, and he who begins from that reality has a possibility of being whole. As a Kalabari monarch expressed it, the whole community is the full yam, while the individual is half yam. Not a lesser yam, but a portion of the common meal.
Hence a radical thought. If dignity is the wholeness realized by others, no ruler can give it or take it away, and no deity is immune either. According to Kalabari proverbs, if a divinity becomes too furious or demanding, you question it from whose wood it was made. According to the tale, in 1857 the chiefs of New Calabar assembled after sharks, which they considered holy, had murdered many of their people. They decided to rob the shark of its divine status. A Liverpool merchant’s notebook, discovered by the author in 2009, confirmed this, and many Abonnema people denied that their forebears could have done so. The idea is that the gods are only strong because humans adore them. Kings are the same. Then there is the modest four-line song children sang to commemorate Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Port Harcourt in 1956. Never calls her a Queen. It depicts a monkey applauding for her, and finishes with a nasty double meaning. Wariboko interprets this as a subversive protest, a weapon of the weak. Where the government perceived a celebration of dominion, the anonymous composer regarded it as a burial.
What makes the trilogy outstanding is that it turns the Kalabari proverb on the Kalabari themselves. The author tells us that we can discern a deity's character from the wood from which it was carved. He then selects the dearest thought of his people and asks where it comes from. He contends that dignity is also an idea, a big fiction that masks hard living conditions and drives people to pursue a satisfaction that never comes. It was a discipline imposed on a society of merchants, he claims, as a ruling elite began to create a civilization of manners out of fisher people. Dignity never floated above economics. It was made, and the making left its imprint. He is honest about the current as well: many Kalabari today mistake dignity for pride or dominance. He questions why a people with such ideas are not rich and does not place all the blame on colonialism, adding that traditional trade firms cannot separate ownership from management. He is very severe on leaders. He quotes the ancient adage: a leader who does not make the people’s dignity the purpose of his job is not leading but usurping. He closes that chapter with a sentence that I wish were on the wall of every town hall: if the Kalabari notion of dignity cannot make Kalabari people and cities better, larger, and more moral, then it is time to set down its burden.
The books are honest about women also. One foundational narrative of the Ekine society is about a woman, Ekineba, who introduced a male institution into her community, even as women were eventually pushed out of its authority. In his afterword, Professor Adeshina Afolayan poses the most difficult questions an academic can ask. Is this book for the Kalabari or for the thinkers of the world? Can a thought move from Kalabari to English and back again without too much loss? Wariboko does not dismiss them. He remembers a saying about the man who desires the honey within the rock: the axe’s edge will not worry him. It will be hard work, and it will be debated over, and he meant it as an invitation to others to start chipping in.
So, the books demand things, and a launch that merely admires them would fail the test they set. To the Kalabari people, culture is something you do, and it is fading. The funeral songs are rented, the huge quarrel-dramas have not been produced in Abonnema since the 1960s, many women no longer speak the language well, and the one recording of drum names covers just a handful of hundreds. Somebody has to sing, to record, to educate and to perform, and we cannot leave it to the old. They leave us with a partial record of drum names, women’s songs, silences and the problem of moving between languages. And to the rest of the world, they offer a lesson that starts at the door. His grandmother told him that one should never respond to a knock with the query “Who is there?” since such a question asks about the personhood and rank of the guest. You say, “Come in. Put it next to the sentence every Nigerian knows: Do you know who I am? Wariboko reads it with severity and compassion, as a plea for acknowledgment of individuals reduced to tiny by the state and by lost hope. What has this nation done to him that he can’t step into a room without some claim to defend? That is the question to ask the yelling guy, not what kind of pompous person he is. The Kalabari had a different grammar, where you didn't have to announce yourself at every border.
And the books express something the nation can't hear too frequently. More than three hundred years ago, the Kalabari switched citizenship from ancestry to residency, language, and culture. Home is still ancestral land in Nigeria. The Kalabari model was not innocent, and its language exam caused its own damage. Still, there is a concept worth preserving: you belong to the area you live, the language you speak, and the culture you love, not to the tomb of your forebears. And there is the mute counsel disguised in the name of the people. Kalabari is short for a lengthy phrase: let the one who has plenty give me little. “Great leaders never promised to remake society in one stroke,” the author writes. They sought the least change that would enrich life for everybody, especially the impoverished. Excellence is doing the next simple thing, he adds. In a culture prone to speak of complete resets, that seems wimpy. But complex civilizations are sustained by tiny fixes.
I told you right away, there is no Kalabari language, and you had to choose between hubris and a door. The texts resolve that. A people who name their own tongue the human language has undertaken a weight no ordinary pride could shoulder, because if your word is the human word, it belongs to the entire human family. The novels close with a Kalabari style of thanking someone for a gift: where this has come out, let another come in. In Abonnema, one young guy disputed this once, saying the prayer should beg that another comes to me, and asking aloud if any gift is ever free of power. Even the thank-you prayer is subject to cross-examination. That is the Kalabari mind thinking: the books are a door left ajar by someone who knew the owner of a home is merely the first person to pass through it. Thank you, Professor Wariboko. And to all of us, the refrain the lead drummer yells to the dancers in the masquerade: ngei konte. There’s still one more.
Congratulations to Professor Nimi Wariboko and Paperworth Books.
