Keynote lecture delivered at the African Textiles Exhibition of Carleton University’s Arts Gallery, February 16, 2011
Keynote lecture delivered at the African Textiles Exhibition of Carleton University’s Arts Gallery, February 16, 2011
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(Continued from last week)
I bring in the idea of the will of the people and collective identification with an ideal or a goal in order to move beyond regular conceptualizations which limit aso ebi to the rapturous collective uniforms of crowds or specific groups within crowds during festive occasions: weddings, funerals, house warming, naming ceremonies, thanksgiving, and the manifold occasions of “washing”: Nigerians “wash” everything from the purchase of a new car to promotion at work, from the purchase of a bigger electric generator to the arrival of that all-important life-saving visa to Britain, America – or Canada where the first two preferences fail. Depending on economic circumstances, any of these instances is an occasion for aso ebi.
The presence of Nigerian women in this audience obviously means that I will receive help when we get to the nitty-gritty of aso ebi in terms of who buys it, who sows it and where it is sewn, its composition from the gele to the iro via the buba and the pele. Trust me, all of those details will emerge during question and answer. Suffice it to say here that will and agency enter into the picture because you must first subscribe to the validity of whatever is being celebrated before agreeing to be part of the aso ebi-wearing crowd. At a fundamental level, aso ebi, is always a form of identification with communal ethos, with the collective.
The democracy of aso ebi is equally evident in its trans-class dimensions. Two ultimate and unimpeachable democracies exist in Yoruba lore. There is the impartial and ultimate democracy of death which pays no heed to the cash inducement of the rich or the kolanut supplication of the poor. Rich or poor, we are all subject to the democracy of death which always has the last word over the argument that is life. Then there is the democracy of the bathroom. Rich or poor, we are united by the debt of a daily appearance in the bathroom in our birthday suits, hence the adage, “ko s’olowo ni baluwe, ose lo ma yato” (the bathroom is no respecter of class difference even if your soap is more expensive) rendered famous in the one of the lyrics of Ambassador Abass Akande Obesere omo Rapala, a popular fuji musician of the Papa Tosibe fame. Another fuji act, Alhaji General Chief Kollington Ayinla, the Professor-Master-Around-the-World, also has evocative lyrics about the democracies of death and the bathroom in Yoruba lore.
To these two democracies we must add the democracy of aso ebi. We are all naked in the bathroom even if your soap is more expensive than mine because you are richer, croons Obesere. The democracy of aso ebi functions along similar lines. In essence, whether we are talking of old money in Ikoyi and Victoria Island, new and mostly yahoo money in Lekki and Victoria Garden City, corruption money in Abuja, or grinding poverty in Okokomaiko, we all have access to the democratic agency of aso ebi.
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True, you may buy yours a thousand dollars per yard in Lagos and have it sewn by your favourite “fashion designer” in London on your way to an owambe wedding reception at the banquet hall of the Waldorf Astoria in New York, with Dele Momodu’s Ovation dutifully around the corner; true, I may buy mine on credit for the freedom ceremony of my roadside mechanic cousin in front of our face-me-I-face-you one bedroom apartment building in Okokomaiko, with paraga and alabukun sellers dutifully around the corner, the bottomline is that your aso ebi faaji in New York cannot take away from my aso ebi ariya in Okokomaiko because, remember, ko s’olowo ni baluwe, ose lo ma yato. Simply put: you cannot elevate the culture of aso ebi above my head just because you are old money or new yahoo money in Nigeria and I am just Mukaila, your driver or your newly-minted roadside mechanic in Okokomaiko. You cannot stand between me and the cultural agency that is aso ebi just because you drink perrier and I drink paraga.
Aso ebi is therefore first and foremost evidence of will, agency, and the democratic cultural instinct of its originating milieu. Aesthetics and colour enter into the picture only at the moment of visual contemplation as we see in the following youtube video clips:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxCYBYEUjU4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkyPK8Y5cb0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq37oXkH8Iw&feature=related
With seventy-six thousand entries the last time I checked, google is obviously not doing too badly on the aso ebi train. However, if you are a careful reader, you will notice a refrain common to virtually all the google entries. Here is, in fact, how one google entry which calls itself Urban Dictionary defines it:
Aso Ebi
(Pronounced ASHO EYBEE)
Nigerian outfits made from matching fabric to be worn by a group of people to a party, wedding, or funeral as a uniform. Wearing a certain aso ebi identifies the group of wearers. For instance, at a wedding, all the bride's friends might wear blue and gold, the bride's family might wear white and gold, and the groom's friends might wear black and pink, and so on. Usually at weddings, the various fabrics for the aso ebi are decided by the bride, and are then announced to all the guests months in advance so they can prepare their outfits. Guests are usually expected to buy the aso ebi from the bride, but close friends and family members and certain prominent individuals may be presented with the aso ebi as a gift. Aso ebi for parties and funerals are generally simple, but aso ebi for weddings may involve many complex changes with entirely different aso ebi for different days of the wedding, and for the reception.
So far so good. I agree with Urban Dictionary but I must draw your attention to the fact that this definition, like virtually every other description I found online, defines aso ebi as a Nigerian and not a Yoruba phenomenon. For good reason. But for the unmistakable and undeniable Yoruba words, “aso ebi” (family cloth or uniform – I hate translating these things), I doubt if any of President Goodluck Jonathan’s Facebook friends who are in their twenties and teens are old enough to know the Yoruba ethnic origins of aso ebi.
The aso ebi phenomenon crossed the cultural boundaries of the Yoruba world a long time ago and, like Nollywood and Pidgin English, was mainstreamed as one of the key elements of Nigeria’s national culture. I stand to be corrected but I do not know of any Nigerian ethnic nationality where folks are strangers to aso ebi. Nigerian men of non-Yoruba ethnic extraction, especially those who mouth off along our ethic fault lines in diasporic internet forums, may grumble loudly about aso ebi, dismiss it as a negative influence, and whine about the perennial party habits of the Yoruba, they will still have to return home in the evening to wives waiting impatiently to nag them for money about a long overdue aso ebi payment. For aso ebi may not have caught the attention of the Benetton Group in order to become part of the United Colours of Benetton, it certainly is a prime candidate for a united colours of Nigeria.
But aso ebi and its associated cultural practices did not stop within the borders of Nigeria. It spread and, like Harold Macmillan’s wind of change, it has blown over much of the continent in the past five decades, taking on local inflections and adaptations from Ghana to Liberia, Gambia to Zambia. Needless to say, it has spread to the diaspora, hence the mistake my friend and I made when we saw Sierra Leonean women in aso ebi in Vancouver in the summer of 1999. If culture is Africa’s most formidable export at the table of globalization, Nigeria is certainly present at that table with Nollywood and aso ebi, just beside Ghana’s kente and Congo’s la SAPE. My own pet theory – don’t quote me, just a pet theory - on the phenomenal success of aso ebi, especially here in the African diaspora, is that there is just something about the arresting visual power of the gele – the female headgear component of aso ebi.
It is not for nothing that the gele is by far the most celebrated of aso ebi components in songs, odes, and panegyrics. Which Yoruba or Nigerian woman can forget this ever-green chorus which must now endure the torture of my poor singing talent as I entertain you with yet another song:
E wo gele genge lori aji gbo t’oko
E wo gele genge lori aji gbo t’oko
Aiye la o je a o ni j’iya
E wo gele genge lori aji gbo t’oko
(Behold the gele, perched gingerly
On the head of the doting wife
Pleasure shall be ours, not suffering
Behold the gele, perched gingerly
On the head of the doting wife)
Please join me in observing a minute’s silence here. No, nobody died. We have just mourned yet another loss of meaning to translation in the course of just one lecture. For I have had to render as “pleasure shall be ours, not suffering” what the Yoruba original insists is “we shall eat life, we shall not eat suffering/misery”.
The human instinct and desire to “eat life” and “not eat suffering or misery” is, perhaps, the point at which aso ebi culture is most vulnerable, most subject to abuse. Hence, Nigeria’s depraved politicians prey on that fundamental human instinct to “eat life” and proceed to bastardize the culture of aso ebi by transforming it into one of the items used to “purchase votes” in the context of our prebendal political culture.
Many are the scenarios that afflict one’s sense of decency when aso ebi, sacks of rice, recharge cards, okada motorcycles, generators, and the like are distributed to the people every election cycle by the traducers of democracy.
One of the most successful thieves in Nigeria’s rulership, a convicted felon called Olabode George, took the bastardization of aso ebi to new heights when he acquired the habit of renting gaily-dressed women, with colourful geles threatening to shield Lagos from the sun with their expanse, to attend his court appearances. It was a pathetic sight to see a fragment of the mothers of Nigeria in aso ebi, so thoroughly debased by a member of our odious political class.
Beyond these and many other instances of the bastardization of aso ebi that time will not permit me to dissect, the fact remains that aso ebi is a cultural open sesame to a world where genius meshes with style, aesthetics, and democratic agency. The agency of aso ebi in the context of ariya deserves to be engaged as culture in motion, resplendent in its infinite capacity for self renewal. Perhaps it is in recognition of these facts that King Sunny Ade, one of Nigeria’s great cultural ambassadors on the music front, served notice that this particular form of democratic cultural agency is here to stay. If your memory is good, you don’t have to be Yoruba to join me in this Sunny Ade number:
Ariya has no end
Ariya has no end
Ariya is unlimited
I thank you for your time.
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