This website is created by: John C. McCall Department of Anthropology Southern Illinois University-Carbondale Click here to return to the Ohafia Home Page				This text is an excerpt from: Dancing Histories Heuristic Ethnography with the Ohafia Igbo Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2000.
"Kpaan kpaan-kpa-kpaan kpaan-kpa-kpaan kpaan-kpa-kpaan kpaan..." The sound of the akwatankwa cuts through the din of the crowd gathered for the burial of an eminent chief. The hot midday air is heavy with red dust raised by hundreds of feet: dust mixed with the rich aroma of sweat and the fragrant vapor rising from large pots of palm wine. Several young, robust men in short, coarsely woven blue loin cloths begin to move into the center of the large clearing in front of the village meeting house. Their muscular arms are draped with the long hair of ram's manes, and on their heads are red, black and white knit caps known as leopard hats, each pierced with an eagle feather. They move with confidence and pride but their leader seems even more imposing; balanced on his head is a board upon which human heads sculpted of wood are displayed. The heads, like the dancers are flanked with ram's mane. The ogo is crowded with people of all ages, some talking, greeting, laughing, others maneuvering to find a good place from which to view the dancers. The dance leader, holding a small palm shoot in his mouth and a short cutlass in his right hand, stares fixedly ahead as he dances with short deliberate steps. Three akwatankwa players sit on a wooden bench defining one edge of the dance space. With casual concentration they tap out the heart beat of the dance. Beside them a drummer begins to play, not a dance rhythm, but drum language which is echoed by the antelope horn played by one of the dancers. Everyone should come forth! Those in the bush come out! Those on the road come out! The day is charged! An old man, dressed in a faded wrapper of Indian madras, sits on a nearby stool and begins to shout: "Utugokoko kwe'n!" and a response resounds from the crowd: "huh!" He shouts again "Akanu kwe'n!... Ohafia kwe'n!... Igbo kwe'n!... Nigeria kwe'n!..." and each time the crowd responds with urgent approval. Then he begins to sing the legend of Elibe Aja, the story of a brave hunter who establishes an alliance with the neighboring Aro people by killing a leopardess that is terrorizing their farms. The music is fast, driving, insistent. The dancers are joined by other men, some mature, some mere boys. Each moves his feet in a rapid side-stepping pattern. They roll their shoulders in tight circles causing their chest muscles to flex rapidly. Gradually, deliberately, the tempo builds. As the pace of the music increases the pectoral flexing accelerates. The men's chests pulsate with rippling undulations. This is ofufu . As one man puts it: "when the music takes fire to the dance, the flesh melts."

As the akwatankwa play the drum calls men to action: "Agwo ntu no akarika! " "There is a dangerous snake in the grass!" This is a warning, a call to arms, a summons to dance, to be courageous and to come prepared for action. The drum and the horn were battlefield instruments used to communicate during raids. Many of the calls these instruments produce are traditional alarms and commands and they bring the tension and immediacy of actual battle to the mood of the dance. The drum also plays the dance rhythm, fitting its tones tightly within the fast paced time-line. The drummer sings a high pitched note interjected sporadically throughout the performance which further increases the fervent tone of the event. The ensemble is small, the sound "hot," and aggressive.

In Ohafia, the war dance is part of a distinctly masculine genre of music which is contrasted to the lilting meter of women's music. Never pausing, the war dance pushes ahead, creating a sense of moving forward aggressively. This is embodied in the ridged bodily comportment and continuous swift movements of the war dancers. Men speak of the compelling quality of the war dance rhythm: that they cannot resist the call to dance, that the music pushes the dancers driving them to dance and to move like the warriors of old once moved. Like a voice of the ancestors themselves, the war dance induces men to do what they must do to be Ohafia men.

The lead dancer carries a headdress bearing heads. In the past, when a warrior was celebrated after returning from battle with a human head as a trophy, the headdress was a large pot, blackened with sacrificial blood, upon which were tied the prepared skulls of particularly formidable victims of the past. At other times, a long board covered with leopard skin and bearing carved wooden representations of heads was carried to honor men who had killed leopards or had performed other brave deeds which were considered to be acts equivalent to the taking of a human head in battle. The skull studded pots are still maintained but they have largely become relics of an earlier age. The leopard board however, is at the center of a living tradition. Now used to celebrate men who have succeeded in business and educational endeavors, it resonates as a key symbol of the relationship between traditional Ohafia culture and the endeavors faced by Ohafia men in the modern world.

The war dance is initiated by events in the lives of individuals. The ceremony occurs in commemoration of a particular person's accomplishments and the dance is performed in the village section in which the celebrant's paternal descent group resides. While people will often say that the war dance "belongs to the whole of Ohafia," particular performances "belong" to individual men. By performing the war dance the community gives recognition to men of achievement. But in doing so, these men become empowered to define what constitutes achievement in their own generation.

The war dance has changed considerably in the past century. The battles of the past have been relegated to remote history. But the dance remains at the heart of Ohafia identity. While the age of head-taking is gone, modern markers of achievement serve equally well as tokens of proven courage and affirmed manhood. New signs have become structurally equivalent to "heads," worthy of celebration just as, in the past, the hunter who killed a leopard was celebrated as having "taken a head." This idiomatic transference is frequently explained in blunt terms by Ohafia people who remark: "we used to go to war and bring back heads, now we go and bring back degrees."

The war dance is about achievement of manhood by way of incorporation and appropriation of foreign sources of power. The head continues to stand as a resonant symbol of this achievement, but the actions which constitute the appropriation of power have transformed to embrace the structures and relations of modernity: the corporation, the academy, and the state. Hence, when a man returns to Ohafia with an academic degree or arrives in his home village in a Mercedes-Benz he is said to have "taken a head."

The identity realized here is not in the appropriated objects themselves or even in the power that they represent, but in the all important action of returning with them. Those who stay in the city and lose contact with their natal villages are referred to as "lost," as were the warriors who failed to return from battle. Material rewards are not enough to constitute an authentic identity. The sojourn must be completed. The warrior must return, be celebrated, meet his ancestors, and join in the community of heroes. Through adaptation of the warrior tradition, the war dance provides a continuity with the past which circumvents the upheavals and social changes which have characterized the last century by appropriating these new elements. It is an embodiment of Ohafia identity which, faced with the transforming influences of consumer culture, religious conversion, and literacy, refuses to succumb and instead incorporates these elements like so many skulls adorning the shrine of an unconquerable people.

Through aesthetically framed enactments of past events and ancestral heroes, the war dance constitutes a collective experience which extends through time, linking the living to their predecessors. The term "history" fails to convey this sense of community unfolding through time. It is an experience of transtemporal communitas which is at the core of each individual's identification with the war dance event and ultimately with what it means to be an Ohafia person. The collective community which participates in the creation of the war dance includes the living and the dead; for without the ancestors there would be no community with which to identify.

This presence of ancestors is not a "supernatural" notion. Rather, it is an empirically experienced glimpse of a social reality extending through time over many generations and thus normally outside of the mundane experience of present time consciousness. This notion is eloquently expressed by Ogba Kalu of Abia, Ohafia who stated:

Whenever [the war dance] is performed, our hearts brim with joy: because it is the umbilical cord with which we were born. Whenever we hear its rhythm, our hearts swell with joy: we think of the day of our birth and cherish the day of our death; we think of the day we shall raise our heads in pride and rejoice in anticipation of the day we shall grow rich... So then, we are most happy to see it performed every time. (Azuonye 1974:96)

Cite as:
McCall, John C. Iri Agha: The Ohafia War Dance. © 1992. Last Update 2005.
http://www.siu.edu/~anthro/mccall/ohafia/wardance.html