Ala

Ala is where Igbo religion keeps its ethics. Chukwu underwrites the moral order in the abstract; Ala enforces it, and she enforces it as the owner of the ground everyone stands on. The category of nso ala, abomination against the earth, is the closest thing Odinani has to a criminal code, and what belongs in it is specific rather than general: homicide within the community, theft of yams, incest, and certain births and deaths that fall outside the accepted order have all been recorded as nso ala in one community or another. The list varies between village groups, which is itself characteristic of a religion that had no central authority to standardise anything.

The distinctive feature is not the list but the mechanics. An offence against Ala pollutes the land. It is not a debt the offender owes and can settle privately; it is a stain on ground that a whole lineage farms and is buried in, and it is understood to bring consequences on people who did nothing. The remedy is therefore public: the earth priest, the eze ala or okpara depending on the community, performs a cleansing with prescribed sacrifices, and the community watches it done. Serious cases could carry exile.

Ala's other face is generative. She gives the yam harvest and she gives children, and the two are spoken of together. The new yam festival is hers before it is anyone's. The dead go into her, which makes her the point at which the ancestors and the living meet, since the ndichie lie in the ground she owns. A goddess who is at once the source of food, the mother of children, the receiver of the dead and the judge of conduct is not a specialist deity; she is closer to the whole moral world in one figure.

Among the Owerri Igbo, Ala is honoured with mbari, and mbari is one of the more remarkable things done for a deity anywhere. When a diviner determined that Ala required it, usually after a run of misfortune, a community would commission a house: an open-sided structure of mud, filled with painted clay sculpture, at the centre of which sits Ala herself, seated, often with a child, sometimes with a sword.

The rest of the house is a catalogue of the world. The sculptures recorded by Herbert Cole include gods and ancestors, but also police officers, bicycles, colonial officials, women in childbirth, animals, and figures whose behaviour is being held up for public mockery. The people chosen to build it were secluded for the duration, sometimes for a year or more, treated as ritually set apart, and their work was unveiled at a single ceremony.

What happens next is the point. The mbari house is not maintained. After the unveiling it is abandoned to the weather, and the mud and the sculpture return to the ground. Building it was the offering; keeping it was never part of the exchange. The house dissolving back into the earth is a return to Ala of something made from her own material.

Very few mbari houses survive, and their construction had largely ceased by the later twentieth century. What Cole documented in the 1960s and 1970s is most of what is known in detail. The practice matters beyond its own region because it shows an African religious art tradition that was deliberately impermanent, made to a deity's specification and then surrendered, which sits awkwardly with the assumption that religious art is made to last.