Izon (Ijo)

The Ozidi saga is performed over seven successive nights, with masquerade, drumming, dance and an audience that interjects, and it is that form rather than its length that makes it unusual. J. P. Clark-Bekederemo recorded a full performance from the narrator Okabou Ojobolo in the 1960s, transcribed it and published the Izon text with an English translation, and later filmed a performance, so the work exists in three forms that can be compared against one another. The story concerns Ozidi, born after his father, a warrior of the same name, has been murdered by the elders of his town, and raised by his grandmother Oreame, a woman of formidable power who arms him with medicine and drives him through a sequence of killings until the violence turns on him and he has to be cured of it.

The saga is not a moral tale with a hero. It is a sustained treatment of what happens when power obtained through ritual means outruns the restraint of the person holding it, and the closing movement, in which Ozidi is afflicted by smallpox and healed, reads as the correction of a man who has become dangerous to his own people. The performance also depends on the audience being present as participants rather than as spectators. Onlookers interject, correct the narrator, take up the choruses and, in the masquerade sections, are drawn into the action, so the recorded text carries interruptions and repairs that a written work would have edited away. Clark-Bekederemo kept them, which is part of why the publication is valued as a record of an event and not only as a text.

Izon is the largest language of the Ijaw people of the Niger Delta, and it belongs to a group called Ijoid whose classification is genuinely unresolved. Ijoid is usually placed within Niger-Congo, but it sits apart from every other branch, its basic word order differs from the Niger-Congo norm, and some specialists have argued that the relationship is too distant to demonstrate. The atlas records that as an open question rather than filing the language under a family heading that may not hold. The delta itself shapes the religious vocabulary the language carries. Settlements sit on creeks reached by canoe, and the water spirits, the owuamapu, are addressed as neighbours with interests and tempers rather than as remote powers; masquerade brings them into the town in visible form, and the same word can name a spirit, its mask and the performance.

Christianity has been present in the delta for well over a century and most Ijaw are now Christian, so the older material is carried alongside church membership rather than instead of it, which is the ordinary situation across the region and not a sign that either is insincere. The delta itself has shaped the modern religious situation as much as the ancient one. Oil extraction since the 1950s has damaged the creeks and fishing grounds that the older ritual life is organised around, and both church congregations and the custodians of the water spirit shrines have been involved in the protest movements that followed, which is a case of an environmental dispute and a religious one being the same dispute.