West African Masking Traditions and Diaspora Masquerade Carnivals

Front matter

West African Masking Traditions and Diaspora Masquerade Carnivals

History, Memory, and Transnationalism

Raphael Chijioke Njoku

CHAPTER 2 Aspects of Society and Culture in the Biafra Hinterland 43

CHAPTER 3 Bantu Migrations and Cultural Transnationalism in the Ancient Global Age, c. 2500 BCE-1400 CE 67

CHAPTER 4 Bight of Biafra, Slavery, and Diasporic Africa in the Modern Global Age, 1400-1800 89

CHAPTER 5 Igbo Masquerade Dances in the African Diasporas: Symbols and Meanings 111

CHAPTER 6 Unmasking the Masquerade: Counterideologies and Contemporary Practices 136

CHAPTER 7 Idioms of Religion, Music, Dance, and African Art Forms 160

CHAPTER 8 Memory and Masquerade Narratives: The Art of Remembering 185 Notes 199

FIGURES AND TABLES

Figures

FIGURE LI European mask, 1555 23

FIGURE I.2 Masquerade dress, Europe, 1596-1635 25

FIGURE 13 The Carnival of Venice, 1726 26

FIGURE 1.4 Death mask of Ramses II of ancient Egypt 28

FIGURE 2.1 Dancing initiation masks, boys’ initiation, Cross River 51

FIGURE 2.2 Spirit (mmug) masquerade 54

FIGURE 2.3 Ghost police, Amobia Village 56

FIGURE 2.4 Boys masquerade (Ibibio style mask) Abiriba 61

FIGURE 3.1 Bantu migrations 71

FIGURE 5.1 A slave dance in Surinam, 1830 119

FIGURE 5.2 Ågábá masquerade of Umunnegha Mbaitoli 126

FIGURE 5.3 Female counterpart of Achi Mbieri Okorosha masquerade 128

FIGURE 5.4 Achi Mbieri Okorosha masquerade 129

FIGURE 7.1 Band playing for Mmau masquerade, Amuda Village, Isu Ochi 165

FIGURE 7.2 Ohafia war dancer with headboard (Ọyáyá) 171

Tables TABLE 4.1 Africa departures by region 92 TABLE 4.2 The Bight of Biafra embarkation and principal port of disembarkation, 1601-1800 101 TABLE 43 Percentage of enslaved children sold to British slave traders at the Bight of Biafra 105 xi

Preface

My conceptual journey to this study began before I learned how to read and write. Growing up in the 1970s while the Igbo recuperated from the traumas of the 1966-1970 Nigerian Civil War, my grandmother, a keen host for our regular moonlight tales, would jokingly chide the kids arriving late from the composite households with the au fait: “He who arrives at the middle ofa story leaves with a disjointed narrative.” Her words echo an Igbo saying: “When a man who was absent at a burial exhumes the corpse, the village should be prepared to deal with a disembodied cadaver.” While both proverbs underscore the imperative of complete and accurate mastery of a subject in general, they particularly challenge students of Africana Studies to ensure grounded knowledge of the complex and intricate nuances of the African roots of African American history and culture they market. Otherwise, the ominous risk is to produce incoherent and disjointed accounts.

In this book, I bring an African voice to the copious volumes of studies on African and African Diaspora linkages by focusing on African-styled masquerade carnivals. Taking into account the unique roles masquerades played in the indigenous society, the voice with African linguistic, ethnic, and cultural roots is crucial so not to have the details muddled in translation in an age of modernist thinking. The book informs the reader where, when, and how the African masquerade genre was invented and explains the life force behind the festival play.

Masquerading in the Africana world was a dynamic device of narratology. For the enslaved people, the art of masquerade engagee was one of the most potent survival devices in the Americas. By exploring the origins, religious idioms, symbols, internal and diasporic diffusions, and the music, dance, and drama that accompany the masquerade tradition, the result is to see beyond the jamboree displays, which most people have identified with carnivals everywhere today.

With a Pan-African approach contextualized in change-over-time-and-space argument, this book also speaks to the connection between Bantu migration and the ethnic complexity and spread of masquerade culture across the continent and beyond. In addressing this theme, I provide a richer and fuller account of both the internal dynamics and the multiple and multifaceted cultural xiv Preface connections between Africa and the African Diasporas without reifying culture as something cast in stone. The Bantu-African masquerade genre that evolved from the Bight of Biafra hinterland is adaptive and was in constant flux prior to the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade. Its presence in the Americas was an extension of the fluid Bantuization process outside Africa by way of creolization.

Bearing in mind the agitated debates it conjures, the Bantu paradigm deserves further clarification. As employed here, Bantu as a concept is more than the language question; it is symbolic for precolonial cultural inventions and the hybridities that connect African societies across regional lines. Colonial scholars who pioneered Bantu studies and classified African languages into different families admitted that they did not understand fully the etymologies and complex nuances of African languages and the culture they carry. As a result, the early Bantu scholars placed the Igbo language among the Kwa subfamily of the parent Niger-Congo family. The colonial scholars discounted the fact that the Cross River Igbo (including Abam, Abiriba, Afikpo, Arochukwu, Edda, Ezzikwo, lhe, Igbére, Ikwo, Isu, Nkporo, Ohafia, Okposi, Uburu, Unwáná, and Ututu) share similar history, culture, and language with their Efik, Ibibio, Ijọ, and Ekoi neighbors who were classified into the Bantu subfamily group of the Niger-Congo group. In a field of history where the word of the colonial scholar often carries the same weight as a papal bull, it is critical to start rethinking some of the serious flaws inherent in these received sweeping ideas in order to turn a new corner in African history. After eminent scholars such as Adiele Eberechukwu A figbo, Ogbu Kalu, and Ebiegberi Joe Alagoa, I reiterate here that the Igbo language, particularly the various dialects spoken among the Cross River Igbo, align more to the Bantu subfamily than the Kwa subgroup.

I owe numerous individuals immense gratitude for their assistance in completing this project. From the very beginning, Baldwin Anyasodo, Chidi G. Osuagwu, Joseph Bangura, Emmanuel Amadife, Apollos Nwauwa, Dimeji Togunde, John McLeod, Thomas Mackey, Tracy K’Meyer, Christine Ehrick, and Francis O. C. Njoku offered their support that saw to the successful completion of this book. Additionally, Alaba Kajobola, Francis and Ngozi Njoku, Bryce Turner, and Rachael Johnston provided the critical logistics that advanced the pace of my research. My sincere gratitude to all those who funded this research, including Idaho State University’s College of Arts and Letters, the Department of History, and the Department of Global Studies and Languages at ISU. A National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant made possible my extended work at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem and the New York Public Library in New York. At Schomburg, I met mentors and

Preface Xv colleagues who were very generous with their ideas and time. My weekly discussions with Colin A. Palmer, Howard Dodson, Carolyn Brown, Venus Green, Barbara Krauthammer, Malinda Alaine Lindquist, Kezia Ann Page, Chad L. Williams, Lisa Gail Collins, Valerie Babb, Carla Kaplan, and Diana Lachatanere will ever remain priceless.

Iam greatly indebted to Toyin Falola, Chima J. Korieh, Kristine Hunt, Malliga Och, and Douglas Chambers for their insightful and critical comments on the earlier versions of this manuscript. I am very thankful to the Editorial Board and acquisition editors at the University of Rochester Press for their keen interest in this project.

Raphael Chijioke Njoku Idaho State University, Pocatello April 2019

Aro CAR DRC MDU NAK NNAE NNAI

ABBREVIATIONS

Arochukwu

Central African Republic

The Democratic Republic of the Congo Mbieri Development Union

National Archives Kew

Nigerian National Archives Enugu Nigerian National Archives Ibadan

Introduction

HIS BOOK EXPLORES THE origins, religious idioms, symbols, internal

and diasporic diffusions, and the music, dance, and drama that accom-

pany African and African Diaspora masks and masquerade performances. The relevance of an inquiry of this nature cannot be overemphasized. Masquerades embody the essence of African civilization and the spirit of culture and customs that translate meanings to certain dimensions of the continent’s complex history. The songs, dance, drama, poetry, proverbs, and other accouterments of practices that go with the masquerade performances also represent a repertoire of intellectual traditions crucial to the recovery of aspects of lost African pasts. The rituals associated with masking define the fluid structures of power and authority, patterns of civil society networks, and the people’s social consciousness. The changing faces of African-styled masquerade carnivals hold a mirror on the variegated impact contacts with alien cultures have brought upon Africans and their diasporic descendants.

In examining the changes that have permeated the masquerade spectacle in the last four centuries, this study probes the interconnections among masquerade narratives, memory, reinventions, and transnationalism. Centering on the role of the Igbo, one of the most visible Bight of Biafra hinterland ethnic groups involved in transatlantic commercial exchanges, the inclination toward ethnicization of African cultural artifacts in the Americas is problematized. The argument is put forth that enslaved Africans should be understood as Bantu-A frican culture modeling agents or culture carriers who tried to reenact vestiges of their inherited traditions in alien societies. While the Bantu culture is contagious, often the traditions the modelers enacted were not exact replicas of the African prototypes—and they need not be. Cultural diffusions or modeling are dynamic and do not usually re-create the original. Modeling agents use simulations or scaled-down versions of the original to show how an event might occur under specific circumstances, and they may not work in an exact way or as the object or system they represent. Beginning from the sixteenth century, African-themed cultural activities in the New World were dilutions ofa conglomerate of practices from several ethnic African and European nations nurtured on American soil. As models help scientists develop explanations about a natural phenomenon that may be difficult to observe, so should we appreciate African American cultural artifacts and study them within the dialectics of traditions and adaptations.

The terms adaptation, time, and space are central to this study because Africana masquerades are not just entertainment tools in static mode. In the Bight of Biafra hinterland Bantu Culture Area, masquerades, in their adaptive nature, served as a genre of literary engagee in the oral and performative style. Masquerade narrative is interpreted here as a method of committed and organic literary discourse in performative form. Customarily, African masquerades symbolize the conscience of a society. They provide a platform to promote identity; propagate, defend, or pursue a cause or ideology; and recover or reshape collective consciousness in a constantly changing world. While enslaved Africans extended this dynamic role of masquerades to the slaveholding American society, the challenges that they were confronted with in the new society were quite different from those they were acquainted with in the Bight of Biafra Culture Area, which, as the original homeland of the Bantu, gave birth to the larger Bantu Culture Area.

The notion of culture areas is not new in academic discourses, but the idea of a Bantu Culture Area has not been applied to any study on African culture transfers to the New World. Proponents of the diffusion theory in America, otherwise known as the “American School of Diffusion,” hold the view that people learn and appropriate rudiments of culture they encounter and as the rate of interaction between cultures increases, so do the probability of borrowing and learning. Melville Herskovits argues that cultures in an area tended to form clusters that are “sufficiently homogenous in regions on which they occur [that] can be delimited on a map.”! Nita Mathar defines culture area as “the geographical space in which similar cultures are found.”? The American diffusionists believe that by mapping spatial distribution of traits in specific geographical spaces, one can then easily illuminate the parallels and variances among cultures.’ The initial articulation of culture areas as a paradigm in the American ethnographic academy go back to 1895 when Otis T. Mason used the term culture area in his work.‘ Other scholars building on this have since expanded the theory by correlating dominant cultural traits with geographical spaces.’ Clark Wissler provided a conceptual and methodological approach to the study when he stated that if “we take all traits into simultaneous consideration and shift our point of view to the social or tribal units, we are able to form fairly definite groups. This will give us culture areas, or a classification, of social groups according to their cultural traits.” In other words, social groups may be geographically dispersed but still form a common cultural identity.

The African presence in the New World was a Pan-African project. Thus, rather than pursuing a narrow ethnic model, which arbitrarily assigns agency to certain African groups while ignoring others, I have adopted the Bantu Culture Area model as a more embracing paradigm for the hundreds of ethnic nations represented by the enslaved Africans in the Americas. This inclusive approach precludes disjointed and disembodied stories. It offers a nuanced explanation of the inherent distance crossings, fluidity, similarities, and variables associated with African and African American cultural complexes. The distinction brought into purview is the degree of changes that were already affecting the masquerade tradition in Africa prior to its departure to the Americas. The counterpoints include the interface among the centuries of internal and cross-regional exchanges, changes brought upon the culture by Islamization, Christianization, and colonization within the continent and in the African Diasporas; the (re-) secularization of the institutions that were in the past exclusively for male initiates; and the masquerades’ intersections with the European culture as globalization deepens and expands.

In the past four decades, masquerade studies have attracted a significant amount of scholarly curiosity as new study methods continue to boost our understanding of the manifold and multifaceted processes that created the African Diasporas. Early on in the 1940s, the broad subject of cultural transfers and retentions (of which masquerading is a big part) among enslaved Africans emerged as one of the dominant topics of debate among scholars of the Black Atlantic. The attraction to this idea soon created two opposing schools of thought. The first school, identified heretofore as the “African Culture Retention School,” was championed by Melville Herskovits, while the second, the “Tabula Rasa School,” was advocated by Stanley Elkins. With The Myth of the Negro Past (published in 1941), which aimed to dignify the frontiers of new traditions the enslaved Africans fostered in the Americas, Herskovits launched the canon of studies that has today grown exponentially.’ But in 1959, Elkins challenged the Retention School with his declaration that the cultural difference between Africans and African Americans was wider than one could imagine. Elkins provocatively affirmed that the African slaves who survived the perilous Middle Passage suffered memory blackout or cultural annihilation: “Nearly every prior connection had been severed.” In a rhetorical question as to where the slaves would look for new knowledge, traditions, values, etiquette, standards, and cues, Elkins concluded that it was the White planters of America who owned the slaves.* In 1978, Albert Raboteau, who studied African traditional religious survivals in the American South, backed the tabula rasa hypothesis with a bold declaration that the slaves’ “African religious heritage was lost.”?

It is not that the Elkinses and Raboteaus are completely off the mark with their views. The violence and cruelty that characterized the Middle Passage incontestably depleted the victims’ physical, psychological, and mental well-being. However, the idea of a permanent memory blackout is an overreach at the fringes of pseudoscience. First, a misrepresentation of this magnitude betrays a lack of elementary knowledge of human psychology, which recognizes the role of nature and nurture in the molding of life-long characters and skills.'° Second, the advocates of the tabula rasa argument tend to forget that ellipsis of memory is not unique to enslaved Africans. Amnesia often goes with remembering, and the critical issue is not essential that amnesia or forgetfulness might occur. What matters most is which realities gave the individual or group a full sense of identity or relevance and making the memory or what we remember to respond to the challenges of life experiences. Third, how anyone can completely strip a grown-up person of agency and then reduce him or her to the level of Pavlov’s dog, in this case, subject to an operant culture reconditioning, is altogether difficult to contemplate.

Like the Tabula Rasa School, the culture retention argument also betrays serious conceptual and heuristic flaws. Partly fueling the culture transfer/retention debate is the attempt by the previous studies to ethnicize African Diaspora slave cultural artifacts. This is a tricky monologue because the paradigm tends to ignore the dynamism and centrality of spatial reasoning—that is, the tendency to imagine things with limited information. Cultural diffusion and modeling, as the accounts of the Bantu migrations and the transatlantic slave trade conjure, could hinder narrow ethnic thinking. Like transatlantic slavery, Bantu population movements show that cultures in motion are like a rolling stream; they acquire new tastes and colors in relation to the ecosystem. Although not often emphasized, results from recent studies on African masquerade arts carnivals expose the intricate intersections among diffusion, spatial reasoning, complex interactions, and the role of memory in masquerade narratologies responsive to the pressing needs of the present.

A closer look at Abner Cohen’s seminal studies on masquerade carnivals, for instance, reveals a continuous reinvention of village-based customs in both the urban centers of Africa and the African Diasporas by migrants arriving from the countryside.!! As Cohen discloses, these city-based masquerades are never the same as their village-based prototypes because, as the social setting has changed, so did the narrative and presentation. Philip Scher’s Carnival and the Formation of the Caribbean Transnation takes a global perception of carnivals as contested arenas of politics and identity formation in both the island state of Trinidad and Trinidadian communities in England, the United States, and Canada.” Again, the cosmopolitan carnivals are adapted to the dictates of modern politics in new environments rather than the same versions associated with the slave plantation era. Norman Stolzoff and Gerard Aching have further explored a similar theme in their separate studies on the Caribbean, including Cuba. The authors investigated the use of masks as an instrument of power and political mobilization in these racially bifurcated societies as the contours of power and authority continue to shift.” Put together, these studies communicate a clear message that to grasp and predict masquerades and their behaviors, scholars must look at the interactions between location and realities of a sociopolitical milieu rather than the shape of a past tradition found in one area. This calls to mind Stanley Littlefield, Dele Jegede, and Esther Dagan’s description of African masks and masquerades as a continuing art form paralleling shifting religious belief systems, theater performances, artistic productions, nationalistic identities, and much more.'*

The constant shifts demand revisions and new approaches that sometimes present conceptual challenges. In 1990, John Gray came to an epiphany when he advocated for a Pan-African approach as a future direction of research on the resilient Afro-Creole masquerade culture. Perhaps this may have motivated Ivor Miller’s works on the Abakud masquerade of Cuba, which he sees as an extension of Efik-style Ekpé masquerade in modern Nigeria; and Robert W. Nicholls’s Old-Time Masquerading in the Virgin Islands, which links the masquerade carnival in that island enclave with the Igbo prototypes. Similarly, Toyin Falola and coauthors’ volume, Orisa, explored various aspects of Yoruba gods and spiritual identities in Africa and the African Diasporas.’ Other related studies such as Igbo in the Atlantic World: African Origins and Diasporic Destinations, edited by Toyin Falola and Raphael Chijioke Njoku; Linda Heywood’s edited volume Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora; and The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World, edited by Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs, have respectively explicated the dynamism of slavery and Igbo, Kongo/ Angolan, and Yoruba contributions to African diasporic cultures.” Revisiting these studies offers a perspective on how to better comprehend African and Af rican American masquerade carnivals as an active and fluid device for sociopolitical dialogue in a world in constant flux.

In essence, this study acknowledges that several millennia prior to the transatlantic slave trade, African culture was already experiencing changes through Bantuization, and studying African American culture in the Americas is a continuation of that change outside the African continent. As the Bantu population movements subjected African culture to a process of intense and dramatic refinements and harmonization, so did the transatlantic slave trade extend this process of harmonization to the Americas by way of creolization. In this process, both African and African American cultures became a collective programming, a mobile community of practices constructed on shared and pragmatic habits, values, maxims, and need-based observances within a group thought. Thus, situating the African Diaspora culture transfer discourse within the Bantu migration history makes sense: It helps further our appreciation of the far-reaching impacts of the Bantu beyond sub-Saharan Africa. While the story of the Bantu in relation to Black Africa is well known, frequently ignored is the influence of the migrations and the masquerade culture it brought to Islamized North Africa.

Second, positioning the discourse within the Bantu studies literature shows that long before the waterscapes began to serve as conduits of economic and cultural sharing between peoples and lands in the First Global Age (c. 1400-1800), landscapes (such as the Bantu migratory routes, the trans-Saharan trade routes, and the Silk Roads) have been serving as conduits of cross-regional exchanges on the global scale. This demonstrates how conventional arguments in history writing about the dynamics of the maritime world, distance crossings, the rise of the West, and the charm of colonial empires can be overturned by emphasizing dynamic, collaborative, and nonlinear networks as opposed to formal networks based on power, the Maxim gun, and social classes. The land-based networks in the Ancient Global Age (c. 2300-1400) and First Global Age reflect a different picture of global interactions. Landscapes emphasize the centrality of peoples, distance crossings, the materialities of cultures in motion, and other exchanges at different times in different parts of the world. Additionally, this book challenges certain chronological readings such as attempts to periodize the origin and spread of cultural traditions like masking and masquerading. It imposes a multivalent approach and urges scholars to think spatially and thematically instead—that is in a way that relates to the position, size, and relevance of ideas and concepts within specific geographical locations.

Spatial reasoning, as the accounts of the Bantu population movements and the transatlantic slave trade reveal, allows us to see what happens when culture modelers migrate with inherited tropes of values and symbols and the history they convey flows in multiple directions and across regions and culturescapes. Theophilus Okere explains that some values or symbols were destined for a transnational mission. Some “values are not only more permanent in time but seem destined for a universal vocation, eventually being accepted beyond their time and place of birth.”’ The imperative is a more nuanced construal, a cognition that recognizes the complexities inherent in the cross-regional diffusion of ideas and symbols.

Thus, rather than forcing the ethnic cloak on African American culture complexes, West African Masking Traditions and Diaspora Masquerade Carnivals prioritizes the subtleties of persistence, nostalgia, practices, memories, institutions, coping strategies, and structures that provided succor and character for those in bondage. The consideration is more on ways through which African epistemologies of religion, music, dance, and other repertories of ideas embedded in the masquerade phenomenon aided enslaved people to survive oppression. The conscious or unconscious desire to reinvent African-themed cultural prototypes in the New World—whether successful or not—contributed to the subsequent growth of what we know today as African American art, music, and literature in particular and the Grand American culture in general.

Accordingly, contra the Tabula Rasa School, this study is also mindful of what Judith Bettelheim has noted about the “Herskovitsian retention model,” which she wearily describes as “a retardataire analysis, which stresses a continuous historical connection with A frica.”!? The Retentionists have contested that with the African presence, new cultural practices sprouted in the Americas and the realm of ritual and belief systems constituted the force around which African Americans organized themselves into a people with an identity.” The point, however, remains that the overall intent of enslaved Africans’ cultural expressions was primarily geared toward survival rather than reinventing proto-African ethnic practices as many have passionately argued. Such ideas fail to capture the harsh circumstances confronting the slaves that we study of their history. Narrating her family experience, ex-slave Louisa Adam, born in Rockingham County, North Carolina, reminds us that “T tell you de truth, slave time wuz slave time wid us. My brother wore his shoes out, and had none all thu winter. His feet cracked open and bled so bad you could track him by the blood” [sic].”"

Louisa Adam’s picturesque is the actualities of slavery that should never be lost. The onus of inquiry then is on memory or the art of remembering surrounding the global journey of the brand of masquerade culture that the Biafra hinterland people invented and through the Bantu movements shared with their fellow Africans. The birth of this tradition goes back several millennia prior to the transatlantic slave trade and the European colonial expansions that followed. I have identified a culture zone in southeastern Nigeria where the Cross River Igbo, in partnership with their neighbors—the Efik, Ibibio, Ekoi, and Ijọ—nurtured a very contagious brand of masquerading. The tradition was propagated as a device of representation that makes use of memory and narratology to safeguard social norms, restore harmony in the midst of chaos, and resolve societal issues. Exploring the materiality of cultural inventions of the various societies native to the original Bantu homeland, which encompasses the historic Bight of Biafra slave embarkation port, offers a path to a better appreciation of the diachronic interchanges between the Old World/Old Time masquerade traditions and the New World/New Time masquerade carnival culture.

In other words, this is a transregional, transatlantic world inquiry with emphasis on one of the most popular and continuing cultural dialogues between Africa and the Atlantic world. Colin A. Palmer has underscored that the name “Atlantic world” is not merely “a geographic expression but also a metaphor for the organic and human linkages that characterize it.”** Along with this line of thought, Thomas Benjamin accentuates how the new transatlantic linkages the Europeans established in the fifteenth century “shall unloose the bonds of things.” This means that the merging of the Old and the New Worlds created opportunities for closer relationships between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. But the timeline and scope of the present study predate the beginning of the transatlantic exchanges. It incorporates the timeless precolonial African era, which I have named the Ancient Global Age, the supposed First Global Age, and the New Global Age (1800-present). Building on the theory of cooperation, human social networks, nonlinear dynamics, and the coupling of human and natural complex systems, as propounded by Steven H. Strogatz, among others, some perspective lights are shed on periods of African history, chiefly as it relates to cultural productions and regional exchanges in the ancient, medieval, and modern times.” One of the major innovations provided is the use of “agent-based modeling” (also known as artificial intelligence) to simulate information about people or historical actors such as the Bantu in areas of the world and/or periods of time for which written sources are poor or nonexistent.

The Bantu as Culture Modeling Agents

The history of Bantu migration and cultural cross-fertilizations or diffusion highlights the theory of human social networks and the agent-based modeling system. The Bantu phenomenon remains one of the greatest migrations in human history considering the huge number of people involved, the time span, and more important, its extensive cultural impacts. Oral, linguistic, and archaeological sources show that the proto-Bantu group lived precisely in the areas bordering parts of the Benue-Cross River Basin of southeastern Nigeria, and western Cameroon. It is believed that the first Bantu migrants left this area earlier than 2500 BCE on what would become intermittent movements involving hundreds of generations now dispersed across the entire continent. The Bantu resettled everywhere with the appurtenances of material and nonmaterial cultures: religious ideas, new languages, and sociopolitical institutions. Some scholars have characterized the Bantu as violent and disruptors of established cultures in their environmental predation, while others see them more positively as culture carriers who helped in spreading sociocultural institutions that encouraged development across the continent.”

It is not the intention of this study to adjudicate the characterization of the Bantu. Rather, the Bantu are highlighted as culture modeling agents. Andre Grow and Jan Van Gavel have noted that the agent-based modeling paradigm is an emerging field in demographic studies with the potential to help scholars close “the gap between the conventional and an alternative approach to population studies by combining the advantages and limitations of both.” It is consequent to state that a study of the Bantu population movement embodies both the challenges and advantages of the conventional and the unconventional in historical narrative and social science research. In lieu of conformism, the Bantu migrations occurring several millennia ago are not entirely different from the influx of Europeans into the Americas between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries or the more recent refugee movements involving millions still unfolding in Western Europe and North America. Migration, which sometimes results in total displacement, is a constant part of human history. The unconventional implication, however, is apparent in assessing the impact of the Bantu in the framework of cultural inventions, syncretism, and hybridities in the ancient times. Daniel Courgeau and Jakub Bijak have outlined four successive but complementary sequences in agent-based modeling that, as the demographers noted, have been evolving since the seventeenth century. These are the period (time of the study), cohorts (number of people treated as a group), event-history (a longitudinal record of when events happened for a number of people), and multilevel perspectives (multiple approaches and viewpoints involved in a change process)”

Both Bantu population movements and transatlantic slavery linked with the restless Bight of Biafra hinterland people have all the features outlined by Courgeau and Bijack: period, cohorts, eventhistory, and multilevel perspectives. The periods are twofold: 2500 BCE to 1400 CE and 1400 to 1800 CE. The cohorts are also twofold: the Bantu migrants crossing regional boundaries, and lending to and borrowing ideas and material cultures from alien societies; and the African slaves involved in the transatlantic exchanges sharing their memories of African culture in the Atlantic world while internalizing Western/American ideas and ways of life. Both historical episodes define the event-history and the inherent analytical multilevel perspectives, viewpoints, and challenges the events pose. With the spread of African cultural traditions, including religion and masquerading, agent-based modeling helps us to respond to three main challenges: how to overcome complexity in social history research of this nature, how to reduce its uncertainty in terms of clear-cut evidence and specific timelines, and how to reinforce its theoretical foundations. For demography, interactions between various populations systems are specifically examined. We then show how this approach enhances a study of this nature and the benefits it brings. Though the impact of the Bantu migration on Africa south of the Sahara is well known, there is nothing on the impact of the Bantu and the masquerade culture they brought to North Africa and of course the Americas. Original studies by anthropologist Edvard Westermarck have shed some light on how the Bantu culture extended its influence beyond the sub-Saharan region to North Africa with mask and masquerade observances in the pre-Islamic indigenous Berber North African society.”®