AKIGA SAI IN HIS OWN WORDS

It was in May 1911, to return to those events, that the South African branch of the Sudan United Mission (SUM)Footnote ⁶ established a station in eastern Tivland in the village of Sai Dekpe, a senior elder of a section of one of the largest Tiv patriclans, called Shitire (or Shitile).Footnote ⁷ Three years earlier, the place had been reconnoitred by the founder of the SUM, Dr Karl Kumm (Rubingh Reference Rubingh1969: 93, consistent with Akiga's account). Sai's village sat handily alongside a trade route between two locally significant, non-Tiv towns: Wukari and Takum (East Reference East1939/Reference East1965: 1). Sai was a smith and a prominent man in his local community, and on both of these accounts he was generally considered to be endowed with a measure of that power Tiv call tsav, a capacity to be effective and imposing, including by occult means. Akiga tells us that his father was around forty when the Europeans (Buter) first came to Tivland, which probably means – depending on which Europeans Akiga had in mind – that he was born around or just after the middle of the nineteenth century, making him about fifty by the time he met the missionaries. In full, Sai's name, and the name his village took from him, was saa i utu, meaning that nothing could overwhelm him ‘except the affair of the night’, a reference to the work of the adepts of tsav, or mbatsav (Rubingh Reference Rubingh1969: 92). Pine adds further details about Akiga Sai's parentage.Footnote ⁸ His mother, Nanyi of the Ukum patriclan, was Sai Dekpe's ninth wife; they had one older child together, Akiga's only full sibling, his sister Kasevdue (spelt Kasevevduwe in Akiga) (Pine Reference Pinen.d. 1: 5). Soon after Akiga's birth, Nanyi left her husband, and her young son remained behind to be brought up in his father's compound, as would have been normal in this patrilineal society. Following E. N. Casaleggio's history of the DRCM, The Land Will Yield Its Fruits: fifty years in the Sudan (Reference Casaleggio1964), the Tiv historian Tesemchi Makar repeats without editorial comment how the mission branch founder, Mr Zimmerman, requested Sai to let him have one of his children to stay with him as houseboy.

Pine attributes Akiga's missing toes to a snake bite. Whatever their origin, there is agreement that Akiga suffered from minor disabilities. Sai's attitude might seem hard-hearted but their relationship appears in a benign light in the account of his son, who describes himself as his father's favourite child (Reference Akiga Sai2015: 94). Sai emerges from Akiga's retelling of the events in his life as a savvy survivor, a man with an eye for the main chance. In a long passage I can quote only in part, Akiga recounts with relish a slaving adventure that Sai only just pulled off.

The story continues with Sai and his friend Gbaa almost coming to grief in their effort to restrain three Hausa men and a woman travelling with them.

The mission convert is far from disowning the renown his father gained for his derring-do. Akiga was attributed strong tsav himself, or so he tells his readers in passages that speak of Tiv ambivalence towards possession of this power.Footnote ¹⁰ Sai was in the habit of performing akombo (or cult) rites in the fields of his head wife, El of the Turan patriclan, to which Akiga and Akiga's half-brother Hirekaan accompanied him. Sai had acquired an iron box from the John Holt trading company and left it in Hirekaan's care. When he neglected to lock the box, Hirekaan sought to exonerate himself by accusing Akiga of unlocking it by tsav. Akiga continues the story (also in East Reference East1939/Reference East1965: 243–4).

By accompanying his father, Akiga witnessed the akombo, and in looking into the chest he saw the imborivungu or ‘owl pipes’, composite voice disguisers including human remains (or cast in brass) associated with the repair of the land but also with the night and tsav (Bohannan Reference Bohannan1955: 146–9; Balfour Reference Balfour1948). Akiga adds further episodes that enhanced the reputation of his powers: one of the most striking involves him driving away black pigs (East Reference East1939/Reference East1965: 244–5; Akiga Sai Reference Akiga Sai2015: 95). As evidence of his close relationship with his father, Akiga tells us that he used to sleep in the hut of the wife whose turn it was to co-habit with him. So as not to annoy them:

In recounting these and other episodes, Akiga is not only recording things of the past for future generations of Tiv who will otherwise not know about them, although he avows, and achieved, this intention; and he is not just translating the increasingly salient notion of Tiv custom to missionaries, colonialists and educators, although he is willingly involved in that project too; nor is he primarily preoccupied with self-knowledge, although we can sense his awareness that he has fallen into curious and exceptional circumstances. Rather, his writing emanates from a specific early twentieth-century nexus of translational urgencies – between past and future generations, Christians and seekers after occult powers, Tiv and Europeans, his life story and that of his people, and so on – in which Akiga's complex subjectivity has both been produced and is ensnared. Part of what he explores, and evidently finds satisfying, concerns the possibilities of translation, not just of words, but of ideas, values and reputation between these categories that increasingly, he finds, are penetrating one another. This should be unsurprising when we consider that Akiga had worked as a translator from Hausa to Tiv for the missionaries from the age of thirteen.

To follow the implications of reputation a little further, father and son both were attributed and cultivated – or at least winked in the direction of and did not strongly deny – a reputation for tsav. To a degree, Akiga's renown was secured against that of his older paternal brother, Hirekaan, who is again an actor in the next family drama. Conflict between brothers, particularly those with different mothers, was anticipated by Tiv because of competition for resources. This could have serious repercussions, as occurred when Akiga's full sister, and only full sibling, died during one of the periodic anti-witchcraft movements among Tiv (Akiga Sai Reference Akiga Sai, Bergsma and Akiga2015: 113).

Allegations of witchcraft always mattered, but they mattered in new ways during the colonial period because witchcraft panics were acted upon by the British colonial authorities according to their best – and changing – understanding. In 1935, Akiga was writing in the aftermath of a particularly intensive pursuit of witches by the British and their African colonial officials (see Abraham Reference Abraham1933; Downes Reference Downes1933; Bohannan Reference Bohannan1958; Edwards Reference Edwards1983).Footnote ¹¹ Witchcraft was only one strand in a knot of cultural and social features with which the British system of indirect rule was ill-equipped to cope. Tiv were more egalitarian than the Northern Nigerian societies, notably the Hausa Emirates, where indirect rule had ‘worked’ – from the colonial viewpoint – most effectively. What's more, this egalitarianism was increasingly, but inconsistently, becoming a satisfyingly distinctive element in Tiv self-conception and self-appreciation. Equality did not come from lack of contest. On the contrary, the power idiom of Tiv witch beliefs chimed well with a society based on competition between prominent men, and this competition particularly took the form of an accumulation of rights in people: slaves, as we have already seen, and marriageable women and the marriage wards who gave access to them through exchange (Fardon Reference Fardon1984). The new religious and political orders presented a systematic challenge to this Tiv complex of institutions, a challenge that came from the young, from others empowered by money, who sometimes included chiefs, and from Christianity, as much as it came from the colonial regime. If Akiga's account of the earliest years of colonial rule over Tiv relies heavily on the perspective of his older informants, notably his father, which makes it an important supplement and corrective to the contemporary British record, it is also written from his perspective as a relatively young man (in his late thirties) and as a member of the class that arose in association with the not wholly consistent religious, educational, economic and political aims of the various parts of the colonial apparatus. In short, Akiga is a complex narrator, because he is a complexly meshed subject.

Akiga's subjectivity is highlighted by Gaurav Desai (Reference Desai2001) in his arresting discussion of a notorious case of witchcraft allegations. Desai contrasts the view of the colonial anthropologist Abraham, who proposes a mystical explanation for Tiv continuing to believe a body to be missing from the grave when other testimony declares that it was present and intact, with Akiga's pragmatic sense that Tiv used accusations of witchcraft tactically. To claim that a corpse has been removed from the grave is to direct an accusation against some specific other person of having colluded with witches to exhume it. From this reasoning, Desai deduces that Akiga has abandoned belief in tsav on converting to Christianity. But there are flaws in imputing a state of mind on such grounds. Anthropologists find that Christianity is not just compatible with belief in satanic powers, but may be experienced as a powerful protection against them, which, in a roundabout way, reinforces their reality. Recognizing the strategic character of a witchcraft accusation does not imply disbelief in witchcraft. To take a contemporary parallel, Nigerians are well aware that corruption charges are most commonly pressed against those who have lost political impunity; noticing this is not an argument that corruption is not widespread, it is an explanation of who gets away with it, and for how long. Simply by dint of noticing that Tiv use accusations of tsav instrumentally, and contrary to his explicit protestations to the contrary, Akiga is not committing himself practically and always to a world in which tsav does not exist.

TIV IDENTITY ON THE MARCH

By the later nineteenth century, Tiv expansion from the south-east may have been making substantial inroads into the valley of the Rivers Benue and Katsina for a couple of centuries. The earlier history is not agreed, but its details do not affect our story unduly (Bohannan Reference Bohannan1954; Iyo Reference Iyo, Idrees and Ochufu2002). The pre-existing powers of the Benue Valley, predominantly speakers of Jukun and Igala languages, had witnessed the peak of the Atlantic slave trade during the eighteenth century with its associated violence, followed by the dislocations of the Fulani-led jihads of the early nineteenth century (Kasfir Reference Kasfir, Berns, Fardon and Kasfir2011). These had involved not just occasional raids of devastating scale launched against particular settlements from Fulani strongholds, but a general deterioration of security that was conducive to other freebooters, who might occasionally ally with Fulani powers. The Chamba Leko-led raiding confederacies entering from the east (and settling in places such as Takum and Donga) fit this pattern, and so, in their different way, did the Tiv. Tiv farming communities were sufficiently strong, and apparently also elusive, in military terms to be able to occupy the lands of the people whom slave raiders had harried. Identification as Tiv may also have offered security to some of the remnant communities or uprooted individuals the times had produced. Whatever the combination of reasons, their overall effect is clear: the expansion of Tiv identity was rapid, and, by the end of the century, the Iharev clan and part of the Nôngov clan had crossed the River Benue to farm on its right, or northern, bank.

Aside from some early travellers' traversals on foot or up the Niger–Benue river system, the first instance of intensive contact that at least some of the Tiv outliers had with Europeans accompanied the expansion of Royal Niger Company trading posts in the late nineteenth century (Fremantle Reference Fremantle1920: 4–16). These early encounters gained Tiv a reputation for recalcitrance among the Europeans. Within a year of the trading posts opening in 1885, all except the one at Abinsi had been closed on grounds of insecurity. Then, on the declaration of the Nigerian Protectorate, Tiv north of the River Benue disrupted the work of engineers erecting a telegraph line across their territory, in part apparently because they did not want incursions onto their farms, and in part because copper wire was a desirable commodity. This action led directly from January 1900 to the ‘First Munshi Campaign’ (Munshi being the derogatory Hausa term for Tiv), a substantial action led by thirty-eight officers, in addition to NCOs (non-commissioned officers), under the direction of Colonel Arthur Willoughby George Lowry Cole (Royal Welsh Fusiliers). Further engagements followed in April and May of the same year, and an ‘unsettled district’ was declared in 1904. Relations came to a head again when local Tiv took the Jukun side in a feud with Hausa merchants in 1906 and helped destroy the Royal Niger Company's remaining trading station at Abinsi. The 1906 ‘Munshi Expedition’, under Colonel Julian Hasler with twenty-six officers, stalled when his troops were called into action elsewhere in the North to fight the ‘Mahdist’ uprising at Satiru, near Sokoto.

Shortly afterwards, British policy towards Tivland changed. In the year Lord Lugard was replaced as Governor of Northern Nigeria by Percy Girouard (Kirk-Greene Reference Kirk-Greene1984: 220–5), the Tiv came under the administration of a new Resident, the experienced Captain Upton FitzHerbert Ruxton (Akiga's ‘Chafa Rokson’), who had been political officer to the first ‘Munshi Expedition’ and also served briefly in the Royal Niger Constabulary, and of his Assistant Resident, Captain Charles Forbes Gordon (Akiga's ‘Chafa Godi’). David Dorward, historian of the Tiv under colonial rule, to whom this account is indebted generally, describes them both as ‘gradualists’ who were encouraged by the new Governor to pursue the peaceful expansion of British influence in Tivland between 1907 and 1910 (Dorward Reference Dorward1969; Reference Dorward1974). Episodes from one of Gordon's (Godi's) earliest tours (1905, apparently) as recounted by Akiga, reporting what he had heard from elders such as his father, give a vivid sense of eastern Tiv experience of British colonial adjudication, and of the establishment of Katsina Ala as an administrative hub.

Gordon has arrived at Katsina Ala and pitched his tent when a delegation of Etulo (an enclaved population speaking an Idomoid language) summon Ahungwaor (of the Kpav clan in Mbamo) to court because he has sold Tika into slavery. This is the first ever case in Shitire. It turns out that Tika, a Tiv on his father's side, had taken refuge with his mother's people (his igba in Tiv terms), from where he repeatedly stole boats from the Mbamo. Having arrested Ahungwaor, Gordon continues his tour and is confronted by the case of Boshi, a fellow clansman of Ahungwaor. It transpires that Ahungwaor had taken two men (including Tika) and two women, and had given one of the women to Boshi. But Boshi has transferred her to the local chief, also of Kpav. Gordon orders the release of the slaves and puts both Ahungwaor and Boshi into the chief's custody. So Gordon continues to another place where another woman complains of the seizure and sale of her child. Again, the child is released. And so it goes on until:

Colonial officers toured with a motley entourage, consisting notably of Hausa interpreters who acted as colonial intermediaries (see Ochonu Reference Ochonu2008; Reference Ochonu2014) and had to make judgements about complicated running struggles over rights in people. A little later, Akiga resumes his account of this episode:

A chase ensues after Ajang tries to shoot his way out of being ambushed and he is shot and his household sacked by the labourers and soldiers.

Tours like these and others that Akiga describes, with their interlacing of casual violence, adjudication, trade, administration, competing Tiv interests and so on, which gave rise to colonial towns such as Katsina Ala, allowed Girouard to claim success for an approach that did not rely on punitive campaigns. Girouard was inclined to trust his residents and their staff on the appropriateness of local arrangements, and in Gordon, David Dorward argues, Ruxton received particularly able support.Footnote ¹² Ruxton pressed for a more direct system of administration of Tiv. The colonial officers closest to the ground judged that indirect rule through neo-traditional chiefly offices (a model adapted from an Indian precedent and applied effectively, for reasons that were both ideological and practical, within the extensive Sokoto Caliphate and Bornu Empire) was difficult to implement with those peoples of central Nigeria who were not Muslims and lacked centralized structures of governance. The approximately half a million Tiv were the most populous of them, and, in many respects, they showed the most marked of departures from the kinds of organizations that lent themselves to a pragmatic synthesis of British colonial-administrative needs and Nigerian hereditary-elite interests. There were, of course, Tiv men who outshone their competitors to become men of prestige, and some of them claimed to be chiefs, but their pre-eminence was ambiguous in the eyes of their followers (since power implied tsav) and rarely lasted a lifetime, and they gave rise to dynasties even less often. The clear alternative, to rule directly through district officers, was rejected as too expensive. Some kind of compromise had to be found that was neither indirect rule achieved through local chiefs nor direct rule through expatriate colonial officials.

The upshot of this impasse was the introduction of what was called the jiri system: indirect rule through councils drawn from groups of residential compounds or yaa. This worked after a fashion, and some grounds for it could be found in local practice, but it was unable to bear the unprecedented demand for raising taxes, the extra burden of which caused it to break down between the years 1912 and 1916. Given the limited circulation of coin currency in Tivland, taxes had to be collected in kind and sold immediately to Hausa traders. According to Dorward (Reference Dorward1969: 321), Governor Temple in particular judged the implementation of administrative control by the success of tax collection, and he reacted to the inefficiencies of the jiri system in this regard by introducing sarki or chiefs (in Hausa). This ran contrary to Ruxton's view that Tiv should be taxed only when the benefits of rule, such as the administration of justice, became apparent and not before. The upshot was a ‘pseudo-Hausa’ system of indirect rule.

Efforts at taxation intensified when Captain John Morton Fremantle (Akiga's ‘Maimadubi’ or ‘Madubi’) became Muri Resident in 1914. Madubi appears in a consistently poor light in Akiga's account.

Dorward epitomizes the years 1914–32, precisely the period when Akiga would have been researching and writing his book, in terms of moves towards orthodox indirect rule and their failure. The appointment of fifth-class native chiefs went along with the abolition of the jiri system. In 1917, in an attempt to control Tiv territorial expansion, Fremantle reversed Ruxton's policy and ordered the expulsion of Tiv from Wukari District, which was considered to be Jukun territory. Any Tiv returning there were to be placed under Jukun authority, a policy consistent with the views of Acting Lieutenant Governor of Northern Nigeria Richmond Palmer, who saw in the Jukun the faded remnant of a once great empire with a capacity for leadership that might potentially solve the colonial search for suitable indirect rulers.

By 1926, Richmond Palmer had placed all Tiv living east of the River Katsina under the administration of the Jukun capital of Wukari. On the basis of a 1921 visit to Ibi (on the River Benue), he had reached the conclusion that the colonial regime itself had been responsible for the degeneracy of the Jukun rule and empire (Avav and Myegba Reference Avav and Myegba1992: 5). This provided one half of a plan to place the entire Benue Valley under either the Igala Atta of Idah, in the west, or the Jukun Aku of Wukari, in the east. The Resident of Munshi Province, Gordon, had warned in 1907 against the unrest this would cause. Governor Sir Hugh Clifford was also against the scheme, so it was not until Clifford departed to take up the governorship of Ceylon in 1925 that Kabba and Benue Provinces were formed to implement Palmer's plan, which, according to Dorward, turned out to be the failure that had been anticipated and had to be reversed.

Only Abinsi District (west of the River Katsina and north of the River Benue) continued under Tiv heads uninterruptedly. Thanks to an expansion of income from the cultivation of beniseed as a cash crop (Dorward Reference Dorward1975) and from labouring on the building of the railway, and with the active encouragement of the DRCM, younger men in particular began to agitate for the abolition of exchange marriage and the introduction of dowry marriage as a modern alternative (Wegh Reference Wegh1998: 55–7). To gain a wife through an exchange marriage, the most prestigious form of marriage, Tiv men were forced to wait until they became entitled to a marriage ward to offer an exchange partner. But older men, and others who became important in the colonial administration, could choose to use these wards themselves, thereby delaying the age of marriage for younger men while obliging young women to become the polygynous wives of elders, contrary to their wishes in the matter. In 1927, a meeting of heads in Abinsi agreed to the replacement of marriage by exchange with marriage by payment as the only officially recognized form. A council of elders was set up, and Audu dan Afoda, a long-standing resident Yoruba and chief of Makurdi, was appointed its President. In 1929, Jato Aka (the District Head of Turan in south-east Tivland) was appointed to the same position in Katsina Ala. Increasingly, the colonial district officers came to rely on such heads. The turnover of colonial personnel was rapid, and during the 1920s officers on the ground grew increasingly distant from local knowledge. Dorward notes that only a few of them – Bargery, Cooling, East and Phillips – sat Tiv examinations in that decade and, as the colonial officers became more distant, the heads behaved more autocratically, abusing the powers with which they were vested. These abuses were interpreted by their subjects in the idiom of tsav.

In November 1929, a complaint reached Captain Rupert Downes (Akiga's ‘Chafa Don’) from a man aggrieved because he had not been appointed to a district headship despite sacrificing a member of his family (whose skull and skin he showed). The Resident, E. S. Pembleton, ordered an enquiry and the seizure of akombo materials; this was the pretext for the predominantly Hausa local police, or Dogari, to unleash a reign of terror among the elders, sparking the haakaa witch-finding movement among Tiv youth. In 1930, investigations were undertaken by Captain R. C. Abraham, an anthropological officer in Northern Nigeria, and Captain R. M. Downes, the District Officer, each of whom wrote a book based on his experience and published by the government printers in 1933.Footnote ¹³ Downes' explanation of the double-edged character of tsav was accompanied by a criticism of the ‘younger generation … especially when they have been alienated from their home influences’ and suspect the elders of ‘evil practices with the foulest of motives’ (Reference Downes1933: 45).Footnote ¹⁴ As Abraham articulated it, the aim of the Nigerian government was to ‘disturb as little as possible the existing fabric of native institutions and to pave the way for their development along their own natural evolutionary lines’, and the periodic witch scares should not have been an obstacle to this because investigations into the mbatsav had not proved a single case of cannibalistic killing or eating. If this indeed occurred ‘sporadically’, it would not pose a ‘serious menace’ (Reference Abraham1933: 106).

The new image of the Tiv that emerged from these investigations emphasized their linguistic, hence cultural, relationship to the Bantu, and the fact that they lived in what Downes called a ‘family State’ with no ‘natural organisation beyond that of the “kindred”’ (Reference Downes1933: 24, 26). ‘[L]ike all the Bantu,’ Abraham generalized, ‘the Tiv is essentially a democrat’ (Reference Abraham1933: 2). Leadership or ‘natural authorities’ (Abraham Reference Abraham1933: 33) within family-based units had been eclipsed by the appointment of lesser men as tax collectors, which was an error on the part of the colonial authorities (a view with which East concurred). Downes' reform proposals of 1932 advocated three tiers of administration, from a Tiv central council, to a clan council of kindred heads, and a kindred council with an elected Tor (head or chief) meeting annually. In 1933, shortly before Akiga completed his text, Katsina Ala and Abinsi were merged into Tiv Division – largely aligning administrative and ethnic subjects – and the reforms went ahead. By 1936, however, the number of clans needing recognition had grown by half in three years (from thirty-six to fifty-seven) and clan councils had expanded to include more elders, making them unwieldy instruments of administration. The growth in power of spokesmen who could no longer be dismissed by the councils was accompanied by outbreaks of hoyo or witch-outings and beatings by youths. Periodically, this phenomenon came to the attention of the district officers, as it did in 1939, when the Wukari officer noted the outbreak of Inyamibuan, an anti-tsav movement that, among other measures, promoted extreme treatments to make corpses unpalatable to consumption by witches.Footnote ¹⁵

By the later 1930s, Tiv modernizers were calling for a Tor Tiv, or Tiv paramount chief, in part because they missed out on the advantages of other neo-traditional positions. Orodi Ugba and Akiga Sai began to promote their candidacies in 1938 (Dorward Reference Dorward1974: 471). Inyamibuan has been interpreted as a reaction to the British blocking this discussion, and the modernizers’ desire to hold existing Tiv authorities to account in the context of rapid, but often temporary, conversion to the Christianity of the Dutch Reformed Church Mission (DRCM), as well as the perceived failure of the council system. The historian David Dorward portrays the movement as an attempt to establish an alternative administration (Dorward Reference Dorward1974: 471). D. F. H. McBride (the District Officer in Tiv Division) carried out investigations that suggested that the holding of a swem, or oath, pot conferred legitimacy at each clan level. Dorward suggests that this patriarchal structure was more likely to have been the form taken by the legitimation of the elders who became powerful after Inyamibuan by virtue of their control of swem. In 1942, Governor Bourdillon supported McBride's plans for reorganization, strongly opposed by Downes, to create a council of ‘sept’ (or major clan) patriarchs. But this also proved another ineffective initiative, and Sir Arthur Richards finally yielded to the desire for a Tor Tiv. In 1947, presumably to the disappointment of Akiga Sai, Makere Dzakpe was appointed Tor Tiv; he was an ex-sergeant major in the West Africa Frontier Force and a former chief of the Native Authority Police. The appointment reinforced the ethnic identity of the Tiv with respect to the predominantly Hausa North of Nigeria, providing that identity with a focal point from which a more hierarchical version of history could be added to the egalitarian legacy (Luga and Tortema c.Reference Luga and Tortema1991). The following year a council of the Tor Tiv was established with eight councillors from the ‘septs’. David Dorward concludes his account by noting that, while councils might have corresponded most closely to Tiv political culture, they struggled to be able to discharge the administrative functions demanded of them. When Laura and Paul Bohannan arrived in 1949 to commence the field research that was the basis of their celebrated accounts of Tiv patriliny, clans had been the contentious basis of British administration for at least two decades.

FINDING AKIGA'S STORY

With this background, let us return both to Akiga's story, where we left him aged thirteen, and to Akiga's Story, the book. Thanks to the efforts of Harold Bergsma, Martin Akiga and their team of Tiv translators, those of us unable to read Tiv finally have access to a complete English-language translation, of nearly 190,000 words, of the typescript of the History of the Tiv that Bergsma saved from destruction in 1964 when he came across it in the Government Secondary School in Gboko in central Tivland (Bergsma, this issue).Footnote ¹⁶ This Tiv text was the source for Akiga's Story, published by the Oxford University Press for the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures (IIALC) in 1939. What is the relationship between the versions?

Since it reflects upon that process, Akiga Sai must have written his ‘Introduction’ to the typescript of the History after it had been typed up; consistent with this, the introduction is not numbered consecutively with the main text. Akiga tells us there that he completed his History in manuscript in 1935, the date that recurs alongside his contemporary observations: he acknowledges the encouragement of the DRCM missionaries, notably ‘Ortese Uhe’ (Reverend Dr William A. Malherbe, born 1888, who served in Tivland from 1915 until 1934). Akiga could not afford to have his completed manuscript typed, and the missionaries were unable to fund its publication either, but, realizing its value, they brought it to the attention of the colonial authorities who enlisted Rupert East, Superintendent of Education, who also spoke Tiv. The two men worked together on the manuscript both in Mkar (not far from Gboko), where East joined Akiga, and in Zaria, where Akiga stayed with East. East then returned to meet Akiga in Gboko and they toured Tivland together to interview those of Akiga's informants who were still alive.

The archived file relating to publication sheds more light on this process.Footnote ¹⁷ East had brought the text to the attention of P. G. Harris, who wrote on behalf of the Acting Chief Commissioner in April 1935 from the Secretary's Office Northern Province Kaduna to A. B. Mathews, a colonial officer apparently on home leave, asking him to enquire into the possibility of a learned society being interested in publishing a bilingual edition. Given the date, it is unsurprising that Harris specifically mentions Akiga's material on witchcraft as likely to be insightful. Harris's letter proposes publication in Tiv with an English translation and necessary notes amounting to around 400 pages of text, an underestimate so substantial as to suggest that the scale of Akiga's work had not yet been appreciated. The Tiv typescript alone is 380 pages long. The minutes of the IAI Executive Council for 1936 and subsequentlyFootnote ¹⁸ reveal that East had been the recipient of an IAI studentship to work in Berlin for two months with Diedrich WestermannFootnote ¹⁹ on linguistics. East had intended to resume this work, with a small further grant from the IAI, but had been unable to secure leave. Presumably on the basis of this prior acquaintanceship, and the fact that the IIALC was one of Harris's suggested learned societies, East sent a proposal to Westermann to publish this ‘honest attempt by an untrained African to write the story of his own tribe’. Westermann reported that he was able to recommend to the IIALC Council publication of a book of around 300 pages in English translation with notes. The proposal chimed with his plan to inaugurate a series of African-authored texts.

In January 1936, the Institute offered £50 towards the cost of producing ‘A history of the Tiv Tribe by Akiga’, as the title was then envisaged, on the basis of additional funding from the government of Nigeria. Following a series of negotiations, it was agreed by May 1936 that the Commissioner for Northern Nigeria would provide another £150 towards publication. East expressed the hope that he would complete the work in a year. The length of the work exceeded initial estimates, however, and the cost eventually settled with Oxford University Press by late 1938, following various confusions over typographic design and font sizes, required additional funding of £81, secured by East from the Tiv Native Authority. Neither the publication file nor the council minutes reveal who made the decision to retitle the book Akiga's Story. The final title appears from early 1938 in the surviving documentation, but not to the exclusion of the old title. In later years, when issues arose over reproduction rights, East distinguished clearly between Akiga's History of the Tiv and his own Akiga's Story. The retitling was consistent with the prejudice that Akiga's work was not a history, nor was it an ethnography, but perhaps a ‘story’ or piece of literature, and it may be indicative that East used the term ‘story’ in his original publication proposal quoted above.

Westermann contributed a three and a half page ‘Preface’ (with the byline ‘Berlin April 1939’) that was to be contentious. This was not on account of what now seems its patronizing tone, but for claiming that East ‘encouraged and guided the author throughout his work’ (East Reference East1939: viii), which provoked a response from Reverend Attie J. Brink,Footnote ²⁰ by then Chairman of the DRCM in South Africa, about which Hanns Vischer, unable to contact Westermann after the outbreak of war, wrote to East on 21 November 1939. Brink averred that: ‘The idea of the work … was born in 1914 when Mrs Brink gave the author a note book and a pencil and encouraged him to write down all that he told her, and asked him to get out of the old men all he could while they were still alive. And she and others helped him through the years’ (Brink to the Secretary of the IIALC, 3 October 1939). East responded: ‘He is quite right in saying that I had nothing to do with the draft of the original manuscript. This was shown to me in a rough form in 1935, and I worked with the author on it after that, chiefly from the point of view of English expression’ (East to Vischer, 19 December 1939), which still leaves a degree of uncertainty about the relationship between the manuscript and typescript versions of Akiga's History of the Tiv that may be impossible to settle completely.

The first edition of Akiga's Story had a print run of 500 copies of which only 250 were ever bound: the other 250 quires were discarded, and later the printing blocks were also destroyed (letter confirming permission to the printers from the IAI, 16 October 1956). In this light, the 1965 reprint of the book might seem surprising, but it followed a resurgence of interest, which East partly attributed to Margaret Mead referencing the work in her 1954 Cultural Patterns and Technical Change. Because the blocks had been destroyed, the main text of Akiga's Story had to be reprinted lithographically. New text was added at the beginning of the book (replacing Westermann's contentious ‘Preface’ with a two-page ‘Foreword’ by Daryll Forde as the IAI Director, and a two-page ‘Preface’ by East) and at its end (a bibliography of works on Tiv largely compiled by Paul Bohannan). East himself suggested suppression of the ‘Preface’ by his ‘old friend’ because, as he put it, ‘The situation is not quite the same as when he wrote it’ (East to Wolfe, Secretary of the IAI, 26 June 1964). The photographic plates posed a more difficult problem since the originals had all gone missing (East, 2 December 1964). Whereas each of the twenty-four illustrations had occupied a full-page plate, inserted at the relevant place in the text, in the 1965 reprint, with the exception of the frontispiece portrait of Akiga, the photographs were assembled into a single insert of twenty illustrations, all but four as half pages.Footnote ²¹ While perfectly serviceable, a comparison of the original and the reprint reveals that text, and especially images, are less sharp in the latter, which is true also of the endpaper map.

How does East's editorial hand affect the way we have been able to ‘hear’ Akiga until now? The response has two halves to it: additive and subtractive. Given the use of distinct type sizes, what East added has always been evident from the pages of Akiga's Story where extended, sequential excerpts from Akiga are framed with introductory and explanatory notes, many of them helpful to a readership unfamiliar with Tiv culture: what tsav or akombo are as religious and ritual concepts; how exchange marriage involving wards, or angôl, worked, and so on. This allows East to retain a few key terms that are difficult to translate exactly, including the three in the previous sentence. Doing so imparts an ethnographic, authorial voice of East's own to the book, signalled most obviously by Akiga becoming part of the book title rather than its author on the title page. It also bears remarking that the new translation demonstrates just how accurate was East's translation, which, of course, was achieved with Akiga's help. The major change in our appreciation comes from the other, negative half of the response: our being able to see what East left out and how he rearranged what was retained from the entirety of the Tiv typescript in its final order. Entire sequences were excised, but there is also more subtle remodelling to create some of East's chapters through rearrangements of larger and smaller chunks of text, as well as micro-tinkering, as in the suppression of many of the names of individual European colonial functionaries. The three largest sections excised consisted of historical materials, including accounts of: the migrations of the Tiv clans into their present territories;Footnote ²² the coming of British traders and the ensuing colonial conquest; and the advent of the Dutch Reformed Church and Roman Catholic missions in Tivland. The effect is to focus more closely on the ethnographic present of the ‘Tiv tribe’ than does Akiga, whose account is more extraverted in its insistence that the Tiv had copied almost all their culture from outsiders over the course of their history. As a result, Akiga's Story resembles the published ethnographies of the Tiv that were roughly contemporary with Akiga's manuscript more than does the History.

The new translation of the History is divided into eleven ‘chapters’ (itiough), which are convenient for comparison with East's eight chapters. However, even without knowledge of Tiv, it is evident from inspection of the source typescript that the ‘chapter’ headings – other than the first two – are later additions by hand, presumably by East (which is why I place ‘chapter’ in quotation marks when it refers to the History and translates itiough). Of the two typewritten ‘chapter’ headings, only the second is titled. Otherwise, the typescript of Akiga's manuscript consists of a single, 380-page thread divided into numerous sections, some with centred titles and some with headings justified to the left margin. Annotations such as ‘small capitals’, along with the addition of accents and the deletion of double vowels, suggest that this surviving typescript was a work in progress. We know that the initial plan for a complete Tiv edition foundered because of its length, which may have stranded this typescript in editorial limbo. Comparison of the two sets of chapters is informative only with this proviso.

East's Chapter 1, ‘The origin of the Tiv tribe, and of some of the tribal customs’, matches Akiga's opening closely. Akiga relates the origin of the Tiv to their adoption of circumcision from their neighbours and he pursues the associations between bodily modifications – facial scarification, pierced ears, chiselled teeth, patterned cicatrizing on women's stomachs – with Tiv historical differentiation from other peoples, as well as with differences among Tiv, such as the fashion introduced by travellers for the lighter facial scarification of the ‘nail men’. Narration of the migration and dispersal of the Tiv is linked to bodily modification so that marks made upon the body can be construed as the traces of history.

East's Chapter 2, entitled ‘The homestead, the farm, and the bush’, follows Akiga as he broadens the theme of making the body into the making of the home, with its leisure area, specialist locations such as the forge (for smiths), granary, and reception hut (for strangers). The chapter moves from places to the products of them: examining tools and foodstuffs – grain crops (including sorghum, adopted from the Chamba), lingering over the prize crop of the yam (adopted from their southern neighbours the ‘Dam’), from which East cut an extensive listing of types, then varieties of sweet potato – before encompassing non-food vegetable products such as bark cloth, cotton cloth (from the Chamba) and camwood. A section on magical rites has been inserted (East Reference East1939/Reference East1965: 90–2), and, finally, a section specifically on relations with the Ugenyi or Chamba.

It is in Chapter 3 that the first major break with Akiga's sequencing occurs when the sections on marriage are moved forward and together titled ‘Marriage and tribal organization’. This makes sense in terms of the conventions of an ethnographic monograph (livelihood being followed by family organization), but it alters the thrust of Akiga's account, which next outlined religion. The abolition by the colonial administration of exchange marriage on 15 July 1927, and its replacement by a system of bride price, remained a lively issue for Tiv long after 1935. Akiga's succinct opening to this section lays out the logic fundamental to exchange marriage: wives who were acquired for sisters ‘would procreate to replace the sisters who had been given out for marriage’, and hence the names of these sisters would not ‘be consigned to oblivion in the family circle’ (Akiga Sai Reference Akiga Sai2015: 167). Perhaps counterintuitively to a non-Tiv reader, exchange institutionalized the respect due to sisters in this patrilineal descent system. But exchange marriage was already in the past, so Akiga, and East following him, devote twice as much text to marriage by purchase and by capture. The legitimacy of marriage related to another fraught concern of the time: changing eligibility for chiefship, which had earlier been restricted to the children of exchange marriage. These interplays provoked an ‘inundation’ of cases and litigation that Akiga evokes through case histories that reveal the bias of witnesses. East removed from Akiga's account the names of the colonial officers involved in the summit with chiefs and council members that passed the legislative change (these names are restored and identified in the new translation: ‘Mogan’/Morgan from Makurdi, ‘Fishi’/Feasey from Abinsi, ‘Saim’/Smith from Katsina AlaFootnote ²³ ). Various factors account for the chiefs' acquiescence to the change: there was a convergence of interests between young men flush with cash from railway work and some of the cash-rich chiefs, who were strongly in favour of marriage by bride price; and the chiefs were anxious generally because one among them, Chief Ugba, had recently been deported to Kaduna by Feasey and they feared a similar fate. Akiga claimed that a ruse by Nigerian officials in the employment of the colonial authorities convinced those assembled that they were about to be deported to Kaduna in lorries recently arrived for the purpose. Nonetheless, any who had daughters complied reluctantly with the new ruling. East commented on the younger men and women being most satisfied with the change, and expressed a hope for the spread of Christianity ‘bringing with it a higher view of the status of women’ and thereby a more ‘satisfactory form of marriage’ (than by bride price, presumably). The district officers themselves considered that the step might have been too drastic (East Reference East1939/Reference East1965: 168, note 2), and that it was responsible for driving a wedge into the crack in relations between generations, thereby contributing to the rising of the young against their elders in the haakaa movement only two years later (East Reference East1939/Reference East1965: 169).

East's Chapters 4 and 5, based on materials in ‘Chapters’ 3, 4 and 5 of Akiga's History, deal with the more positive powers of cults (akombo), the oath pot (swem) and body protectors (kuraiyol) in Chapter 4, and in Chapter 5 with the predominantly negative power of witchcraft (tsav). There have been several excisions from Chapter 4, including a lengthy story about the origin of akombo, as well as references to the severity with which Downes sought out witches in 1929; sections on kuraiyol, or body protectors, are moved to the end of the chapter. Significantly, a section on the Tiv High God (Aôndo) is moved here from its position before Akiga's penultimate ‘chapter’ on missionaries, which otherwise is dropped. The chapter on tsav is heavily editorialized by East, from his initial declaration about the ‘well-defined’ character of Tiv beliefs to a closing admission that the 1929 colonial anti-witchcraft campaign had been based on a misconception (East Reference East1939/Reference East1965: 235, 289–95). Akiga begins his account with a statement that East tells us translates literally as ‘That which is not in Tiv, as tsav, is not’, or, more idiomatically, ‘nothing is more illusory in Tiv than tsav’ (East Reference East1939/Reference East1965: 240). The succession of anti-witchcraft movements is well known to specialists thanks to Paul Bohannan's classic description (Bohannan Reference Bohannan1958). The latest, the haakaa, had been provoked by conflict over an inherited wife leading to accusations of ritual murder coming to the attention of the colonial authorities, particularly Downes as the Resident at Katsina Ala. It ended while Downes was on leave, when investigations into another alleged ritual murder, followed by an inquiry, concluded both that Tiv fears of witchcraft were largely illusory and that they had been exacerbated by the introduction of chiefships thought to require human sacrifice. The mbatsav, the inquiry concluded in a reversal of previous wisdom, traditionally were upholders of welfare (East Reference East1939/Reference East1965: 292).

Much of the interest of the complete new translation for readers already familiar with Akiga's Story will be found in its second half. The History's ‘Chapter’ 6 on migrations, absent from East, was translated and heavily annotated in a version by Paul Bohannan that remains essential but does not present the integral text of the original. In addition, most of what became ‘Chapter’ 7 of the History was included in East's Chapter 3 on marriage. As East explains, his Chapter 6, ‘The individual and the group’, was created largely from the materials placed in Akiga's final ‘chapter’ (Aeren a Tiv), which was called ‘Tiv culture’ in Bergsma's translation and ‘Tiv custom’ by East (Reference East1939/Reference East1965: 296). How much Akiga considered the final shape of his account we do not know, but the use of the titles Ya, or home, near the outset, and Aeren, or custom, at the end imparts a recursive sense to the grounds of ethnic identification, which is both the opening and final subject. This was obscured by the make-up of East's Chapter 6, which selected from Akiga's more extensive range of subjects those particularly to do with life stages and rearranged them with a lifetime sequence in mind. Akiga's closing comments in his book about Tiv character, notably their worrying improvidence, are moved to the end of this chapter, which is followed by a brief chapter on ‘Diseases and their treatment’ that has been excised from Akiga's section on anti-tsav movements.

With Chapter 8, ‘Chiefs and administration’, East's account is made to culminate, unlike Akiga's own, with the contemporary issue of the role of Tiv chiefs. East's readers would have been in a weak position to contest his view that Akiga had not written the book of history he intended because Akiga's Story either reordered or omitted much of the material contained in the sections that make up ‘Chapters’ 8, 9 and 10 of the History, dealing successively with Tiv chiefs, European trade and administration, the idea of God and the coming of the missionaries. Before returning to Tiv custom, Akiga's history of modernization culminates in the missionaries’ impact, particularly in education and healthcare.

Turning again from Akiga's Story to Akiga's story, what more can be added about the author? After his father gave him to the Zimmerman household, Akiga learned quickly to read and write in Tiv and began to develop into a mission worker himself. Rubingh records with exactness that, ‘On January 21, 1912, Akiga declared Christ to be his personal savior’ (Reference Rubingh1969: 92). He was the first Tiv to do so. Two years later, Atah Pine (Reference Pinen.d. 1: 7–8)Footnote ²⁴ tells us that Akiga ‘had scripted the first-ever Tiv letter by a Tiv man’.

In July 1914, Akiga was sent to the SUM's evangelist school in Wukari, where he completed the course to become the first Tiv evangelist (Dzurgba Reference Dzurgba2007: 70). Baptism followed on 30 December 1917 as one of four converts (Rubingh Reference Rubingh1969: 92); the other three are identified by Atah Pine as Alam, Alam's wife Kime, and Akiga's brother Teiyor.Footnote ²⁵ Teiyor trained as a mason with the mission and helped build the church in Mkar. He predeceased Akiga, who was buried alongside him in Mkar in accordance with the wish expressed in his will. A third grave there belongs to Akiga's first wife, Dina Yagana, described as a freed slave girl of Kanuri or Beri Beri extraction. She shared this status with Alam's wife Kime, who was in the group baptized with Akiga. Both girls came from Rumaisha, a ‘Freed Slaves Home’ on the River Benue that was funded by the colonial government, but run by the SUM, in response to the large numbers of slaves on the move after the defeat of the Sokoto Caliphate (Lovejoy and Hogendorn Reference Lovejoy and Hogendorn1993: 111–26). Akiga Sai and Dina Yagana married in 1918 when Akiga was around twenty years old, considerably younger than would have been typical in the recent past, particularly for less-favoured sons of successful men. Over the next twenty-five years, they produced four surviving daughters and five sons, who in turn produced a Tiv dynasty.Footnote ²⁶ Later, Akiga would take three more wives, which contributed to his dismissal from the church.Footnote ²⁷ Unlike his first wife, all were Tiv: Jato Akiga of Shangev-Ya clan, Zaiyol Akiga from Mbaikyobo of the Ukan clan, and Achivir Rachel Akiga of the Nanev. The last of these had two children with him.Footnote ²⁸

The mission station did not remain long at Sai. Initially, the SUM was permitted to evangelize only to the east of Sai, but in 1912 they gained permission to work the larger area east of the River Katsina Ala (and so established themselves at Zaki Biam in 1913, and at Sevav in 1919, where there was a school for girls). In 1923, permission was granted to extend their work west of the Katsina Ala, and Mkar was established (since 2005, the site of a private university under the auspices of the Nongu u Kristu u Sudan hen Tiv or NKST, the successor to the SUM and DRCM). By 1926, the mission decided, among other things, that Sai was altogether too far to the east in Tivland and efforts there had been ‘very fruitless’, so it was closed and, to save money, its personnel and materials transferred (Rubingh Reference Rubingh1969: 122; Dzurgba Reference Dzurgba2007: 78). The South African missionaries had a ‘strong aversion’ to teaching the Tiv in English or Hausa, which might be interpreted as not just cultural paternalism but incipient apart-hood. The decision to switch the medium of evangelization and instruction to Tiv was taken by 1912 (Akiga Sai Reference Akiga Sai2015: 272–5). Corporal punishment was administered by the missionaries to schoolchildren who tried to speak English, wear shoes or ride a bicycle (Rubingh Reference Rubingh1969: 100–1). This background makes Akiga's writing his history in Tiv awkward to interpret only in terms of cultural nationalism or authenticity. The DRCM was to experience keen competition from the establishment of Roman Catholic missions with a more welcoming attitude towards the consequences of modernization.

East recalled in 1965 that, in the two decades after their book was first published in 1939, Akiga had first become the editor of a monthly Tiv language news sheet (Mwanger u Tiv) for the Gaskiya Corporation, a publishing venture East himself played a major role in establishing (Furniss Reference Furniss2011). He then spent five years from 1951 as a member of the Northern House of Assembly (which had been created by the 1946 Richards Constitution; Tseayo Reference Tseayo1975: 193–8), as well as working with the Tiv Native Authority in the fields of literature and adult education (Akiga Sai Reference Akiga Sai and Bohannan1954: 295, note 1). As a representative for Ukum-Shitile constituency, Akiga joined the Sardauna of Sokoto's Northern People's Congress (NPC), the predominantly Hausa and Muslim party of the North. He was one of the delegates sent to the London constitutional conference in 1953 (Dzurgba Reference Dzurgba2007: 70; Sklar Reference Sklar2004: 132–5). Although a much younger man, his political contemporary was Joseph Tarka, the populist leader of the United Middle Belt Congress, which mobilized with the Action Group against Northern hegemony (and its NPC supporters, who were portrayed as reactionary), and it is Tarka rather than Akiga who is remembered among the first post-independence generation of Tiv politicians (Makar Reference Makar1994).

***

Akiga's life transpires to have been that of a man more deeply immersed in current affairs than his own effacing ‘Introduction’, or East's first-edition editorial commentary, had foreseen. Akiga had presented himself as a historian keen to pass on knowledge of the ‘forefathers’ to generations of Tiv to come, but his text culminates with a rallying call to his Tiv brothers in the new generation to take pride in their past as a source of strength, a timely call as the salience of ethnicity was becoming increasingly apparent within the modernizing, colonial Nigerian state.

As well as a revelation in itself, the full translation of Akiga Sai's History of the Tiv allows us to see Rupert East's hand as editor and translator more clearly. For all that he was committed to African writing, which he spent much of his life promoting, and was fluent in some African languages, the culturally conservative frame East puts around Akiga's picture has dated, notably his rigid genre expectations. Akiga, he asserts, set out to write a ‘History of the Tiv’ but had not succeeded because ‘the Tiv, like most African tribes, have no history in our sense of the term’. Akiga's effort failed to meet the threshold for anthropology either: ‘Anthropology has already grown up, and is preparing to enter the age grade of the exact sciences.’ The book should be ‘judged [not] as an anthropological treatise, but as a contribution to the newly born African literature’ (East Reference East1939/Reference East1965: 6).Footnote ²⁹ Given East's promotion of African literature, this was not faint praise, but it does not align with Akiga's ambition for a work that brought together all the genres of written expression familiar to him to bear on the burning issues of his day. So we find oral histories, biography, ethnographic description, imagined exemplary episodes and conversations, annotated lists, and eyewitness accounts, mashed up together to record what mattered to Akiga's contemporaries. On the evidence of his book, during the mid-1930s these issues did not revolve around resistance to colonialism as such. Conquest had been ruthless, as Akiga documented, but life had been hard before then too, as Akiga also demonstrated, on occasion with relish as when recounting his father's slaving exploits. Both the precolonial period and the colonial conquest are treated as history. Akiga's main focus is on the controversies of his own time: the abolition of exchange marriage in 1927 and the reasons polygyny was so attractive to Tiv; the excesses of chiefs and of other African colonial personnel (both Tiv and others such as Hausa), and the degree to which British officials were or were not aware of this, and were or were not willing to do anything about it; the periodic attempts by both Tiv and British officials to detect and deal with the use of occult powers or tsav; the changes in livelihood that were occurring in farming and labouring; the impact of the missionaries and the particular admiration of the Tiv for the practical abilities they demonstrated in relation, for instance, to medical care. For all that East was a sympathetic collaborator, who expended immense efforts in translating and interpreting Akiga's text predominantly with a non-Tiv readership in mind, Akiga's Story: the Tiv tribe as seen by one of its members is not A History of the Tiv People by Akiga Sai. Contemporary readers are unlikely to concur with East's attempt to look into the future.

East's future gazing has not turned out to be accurate. Akiga was encouraged by his missionary and colonial circles to interpret his task in terms of a translation of wisdom between tradition and modernity. Occasionally he echoes these ambitions, and his younger self had acted as an interpreter to the missionaries. But what he wrote was a much more complex mixture of autobiographical engagement, family history, oral tradition, eyewitness accounts, contemporary contentions, and much else. The events described continue to resonate in a Nigeria that has been independent for more than half the century since its unification in 1914, and where what is understood to be ‘traditional’ – whether in land rights or cultural prerogatives or chiefship – plays an important part now. For reasons I have tried to suggest, Akiga's History transpires to feel more contemporary than East's and Bohannan's edited translations of it. Akiga's well-intentioned translators altered the overall balance of his many-genred text in ways that restricted its purpose, making it into an ethnography from the ‘native point of view’ rather than a multiform history written by a contemporary actor engaged in that history. From the viewpoint of the present, the second kind of text seems the more interesting.