Beyond the headlines captured by high-profile Nigerian vigilantes such as the hisba, the Bakassi Boys and the O'odua People's Congress, night guards and vigilantes have been a popular local response to theft, armed robbery and threats to security – from rural lineage to urban street, right across the country. The legitimation of this vigilante activity, of both its regional and local forms, has extended beyond dissatisfaction with current levels of law and order and the failings of the Nigeria Police.
The way in which ordinary men and women devise and support alternative strategies to mete out immediate justice or to organize vigilante groups has been seen, for instance, as a coping mechanism in the face of a predatory state (Chabal and Daloz Reference Chabal and Daloz1999). It has also been argued that a range of factors contribute to a ‘political imagination’ that serves to legitimate vigilante operations. These imaginings include conceptions of the elite status and illegitimate wealth of the criminals they target; the normalization of violence as an ethical response against disorder; and the vigilantes' symbolic status as ‘superheroes’ (Smith Reference Smith2004). The various regional vigilante movements (including hisba, Bakassi Boys and OPC) are also claimed to draw legitimacy from the way in which they have defended the interests of their ethnic and religious communities. Here Nigerian vigilantes, as ethnic militia, have been located in the context of West Africa's ‘collapsed states’ and what Reno calls the politics of insurgency. In particular he situates the Nigerian ethnic militia in the militarization of patronage networks that have become an endemic feature from the Guinea Coast to the Niger Delta (Reno Reference Reno2002; Agbu Reference Agbu2004). These perspectives – of coping on the frontiers of the postcolony, of constructing a popular repertoire of vigilante imagery, and of vigilantism's relationship to insurgent politics – do not, however, fully capture the historically contingent and culturally specific logics of what being a vigilante means.
First, these accounts ignore the way in which vigilantism is a practice by which people insinuate themselves into networks of surveillance (de Certeau Reference de Certeau1984: 96). Vigilantes do not simply acquiesce to or oppose the unfettered instrumentalization of disorder – voice and exit are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they come to terms with it by means of brokerage, by inserting themselves within political and economic niches. Vigilantism concerns men and women who have the ability to represent the state or to enforce its laws and to move with impunity between appeals to the form of law and forms of extra-judicial practice that are clearly construed as lying outside or prior to the state (Das and Poole Reference Das, Poole, Das and Poole2004: 13). The vigilante group discussed here contests these positions through complex and ambiguous conceptions of accountability that draw on repertoires of monitoring and surveillance, screening and vigilance. Vigilantes seek to open spaces for themselves, and in so doing speak various ‘languages of stateness’ to legitimate their actions (Hansen and Stepputat Reference Hansen, Stepputat, Hansen and Stepputat2001: 5). These activities not only concern security functions, but also include a range of services: disciplining truant school children, sponsoring young unemployed people, providing an evening court, securing community funds from taxi touting, catching stray livestock on farmland, recovering debts, screening political candidates, and representing community interests in petitions against chiefs, councils and contractors.
Second, to understand vigilantism as a mode of collective violence it is necessary to take account of the moral imperatives to that violence. This is the aspect of Nigerian vigilantism that this article will focus on, and is especially important if the anthropology of violence is to map the different moral and aesthetic evaluations people in different contexts make of their actions on the bodies of others (Spencer Reference Spencer and Das2003: 1568). Diffused in crowds and mobs and concentrated in groups and gangs, ‘popular’ violence tends to obey moral imperatives and is often structured in terms of ‘legitimate’ targets and appropriate punishments. These various moral communities produce notions of justice and law with different kinds of imaginaries from those available in the official sites and representations of justice and law (Das and Poole Reference Das, Poole, Das and Poole2004: 22). Their views of justice are often ‘retrospective vision[s] of a world restored to its proper order’ (Spencer Reference Spencer and Das2003: 1570), but this is not to say that they are based on unchanging notions of cultural norms and practice. Rather, the complexity of lived experience inflects both past and imagined futures into an ambiguous, dynamic and very powerful notion of the moral order and of the routines by which it should be upheld.
Contemporary vigilantism in Nigeria represents the articulation of claims to a set of rights based on the historical and spiritual legitimacy of young powerful men, ‘sons of the soil’, defending the community under the protection of local religious injunction and protection. The development of hisba committees in northern states draws upon a religious idiom of legitimacy and discipline. Murray Last (this issue) argues that it is a grassroots response to the failures of the judicial system and to the inequalities experienced by those young men who invoke piety as a political act and join vigilante groups to enforce the shari‘a code. In southern Nigeria vigilantism draws on the pervasive idiom of the secret society. Insa Nolte's (2004) work, for instance, has shown how in Yoruba communities in south-western Nigeria the membership, performance and practice of the Oro secret society and local vigilante groups of the O'odua People's Congress overlap.
The practice of Annang vigilantism discussed in this article draws its legitimacy from similar performative repertoires. Based on an ethnography of Annang vigilante groups, this analysis outlines how the micro-politics of vigilance are based on the processes that define internal, localized registers and styles of action.Footnote 1 Vigilantism in this context is embedded in narratives of contested rights, in familiar everyday practices, understandings of epistemology and personhood, and in alternative, historically informed perceptions of power. First this article will look at spatial practices and will examine the ways in which vigilantes in their nocturnal patrols construct a spatial topography of the village community, rich in a sedimented history. Second, it will interpret the making of categories of difference, and demonstrate how various embodied practices combine to divide good from bad, insiders from strangers, and vigilantes from thieves. Finally, the article will assess the epistemological notions of truth and proof in vigilante justice.
WALKING WITH VIGILANTES
The routines of Annang vigilance concern the making of cognitive, temporal and spatial boundaries. Surveillance (ukpeme iduη, to watch village) was formerly organized by lineage heads who picked small groups of young men to monitor paths and plots from hides constructed out of palm leaves (ufok usuη). Today, these ufok usuη are connected in a village-wide patrol route coordinated by the ‘Youth/Vigilantic Group’. The vigilantes' night-time path marks an alternative spatiality whose history, meanings and control are beyond the grasp of the state. Walking on a vigilante patrol reterritorializes and creates spaces saturated with memories which are, de Certeau suggests, ‘fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read’ (1984: 108). The practice of walking not only produces this illegibility, it can also represent the mobilization of power (Pile Reference Pile, Pile and Keith1997: 16; Morris Reference Morris2004). This extract from my fieldnotes from 2003 examines the ways in which vigilantes patrol the village community at night:
By ten o'clock each night the compound of the chairman of Ikot Akpa Nkuk's village youth group prepares to turn in for the night. His wives and children rest on benches outside in the cool of the evening, eating, chatting and dozing before entering the row of rooms in the zinc-roofed, block-built house to sleep. Every evening at this time, however, a dozen young men of the village pace around the compound and shatter the low murmur of a family preparing for the night with the loud, hollow resonance of a small wooden drum (owolom) and a metal gong (nkom), both beaten in a rhythm of ever-increasing frequency and volume. This is how the nightly routine of the village vigilante group begins.
One of the longest-serving vigilantes in the village is the patrol leader on Monday nights. A herbalist and bicycle repairer, Ime is well protected, including immunity to bullets (ato afiono), and because of this he is a popular leader. Ime carries a cow horn over his shoulder. This is ujo mkparawa, the secret voice of the youth, and while it is blown to identify the patrol to fellow vigilantes its use is dangerous and the person responsible for it must, like Ime, be powerful (okpochong). He marches off on patrol at a brisk pace. It is a moonless, dark night, precisely the conditions armed robbers are thought to favour, and he leads the guards in a silent single file barely checking his stride on the undulating sandy pathways that criss-cross between compounds and farms inside the village. Torches are shone sparingly, sometimes to alert the troupe to obstacles on the path, and sometimes to penetrate and investigate the dark gloom on either side of the path. Market stalls, empty shops and uncompleted houses are all thoroughly checked. After a torch is shone night-blindness descends and the guard walking in front momentarily disappears.
All of the guards wear black and among the patrol one man known as ‘Tobacco’ is wearing a long kaftan and a towel as a head tie. He has disguised himself as a woman. The guards walk through sleeping compounds to the sounds of snores and coughs. The cool evening calm is broken by urgent prayers and chanted ‘amens’ as the patrol passes close by a spiritual church congregation engaged in a midnight healing service. A few twists and turns later and an array of lights appear along the narrow path ahead. The patrol hesitates for a second before the small, apparently disembodied lights converge and a handful of impish figures, small children carrying kerosene lanterns above their heads, scurry past. One of the vigilantes whispers ‘snail pickers’, children collecting edible snails that come to the surface at night after heavy rains.
The patrol passes into a clearing, the first of eleven checkpoints located at strategic points, crossroads and boundaries around the village. The guards pass through silently with just a whisper that fellow vigilantes are there in the thick undergrowth of the bush laying ambush. Scepticism of this claim is almost immediately dispelled as the guards are halted in their tracks by a loud shout of ‘who dere?’ Ime, the patrol leader, replies by drawing the cow horn to his lips and bellowing a brief retort. Several figures emerge from the darkness to greet us and this process is repeated at clearings and crossroads around the village as torch flashes, shouts and the blowing of the ‘voice of the youth’ is a signal for checkpoint groups of 5–10 young men to reveal themselves and make a report on their nocturnal surveillance.
The most significant and dangerous of the checkpoints is at a junction on the village's boundary. As the frontier against intruders and thieves it is a potent spot, especially as it was the site at which war medicines (ibok ekong) were prepared for the village's founders. Hushed greetings with the dozen or so guards at the junction, who are sitting on felled palm trunks blocking the roads, are interrupted by the firing of guns into the air. The shots are a form of deterrent and a sign that individual vigilantes among the group are well protected. Firing a gun not only serves as an audible deterrent and an indication of their physical protection. It also serves as a sign that the vigilantes have significant spiritual protection and are the ‘rightful’ persons (unen owo) to defend the village. Several of the patrol team have homemade six-shooter pistols, small and poorly machined devices that are awkward to hold and unpredictable to use. The barrels of these guns point up at an unlikely angle away from the chamber which is itself unevenly drilled. Those without guns hold machetes secreted inside clothes or held against the back of the arm to disguise their profile. I know that one of my friends in the patrol is carrying a laser pointer. He will shine the red laser light, more common in a boardroom presentation than here, on a suspect if he gets a chance. This, so he explained when we were buying it, will frighten the suspected thief into thinking that it is a magic omen. I could not help thinking that it might also resemble the type of laser sight on a sniper's rifle that appears so regularly in Hollywood films.
The vigilantes are called into action on two occasions during the night. In the first incident the patrol cautiously approaches a group of men loading palm kernels on a lorry. Rather than theft, this is simply an attempt on the part of the traders to travel at night and thus avoid paying duties to police at roadblocks on the route to the nearby town of Aba. The second incident called for a more physical response. Two parallel headlights are spotted along the federal highway which traverses the village. At first it looks like a car approaching until the lights split apart and they are identified as the lights of two motorbikes. Two rows of vigilantes form up and those in front skim their machetes in broad arcs across the tarmac sending plumes of sparks into the air. The second row, some hundred yards behind, stand firm and block the braking bikes. The riders are interrogated and explain that they have taken a fellow villager to a church for treatment after falling ill. Had the curfew breakers not been known they would have been held at a checkpoint through the night and released in the morning on payment of a fine.Footnote 2 One of the riders is known by the vigilantes, however, and they are allowed to return home to the neighbouring village.
Having received reports from seven of the checkpoints on the northern side of the village the vigilantes return to the chairman's compound to report the night's events to him before proceeding to the four checkpoints on the southern side. As they relax the younger guards smoke Indian hemp (cannabis) and cigarettes, and everyone takes a turn to drink a shot of locally brewed gin (kaikai). The talk amongst the guards shifts from the night's events to why they undertake the nightly task at all and falls quiet when Ime speaks. ‘If guard was not important’, he says, ‘we would not leave our wives in the house.’
The route taken by this nightly patrol maps a temporal and spatial community in which young men are vested with the rights to exercise justice. This topography is not only a physical space but also a landscape of names, a genealogical history (McCall, 1995: 259; Ferme, 2001: 23–48). Its ‘inward-turning histories’ are illegible to strangers and the state alike. Markets, crossroads, squares and boundary paths are each traversed by the vigilantes as every night in the north of the village they patrol the following route:
1. Anwa Abak (close to the boundary with Ikot Inyang Abia)
2. Enen Idung Ubom (boundary with Idung Eka Uyo)
3. Anwa Idung Udo Essien (boundary with Ikot Udo Obia)
4. Edem Urua Udofia (the back of Udofia's market)
5. Anwa Ikot Akpa Nkuk
6. Amiamiaowo Junction.
In patrolling this landscape of proper names the vigilantes are ‘armed historiographers’. These ‘historical justifications’ as de Certeau calls them, serve as an impetus to movement (1984: 104). The vigilantes, for instance, physically retrace their own history. One of the patrol sites, Enen Ilung Ubom (or the front of Ubom's compound), recalls the death of a young man, Friday Udo Ubom, who was shot dead by armed robbers in 1995. It was as a result of his death that the village and its council agreed that the vigilantes should be organized and armed in their current form.
The vigilantes cross each of the village's clearings or squares (anwa), which are the meeting places for each of the village's five lineages. There is in fact an historical association between this itinerary and historical forms of justice. These anwa were created, in part, for judicial practice: each anwa was the location for the settlement of matters among the lineage (ekpuk). More than this, however, within these sites, most potently at the village square where all of the lineages meet, there are particular spots, secret locations though they are in plain sight, where people can be made to swear oaths of innocence on pain of death. Without the customary libations or invocations, the potency of the space itself can mete out justice. The village squares are therefore sites of ambiguous power, and of both life and death. They can be sites of healing. A pot buried in the ground at the foot of a tree at one anwa is filled with water by ancestral spirits; when drunk, this water is an antidote to witchcraft. Most squares also locate the awesome power of nature itself in the association between certain tall trees and the powers of sorcery that can be awoken out of them (ademe odudu– wake up power). The anwa also evoke biographies, a hagiography of the community, which contrast the moral strength of legendary village warriors who founded the lineages and squares that are named after them with more recent narratives of human failings and of the calamities that have befallen individuals who, despite receiving signs of impending danger, sold land or cut down the trees in these spaces. The proper names traversed in this vigilante patrol recall places with hidden, haunted histories that invert panoptic sight. In this way the patrol not only maps out a physical frontier, it constructs the community itself, and make places liveable and believable (de Certeau Reference de Certeau1984: 105–8).
THE THIEF EATS HIS SHAME
As well as mapping these spatial communities, Annang vigilantism asserts its legitimacy within cultural frameworks of accountability linked to conceptions of agency, personhood and power, and the oppositions these produce between vigilantes and thieves. In response to questions from his younger charges as to the risks they take for the village as a whole, especially the elders who can sleep soundly in their beds at night, Ime went on to say that ‘there is no old or young in the vigilantes’. It was an innocuous enough comment when I heard it. Perhaps he was simply trying to persuade more easily distracted young men to continue to participate in the nightly routines – like the meetings I had attended to urge attendance and to fine absentees when patrols were short-handed. On reflection, I think that it was no coincidence that his comment was phrased in generational terms since Ime's comments, in putting the youth on a par with their elders, speak directly to the local political networks of marginalization and to the contemporary politics of youth.
The politics of vigilance draw upon ambiguous conceptions of youth agency (Durham Reference Durham2000; Bucholtz Reference Bucholtz2002). Youth groups are about encompassing constituencies – youth, lineage, village, minority – as marginalized groups, and hence define spatial zones as enclosures of entitlement, inclusion and exclusion (Geschiere and Nyamnjoh Reference Geschiere2002). The marginality of the category of youth contributes to the dual character of its engagement in the making of patrimonial modes of governance – at once innovative and creative and yet subject to cooption as clients by patrons. ‘Youth’ in contemporary Africa therefore captures their political tactics, not merely as vandals but also as vanguards (Diouf Reference Diouf1996; Cruise O'Brien Reference Cruise O'Brien, Werbner and Ranger1996; Ya'u Reference Ya'u and Jega2000; Momoh Reference Momoh and Jega2000; Gore and Pratten Reference Gore and Pratten2003). In many instances, including street gangs, secret cults, masquerade clubs and vigilante groups, the collective mobilization of youth concerns the way that the marginalized deploy their very marginality to their own advantage. Hence, from one perspective young vigilantes represent the community and its moral economy, while from another they represent wild urchins, with the motive and opportunity (given that they control the village with impunity at night) to thieve. It is precisely by presenting a potent violence – which demands that they are accommodated and taken account of within the village and with respect to their elders – that vigilantes project an epistemological advantage onto disadvantage itself.3
When it was first formed in 1988 the vigilante force in the village of Ikot Akpa Nkuk brought together about a dozen night guards, each of whom was a powerful man. In Annang personhood and power are conceived as being innate or invoked; power is either inherited (mana odudu) or it is manufactured, medicinally derived power (odudu ibok).Footnote 4 The origin of such power is a crucial question in a society where disruptions to personal and collective progress are perceived to be caused by individual competitors, rivals and enemies. Unless it is revealed in the specialist investigations of a diviner, however, the source of a person's power remains secret. The recognition of power is therefore based on the public achievements of a person, a feature captured in the saying ‘performance makes a person strong’ (edinam owo anam owo edi okposoη). Status and wealth must have been achieved as a result of overcoming the tests, trials and threats of a neighbour or a kinsman. Those who have suppressed a rival's power constitute a category of the strong and powerful (okposoη owo – powerful person). For Annang vigilantes power is less a political concept, therefore, than a category of ontology (Agamben Reference Agamben1998: 44). The exclusive basis for recruitment to the vigilante group has now become an inclusive principle. Now any young man who has lived in the village for at least two years should be registered as a youth/vigilante group member. Any young man who refuses to join the vigilantes falls under suspicion of being among those ‘insiders’ (owo mbia) who are thought to invite armed robbers to the village and who locate sites for ambush and routes for escape. As a result the vigilante group has grown in size, with about one hundred vigilantes guarding the village each night, and active membership of the vigilante group itself has come to constitute the terms of local citizenship.
The quest for power and protection within the routine practice of Annang vigilantism remains strong, however, and is closely linked to embodied forms of medicine and masculinity. When the village council sanctioned and sponsored the vigilantes in 1995 a secret arrangement was made. One young unmarried man was chosen to be initiated as a member of a cult that could detect thieves. Travelling to the shrine in Abiakpan, in the neighbouring Cross River State,Footnote 5 the man undertook a three-day ‘baptism’ into the knowledge of the Okomura water spirit. The result of his initiation and his maintenance of the laws of the spirit are that his body can detect thieves. When he sees a thief, ‘e do me for body’, he says, and he will begin to have shaking sensations in his chest. Another effect of his power is that in a crowd he will only see a thief's face. As a result the man constitutes a walking lie detector.
The potency of the power young Annang vigilantes project takes many other embodied forms. In casual greetings among the vigilante members the question ‘how you de?’ (how are you?), is met with the reply ‘no shaking’ (I feel no fear). A vigilante will not patrol ‘empty body’ (idem nkanga), they say, by which they mean that they will not patrol without some form of spiritual protection. For many this involves purchasing bullet-proof medicine (ato afiono– literally, throw and miss). Initiation into this medicine involves the consumption of seven alligator peppers (ntuen ibok – Afromomum melegueta).Footnote 6 This type of consumed and embodied medicinal power is associated with the highest forms of sanction and is especially fraught with danger. Any lapse in the codes of behaviour and routine can kill the initiate. The rules (mbet) of the medicine require that the initiate refrains from sex and from fetching water on Obo market day, eats only cooked (not raw) food, and must not touch a woman with his hand during the patrol. Women are antidotes (aditibe) to the medicinal powers young men consume in the practice of being a vigilante. Medicine not only concerns the invocation of supernatural attributes, therefore, but in the dialectic constitution of gendered identities it also defines the construction of masculinity.
The mode of masculinity expressed in the practices associated with protective medicines points to a competitive gendered notion of power. It is commonly held that women sap or ‘cool down’ the power of men, especially if their own powers are derived from the wearing of charms or the consumption of medicine (ibok). Whether robber or vigilante, men in this situation cannot have sex the day before their night-time operation for fear that the medicine's powers will be nullified. Similarly, the effects of any ibok that a man uses will be cancelled if they meet a post-menopausal woman along the road. This is key to understanding the common practice among Annang vigilantes of embodying a female other and dressing as a woman. Walking as a vigilante involves various forms of disguise. We have seen that wearing black clothes is the rule, and long machetes are held with the blade resting on the rear of the forearm so as to conceal the vigilante's silhouette. Dressing as a woman is not only to assume a physical disguise, however; it is also to counter a thief by embodying the power of antidote, to represent an unknowable subject, and to project a form of power that transcends gender. Knowledge itself is a gendered asset in Annang and men do not know how women think. The agency of women is unknown, unpredictable, and cross-dressing (akpoho idem – changing the body) is therefore about disguising both body and motive. Dressing up as a woman means that the vigilantes can pass through any site in which thieves are hiding and not be recognized or suspected.
There is another important element to the power of women in this setting. The form of cross-dressing practised by vigilantes may constitute, as Moran argues in the case of Liberian rebels, an attempt to retrieve the power of the indigenous warrior (ekoη) (cf. Salmons Reference Salmons1985). Here playing with gender identity concerns drawing power from the deliberate conflation of categories, to demonstrate that qualities of courage, strength and supernatural prowess are not limited by biological endowment (Moran Reference Moran and Sutton1995: 80). Cross-dressing, in fact, was a common performative feature for young male and female members of Annang initiatory societies. One of the crucial aspects was that cross-dressing coincided with a transgression of boundaries. For instance, while male warriors (ekoη) dressed as women when they blessed a fattened bride (mbobo) with fertility, so the women's forum (isoη ibaan) dressed as men when they brought war to a man's compound (Pratten, 2007; Ifeka-Moller Reference Ifeka-Moller and Ardener1975). To add to Moran's account of what she calls ‘wartime transvestism’ (1995: 75), it is possible therefore to suggest that vigilantes play with gender identity when they cross the frontier into an unknowable sphere, in this case the boundaries with neighbouring villages at night time. Overall, men dressing as women reinforces a representation of vigilantes as a force of fertility and hence as a symbolic counterpoint to criminals, who are represented as impediments to social reproduction.
Various situated logics of this sort are central to understanding the practice of vigilantism. This brings us to the key symbolic boundary that distinguishes vigilantes from thieves and to the evaluations of character upon which these distinctions draw. As Heald (1986) suggested in relation to Gisu fear of kondo robbers, the ways in which the motivations of thieves are represented are dispositional, situated and embodied. In the Annang context, the deviant motivations ascribed to thieves distinguish between two forms on the basis of a moral evaluation of the scale and intensity of their crimes, and hence between petty thieves (ntok ino – small thief) and armed robbers (amauke– literally, your money or your life). This distinction is related in local discourse by depicting a familial hierarchy of thieves: ‘The first son of ino is an armed robber, while the cassava stealer and palm fruit stealer is his junior brother.’
In Annang the protection of produce was paramount, and the theft of seed yams or cassava stems for the following year's harvest was considered abhorrent. As Austen (1986: 385) reminds us, the intolerable deviants in many African societies are those who threaten control over reproductive capacities expressed in terms of both access to food and the ability to procreate children. Vigilantes shame petty cassava thieves who steal food because of hunger and parade them around the village in an attempt to transform their characters.Footnote 7 Armed robbers, in contrast, are perceived as being in possession of the most potently effective medicinal powers – of invisibility, of the ability to escape undetected, of being able to make their pursuers forget them. They are the most cunning of tricksters and are conceived in an historical genealogy descended from headhunters (awurewure) and leopard men (ekpe owo).
Both forms, petty thieves and armed robbers, however, are coded within a common semiotic framework. The most distinctive interpretative clue to the symbolic labelling of thieves in Annang lies in the opposition in the character of Annang ancestors (ekpo) between good spirits, those who were successful, and bad ones, those who were unsuccessful or notoriously malicious.Footnote 8 These categories were linked both to the status of the living person and to the form of death; a normal death (mkpa) was contrasted with a sudden or violent one (afai). This opposition expresses a common contrast in Annang belief between the right hand, associated with respect, authority, truth and good character, and the left, linked to disrespect, wrongdoing and malevolence The right/left, good/bad opposition also corresponds to the aesthetic expression of concepts of beauty (eti) and ugliness (idiok). These terms are ways of relating character (eti ilo, good person, idiok ilo, bad person) and behaviour (eti usuη, good way, idiok usuη, bad way). The aesthetic representations of personhood are captured at their most figurative in the ancestral masquerade (ekpo) and in its use of beautiful and ugly masks.
Of all the masked figures who perform at the season's end in October (ndok), the ekpo ndemmasquerade is the most disfigured, ugly, anti-human, unpredictable and malevolent spirit.Footnote 9 It is a threat to security, fertility and the progress of the community. Ekpo ndem (of all masquerades) is associated with preparation in the bush (where initiates eat only raw food) and, as a result, with the most complete sense of spiritual embodiment (Picton Reference Picton1990: 195). The malignancy of the possessed state of ekpo ndem is demonstrated in various symbolic forms: during its performance it is daubed with charcoal; the masked performer is tied at the waist with palm-tapper rope to prevent him from attacking onlookers; and he circulates around the market clockwise, going up the left-hand side first and thereby demonstrating his malicious intent. During its performance onlookers are only safe in a confrontation with ekpo ndem if they kneel or bow before it, because the mask cannot bend forward. It is therefore prevented from performing a central ritual task. In Annang ritual practice there is a core cosmological duality of abasi enyoη (god of the sky) and abasi ikpa isoη (god of the soil), which is resolved in numerous contexts in up-to-down movements (pointing, throwing, stepping and jumping). Deliberate infractions of this up-to-down motion, like ekpo ndem'sinability to point downwards, constitute attempts to disrupt the natural order and transform the self.
In this limited instance it is possible to argue that the symbolism of violence is built into the central structure of rituals (Bloch Reference Bloch1986). In this case the practice of the religion of initiatory cults furnishes an idiom and produces a legitimation for actual violence. The practice by which a thief is symbolically represented as a malevolent, anti-social threat to order and fertility like ekpo ndempoints to the extent of the fear associated with thieves and armed robbers. When apprehended cassava thieves – ino ukudok or ntok ino (small thieves) – are handled in a way that closely resembles the performance of ekpo ndem. They are stripped naked, painted with charcoal, necklaced with a palm frond and paraded, tied at the waist, around the village and neighbouring markets. At the end of this journey, the thief is handed over to the police or to the family amid cries of woooo ino (‘shame, you thief’) and the singing of wooo ino adia nnok (‘the thief is eating shame’). It is important to note, therefore, that the body is represented in this practice as the primary site of social control. Symbolically thieves and armed robbers are also associated with dangerous, anti-social locations such as hiding in the bush, and with ambivalent, internalized forces, since they are said to be possessed by a ‘stealing spirit’ and to enter an altered consciousness (inam), after which they ‘do not know themselves again’.
This interpretation of the logics of vigilante violence is based on an ongoing internal discourse over the proper way in which to handle thieves. While these practices inscribe signs of power and deviance on the body, the link with masquerade performance is both embodied and discursive. In 2004 members of the vigilante group said that ‘Ekpo are the ones to use [charcoal] ashes – they mix it with oil. We decided to stop rubbing thieves – because it resembles masquerade – it is somehow playful. If you happen to paint a criminal now, it is a masquerade, it means we are playing masquerade.’ Vigilantes, therefore, recognized that their coding of a thief was like ‘playing masquerade’, and the practice continues despite the critical voices of those who think it undermines their standing because it associates the forces of law and order with something playful that is banned by the authorities.
Armed robbers constitute a second, more dangerous form of person, one that is constituted as much by internal as external logics and practices. Armed robbery was first reported as the ‘menace of a secret society of criminals’ known as amauke (‘your money or your life’) in Uyo in 1959 (Eastern States Express, 22 April 1959; Udoma Reference Udoma1987: 495).Footnote 10 It is the deviant motivation of a thief's character, his possession by a malevolent thieving spirit in particular, that contributes to the vigilantes' justification of their violent response to armed robbery. Armed robbers are ‘natural blood killers’, it is said, and it is not possible for them to change their character. This evaluation of character refers to essien emana, a natural or inherited form of power that follows the person through rebirth. What is significant, here as with Heald's analysis of Gisu thieves, is that they are seen as dispositional attributes which are inherent and unalterable:
Reform is not possible. Killing is justified not because the offence in itself is great, but because the individual is regarded as a degenerate who has turned his back on normality and for whom there is no other remedy. (Heald Reference Heald1986: 76)
Armed robbers are ‘killable people’. Killable bodies, Agamben has argued, are produced through a complex legal process of rendering them as ‘bare life’, outside the purview of the law (Agamben Reference Agamben1998; Fitzpatrick Reference Fitzpatrick2001). Here the vigilantes appropriate their own sovereignty over life and death and constitute an indigenous ‘state of exception’ which may be traced in Annang society's history to a time when it was acceptable to kill or sell into slavery a broader range of deviant categories including the witch, the ‘stubborn’ child, the adulterer with a widow or twin mother, and the murderer. In this way a divide is constructed between bodies that matter and other, abjected, bodies. It is these abjected bodies that remain less intelligible to the symbolic order and threaten a return of havoc and discord to the symbolic and economic orders (Butler Reference Butler1993). As elsewhere, the criminal, in this case the armed robber, has become the embodiment of a malevolence which must be exorcised to produce the moral community (Buur and Jensen Reference Buur and Jensen2004: 147).
Where a petty criminal is paraded publicly, an armed robber is executed in secret. The aesthetics and location of this practice, which has occurred five times in recent years in Ikot Akpa Nkuk, are imprinted with past registers of justice and identity. There has always been a place for killing thieves in Annang villages (ukong ino – place, thief). Today this location is found on the road bordering the stream leading away from the village. Steep wooded sides shelter the stream and provide cover for a number of covert activities. In addition to everyday tasks like fetching water and washing clothes, which take place at pools in the stream close to the village, the road along the stream is also home to shrines – one of which, the agaba shrine, is popular for smoking cannabis. Formerly robbers were executed with nails hammered into the head, as in the leopard society's practice in which wooden spikes were driven into a thief's skull. Now robbers are beaten, shot and set alight.
The origin of these judicial practices should be seen as the result of the concrete practices in which life is engaged and not as a ‘ghostly spectre’ from the past. As Das and Poole have argued, justice at the margins of the state is not simply a matter of ‘folk’ notions of law and justice versus state-sanctioned ideas of justice. Although they are locked in unequal relations, they are enmeshed in one another (Das and Poole Reference Das, Poole, Das and Poole2004: 21). Indeed, this account of extra-judicial killing by vigilantes is not simply derived from a forgotten and violent past; it shares a conceptual space with the police view on how to deal with armed robbers.Footnote 11 The practice and ideology of killing thieves are shared and contested by vigilantes and security forces. Vigilantes in Ikot Akpa Nkuk are now issued with ID cards authorized by the police who keep a register of vigilante members. This arrangement was brokered after vigilante group leaders were arrested for being in possession of illegal weapons in June 2004. Firearms issued, and effectively licensed, by the village council are now allowed, though those found in possession of personal side arms are liable to be arrested.
Events on the morning of 16 August 2004 illustrate the interlinking nature of official and unofficial judicial practices. On that day news spread quickly throughout the village that the police had killed an armed robber. Slumped on the parade ground to one side of the Ukanafun police station lay Mkpafre's body. He had been shot twice from behind in the middle of the night. Hundreds of people walked and cycled to see his body during the following morning. In the preceding days local police and vigilante groups had gathered up a number of armed robbery suspects while others, whose names had been mentioned in their investigations, had been tipped off and had fled. The spectacle gave rise to a song improvised by one of the vigilantes:
E don happen Eh
Ukanafun station full like market
Our Mkpafre boy dem fall am oh, oh eh oh
Only government now now dem go see.
TRUTH AND TRIALS
Annang informal justice is popular not only because it inflects these registers of personhood onto the thief, but also because it employs practices or ‘rituals of verification’ that establish truth, guilt and accountability through public spectacle and performance. The popular legitimacy of contemporary village vigilante groups has been enhanced by their role as an alternative judicial forum. Judging cases has long been an index of power in Annang and in this context vigilantes contest the symbolic and economic capital derived from hearing cases with a multiplicity of formal and informal judicial structures: they include tribunals held by lineages, the village council, the clan council, and churches. In addition to cases of theft, the youth court organized by the vigilante group hears a range of cases including debt recovery, assault, land claims, witchcraft accusations and adultery. It has grown in popularity partly because its sessions are held regularly, partly because they are relatively inexpensive, and partly because those who sit as a panel to judge these cases are already well respected as judges in lineage and village tribunals. A central aspect of the growing significance of the youth association's vigilante and judicial activities, however, is linked to their recourse to alternative means of verification.
The key devices through which people determine truth and reveal knowledge are performative and in this context include the popular use of oaths (mbiam) and ordeals (ukaη). The term for oath (mbiam) carries a mutable meaning that varies according to context: oath, ordeal, poison.Footnote 12 In general, mbiamrepresents both an oath of innocence and a harmful charm. It is an invocation for history to repeat itself and calls on the ancestral spirits of people who have died as a result of particular acts (theft, infractions of laws, etcetera) to return and kill those who have committed the same crime. Mbiam is sworn as an oath of secrecy, as a pact to settle a dispute between rivals, and to signify the spiritual purity of title holders. In a court case mbiam is sworn both to prove the veracity of evidence and as an ordeal to demonstrate innocence. In all these instances swearing mbiam, often a stone or a phial of salt water obtained from an oath specialist (abia mbiam), subjected the oath taker to a year-long ordeal during which their premature death signified guilt. Oath swearing is far more than a guarantee of veracity, therefore; it is also an ordeal through which oath takers live or die. As Tonkin (2000) says, ordeals are divinatory practices and public performances – they are dramas of truth.
Public oaths have long been a deterrent used against criminals in Annang villages. Often village-wide oaths are sworn each year to bind the villagers to a pledge that they will not commit crime or associate with criminal gangs. One of the most significant popular responses to the crime waves illustrates the continued significance of mbiam in the Annang judicial system, and the practice of public oath swearing to prevent theft. This is especially relevant in relation to the discourse on armed robbery: in Ikot Akam, for example, villagers swear at the village council in August each year. Non-Christians swear on mbiam ikpa isong, the spirit of the village, and Christians swear on verses from the Bible that if they should steal, associate with thieves or join armed robbery gangs then they will die within six months.Footnote 13 Oath swearing is also central to vigilante practice. An oath of secrecy is sworn so that no one will leak the secrets of extra-judicial executions. Oaths of solidarity are sworn at anwa isong so that the members will not poison another guard during the night when they drink from the same cup.
Vigilantes are also linked to a range of practices and ordeals that establish truth and character. In the Adat Ifang clan, on Obo market day wives prepare food, invite parents and friends from their natal villages, and dance for the vigilantes. This is the ordeal of cleanliness (ukaη akee sana), held to test and celebrate the character of women married into the village. The type of food she produces proves that she works hard on the farm and has no reason to steal. The woman's innocence, cleanliness and beauty are designated by wearing a palm frond (eyei) on her right hand. She will sing ‘Mmenyong ukaη, ukaη akee sana’ – ‘I went to ordeal, ordeal found me clean’.
The popular legitimacy of contemporary village vigilante groups is also linked to the use of a range of ordeals (ukaη) in establishing guilt in cases of theft. In one instance in Ukanafun, a vigilante leader is himself an ukaη ordeal specialist who investigates cases of theft with recourse to a tract from the Bible. The ordeal he administers is known as Bible Turn (Bible akanna). A key is placed inside the Bible and the ordeal giver calls on the spirits of thieves in the Bible to identify the guilty party. The suspect undergoing the test holds the loop of the key which is suspending the Bible, and is proven guilty if the Bible rotates three times.Footnote 14 The key is placed in Acts 5 at the story of Ananias and Sapphira. Ananias and Sapphira embezzled money from a land sale and both died instantly when Paul challenged them and announced that they had tested the ‘Spirit of the Lord’. Young men wrapped their bodies and carried them away to be buried. There are a number of reasons why this passage is especially resonant in an Annang context. ‘Testing’ (ndomo) is precisely the term used to undertake an Annang investigation by ordeal and the guilt of a thief tested by Bible akanna follows the familiar invocation of spirits found guilty of committing the same crime.
Youth associations and their vigilante patrols also routinely employ the broom doctor (ukaη ujaη) or what Simmons (1956: 224) reported as ‘medicine-broom divination’ (afia ifiet). Two brooms are held with their open bristles touching one another. In this position, with no link between them, the brooms should not be able to be fastened to anything or carry any weight. First at the feet and then seven times moving up the body the specialist touches the brooms against the body of the person undergoing the ordeal. The seventh touch reaches the neck at which point the brooms will either pass by on either side thereby releasing the person and revealing that they are speaking the truth or they form a firm bind and grip the person's neck which throttles and cuts into the skin at the larynx. This is the sign of deceit and guilt.
These are not unchanging ‘traditional’ ordeal practices. They appropriate concepts and symbols of justice from a range of registers. A recent innovation in ordeals used by Annang vigilantes, for example, mimics an ordeal witnessed in Igbo popular videos. The video Issakaba, a four-part drama highlighting the role of the Bakassi Boys, resonates with images of protective charms and truth-telling ordeals readily identified and appropriated by young men in nearby Annang villages (McCall Reference McCall2004). One ordeal seen in the Issakaba videos is the use of a string of cowrie shells as a ‘truth-telling belt’. In response to the upsurge in armed robberies since 1999, the vigilantes of Ikot Akpa Nkuk in August 2000 commissioned the manufacture and empowering of a similar object, known as the ‘Champion Belt’, from a palm-wine tapper's rope (ikpo).
In order to act as a truth-telling ordeal the Champion Belt is endowed with supernatural power. The concoction for the Champion Belt was prepared by a medicine specialist (abia ibok) who stayed in the forest for seven days and nights. The ingredients he used in the preparation of the Champion Belt all have significance. They include the skulls of seven executed armed robbers, which invoke ancestral spirits; the oil of seven palm kernels (alan isip) from the potent red palm fruit known as ifiako eyop, which neutralizes the medicinal powers that the armed robbers might have; seven tortoises (ikut), which, as the symbol of knowledge, have a dual role as counter-tricksters and detectors of stolen items; and seven chameleons (akuwe), which are required so that when a thief is caught he may not escape by shape-shifting and imitating the natural powers of a chameleon to render itself invisible. The vigilantes' Champion Belt is tied around the waist of a suspected thief, forcing him to confess to his actions, his accomplices and the items they have stolen. The belt not only compels suspects to speak the truth, therefore, but again invokes the imagery of the malevolent ancestral force (ekpo ndem), which symbolically confirms the representation of the thief as a deviant and anti-social spirit.
CONCLUSION
The stability and persistence of oaths and ordeals as part of the practice of contemporary vigilantism is linked to the way in which their legitimation transcends the mundane. As with the hidden histories of the vigilante patrol, the configuration of masculine power, and the social semiotics of thieves and armed robbers, the continued salience of the use of culture in vigilante practice lies not in the invocation of ‘tradition’, but in the manipulation of the unknown. The verification of knowledge by means that are beyond human agency; the re-making of selves out of the secrets of the supernatural, and the reconfiguration of others as abject non-humans are the cultural understandings in which Annang vigilantism is embedded. It is this sequestered access to the past, the wild and the dead that informs the situated knowledges of vigilante practice.
Within recent writings on violence in West Africa the salience of indigenous modes of sociality and conceptions of power is all too easily dismissed as neo-traditional, reactionary or a process of ‘re-traditionalization’ (Chabal and Daloz 1999: 45). This classification only obscures the historicity and practice of localized idioms of power, knowledge and accountability in understanding popular responses to the instrumentalization of disorder in contemporary West Africa (Gore and Pratten 2003: 213–14). As a consequence, it is important to discern how those who step into the void of disorder and de-centredness, and establish routine by knowledge and practice, do so by grasping the importance of how cultural patterns are articulated to systems of political domination (Fields Reference Fields1982: 593). To understand the local legitimacy of vigilantism in post-colonial Nigeria, therefore, it is also necessary to recognize its internal imperatives and localized practices.
Thus this account of Annang vigilante practice relates the cultural construction of violence to spatial and bodily symbolism. In this way, through vigilante violence it examines the links between what Mauss called the ‘techniques of the body’, and their inter-subjective world of signs and communications (Spencer Reference Spencer and Das2003: 1568). The focus here is on the cultural construction of violence, in which the classifications of purity and impurity, good and bad, are constituted by cosmology:
It is concerned with the ordering and reordering of social and political categories, with the defining of self in distinction to other, with good and evil.…[It is] concerned with the reconstitution of a moral order of the world. (Malkki Reference Malkki1995: 5–56).
This is not to reduce violence to a bodily and spatial symbolic repertoire. These embodied practices do not represent or memorize the past; they enact it, bringing it back to life (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1990: 73). These meanings of the past, the wild and the dead are therefore articulated to praxis and to historical contingency. Local ways of making sense of disorder, and of justifying violence, rest on an ontology and semiotics that are relevant precisely because of the privatization and deregulation of security that are key features of our times, not in spite of them.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks to the journal's anonymous reviewers, John Peel, Charlie Gore, Nigel Eltringham and participants at the ‘Global Vigilantes’ workshop held at the University of Sussex, 8–9 July 2005. I am grateful also to the ESRC, the British Academy and the Nuffield Foundation for their support of research initiatives that have contributed to this study.
