A Worshipper, His Maligned Gods, and Hypocrisy of Christians

Dede Ege, man, and the art of gods by Immanuel James Ibe-Anyanwu

I have seen a lot of foolish gods. Grandmother once told me about one who complained that teenagers that often played around his shrine gave off smelly farts, to his eternal suffocation. Poor, lazy dude, he wouldn't move an inch. Another wiped out an entire family for the sin of a member he left unhurt! There is no category of foolishness that has not been practised by some god somewhere, even in ancient Rome and Greece.

I have seen a lot of gods--and that is because, to read Homer, Herodotus, or Plutarch, ancient purveyors of the Greek and Roman gods gist--to read them is to be an eye-witness seated cross-legged at the scene of the event. Ancient Greece probably had more gods than humans, some of them thoroughly silly--and I shall not attend to your lingering suspicion that perhaps man, often unwise, made the gods in his own image; that the foolishness of the gods can be explained in the social genetics between man and what he created--I shall not attempt such a sacrilegious thinking, gods forbid!

Because I am forever engrossed in the study of religion, in the study of all mystical entities by whatever definition, trying to understand what makes the human mind so helpless, even dangerous, in the passion for Faith, I always find myself drawn to the spectacle of shrines. Whenever I visit a rural community, it is not the sights of budding urbanisation that generates my deepest excitement, no. It is the sights of artefacts, architectural antiquities, and all such elements of a withered past.

Grandmother often protested my invasion of shrines, an adventure that was part mischief, part child-like curiosity. It took a while before I stopped urinating on ritual sacrifices dumped at crossroads, that being my own stupid way of plotting the encounter of some spiritual agency, in the spirit of lay research. 

So when, three years ago, I visited my maternal home and saw an old man pouring libation at the front of his house, I struck up a conversation. I sought to know why he stuck to the ways of his fathers despite the persuasion, if not blackmail, of vigorous Christianity all around him. A long, winding story on its own, his reason. We became friends, to my mother's endless protests and warnings. Two days ago during my visit to Imo State, I went to greet him.

Husband to three wives, Dede Ege remains his own cook, perhaps driven to such secession by an extreme sense of caution. His habitation is a one-room bunk apparently hastily fastened to the back of his shrine, far removed from the family house. Saturday, I had stood in front of the shrine inquiring of him from a little boy who was drawing the image of a fancy car on the ground. Shortly, Dede Ege, a tall, agile, white-haired human, ferried himself to the scene on a cranky, old bicycle. The thread of his bicycle tyres ran through the fancy car leaving it badly accidented, and its owner technically bereaved. A patch of grey, greying hair clothed a torso of skeletal impressiveness. Beltless, his knickers hugged his waist and wisely stopped before his knees, leaving those knuckles shiny from herbal ointment, to my imagination of smashing coconuts upon them to test his longevity. 

It was a shrine full of gods, or rather, statues. No, gods. I recognised the female gods from the bulbous rigidity of their breasts, nipples boasting integrity but sadly wooden. Vain as I am, I had directed my eyes in-between the legs of the closest babe. There was no organ, nothing but an anonymous smoothness chiselled by the artist's hand. Perhaps that explained the lack of familiar projection at the crotches of the male gods. A boring sexless environment! The artist was wise: it would be blasphemous to install human genital particulars on sacrosanct divinities. Well, the statues were no gods, but they were symbolic representations of same. Even though the gods were spiritual entities lacking bodily proportions, human language would have to aid their understanding through the imposition of human attributes. Hence we could forgive when men refer to 'the eyes of the gods'; 'the hands of the gods'; the wrath of the gods', etc. 

If the gods in that shrine were not dirty enough in their poor table manners leaving food crumbs to dangle from their mouths, they were sufficiently so in the sheer humidity of their crib, one so productive of stench in its lack of ventilation. Red and white curtains torn vertically, either by ritual necessity, or by the ruffle of human passage, kept permanent record of bloody rituals. Potions boiling outside the shrine in black clay pots, allegedly life-saving in the wickedness of their odours; dark floor holding ancestors of unswept dirt; Dede Ege daubed in harsh, evil-repellent, native perfumes--with these I knew the life of that meeting was fated to be short. 

Soon, Little Boy dragged a wooden bench to the front of the shrine, upon instruction. Dede Ege then brought three kolanuts, lifted the healthiest lump from the saucer, broke the fruit, and sent a half of the pair into his mouth. His teeth, browned by snuff, looked like a short bamboo fence standing unruffled at an invasion of fungus. The kolanut crackled to uneven partition and emerged a foursome. Dede Ege threw the pieces east, west, north and south. 'To the four gods', he murmured. He raised the saucer to the height of his face, inviting Chukwu Okike to bless the fruit to the health and prosperity of its bringer, and eaters. By the time his hand was lowered, a mother-hen and her chicks had cornered the eastern ration, knocking determined beaks into the gods-forsaken piece of nutrition. 

I would return, I promised him, handing him a gift as I made my way out, clutching a take-home lump of kolanut. I had eaten just a munch off the one he shared between us, out of courtesy: the poor hygiene on display, rather than any fear of hurt, had killed my relish. But my relish for his sense of rebellion remains intact. At the cost of social ostracism, Dede Ege is custodian to a cultural extinction, a thankless, even demonised job at that. He is, in my judgement, a good, brave man, but sadly his types are mostly characterized as evil, rightly or otherwise, in our movies and gossips.

Ironically his clientele is drawn largely from the same religious population demonising his trade, he tells me. 'The hypocrisy is shocking, my son. They are now coming back to the rejected stone. The gods are wise', he concludes.