Adamma: a contemporary Igbo maiden spirit

African Arts, Autumn, 2003 by Benjamin Hufbauer, Bess Reed

Adamma danced a male interpretation of an Igbo woman's dance, just as she had at the opening of the Mmanwu Festival. She performed throughout the play and was its most rousing element. Her fast footwork was accentuated by her bent knees, which kept her body close to the ground. Her hands, sometimes outspread and sometimes clenched, usually moved in symmetrical circular patterns near her hips or in controlled outward motions near her waist. At times, Adamma leapt up in the air with knees still bent and spread her arms wide.

Shortly after one of these dance displays, the spirit husband came out to dance in tandem with Adamma. Characterized as a very handsome man in the oral descriptions, he wore a red, white, and blue striped net body costume that also covered his face and was topped with feathers. The inhuman quality of the costume indicated the husband's spirit character and, possibly, the loss of his borrowed body parts later in the story. The palm-wine tapper, in contrast, was short and wore a dark, oversized human mask with a grinning mouth. Adamma's masker, like many Igbo maiden-spirit maskers, was tall (Cole & Aniakor 1984:121) and towered over him.

At the close of the play, a boy about eight or nine years old appeared as the daughter. Although she did not wear a head tie, the character was dressed in the same flamboyant style as Adamma. Her mask was fleshier, and as with Adamma, even the whites of her eyes were painted in order to emphasize her human appearance (Fig. 13). After dancing vigorously with her mother, the daughter danced by herself while the other maskers withdrew. The audience rewarded the young masker and the entire performance with expressions of pleasure and applause.

[FIGURE 13 OMITTED]

After the troupe exited the performance area, Adamma, snapping her fingers and swinging her plaits and hips, sauntered to the compound fence, raised a corner of her skirt (Fig. 14), and stared directly at the audience--behavior for which she was apparently well known (E. Okara, personal communication, 1994). Then she danced up to each of us in turn and took us into the arena to dance with her before wrapping her arm around us and raising her skirt again.

[FIGURE 14 OMITTED]

The lead masker added two new narrative elements to his oral account that are in tension with the masquerade play. First, Adamma writes home to her parents, asking them for advice on her marriage to the spirit, by now divested of his borrowed body parts. They reply that they are too poor to help her; in other words, they cannot afford to return the marriage payment for an irresponsible daughter. Letters fly back and forth as Adamma importunes her mother and father. In the second addition, she later refuses to wed the good palm-wine tapper, for he is, after all, small and ugly. At that point, the village council questions Adamma and decrees that she marry him. Only this greater intervention forces her to act properly. This version of the story would probably be difficult to act out without a complicated stage set and a longer performance period.