The Ibo in Twentieth Century Calabar

Extract

The scholarly interest in emerging nations in the post-World War II period had its anthropological and sociological focus on the development of cities in these areas. Nationalism seems to be connected with industrialization and with urbanization. In West Africa much of the attention spent on study of developing cities has concentrated on the importance in such situations of the voluntary organization. It seems quite clear now that voluntary organizations are one of the most often used and most effective techniques for softening the shock of transplantation from the certainties of tribal life into the uncertainties of city life. The formation of voluntary organizations in cities is not restricted to Africa, however. In Central and South America, in Southeast Asia, and in India the voluntary organization has grown and developed and been studied. Most attempts to compare voluntary organizations in these places seem to have assumed that they were a natural or inevitable result of a process called “urbanization”. It does not seem to me to be necessary to compare these social phenomena in the context of such a process. We should compare voluntary organizations in different times and places and under different circumstances in order to enhance our understanding of more general social and cultural processes. This paper attempts two things: the delineation of the history of the formation of voluntary organization of one immigrant group in one West African city; and a comparison between the voluntary organizations of this group and of some other groups. It is hoped that the former will contribute to the body of knowledge we have about voluntary organizations, and that the latter will suggest hypotheses about social and cultural processes in general. It is not sufficient to describe the voluntary organizations of the Ibo in Calabar. It is necessary to trace the history of the town itself; to compare the reaction of the Ibo to the urban environment with that of the Efik, the indigenous inhabitants of the town; and to show in what ways the culture of the Ibo and the Efik predispose them to react in the ways they do.