Village in Transformation

The images used in the virtual world, the Village of Umuofia, come with permission from the Jones Photographic Archive of photographs of Southeastern Nigerian art and culture. Jones was a District Officer in Nigeria from 1926 to 1946, and in 1950 he wrote The Ibo and Ibibio Speaking Peoples of S.E. Nigeria. (I wonder how the book might compare to that not so mythical book The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.)

His photographs were taken perhaps a generation after the events narrated in Things Fall Apart, and many practices including dress, housing, religion, still were similar to the precolonial period. As you can see from studying the archive, and like many Western anthropologists of the period, Jones sought out and photographed "traditional" culture and artifacts. For that reason the picture (above) of a mixed collection of village houses, some traditional and some, clearly Western, especially interests me.

In this picture we can clearly see at least three kinds of structures -- I imagine they are houses -- one a traditional round hut, another with a tile or perhaps tin roof, and a third type, on the right, that is more Western, with square walls, hinged doors and windows. The boys seem to have Western style clothes. This blending of tradition and new was something that I saw in almost all of the villages I visited in Senegal in 2003.