Reading Signs of Identity and Alterity: History, Semiotics and a Nigerian Case

Abstract

The Efik inhabit Calabar which is the capital of the Cross River State of Nigeria. They constitute a people of about 200,000 for whom well-documented archives and bibliographies exist mainly in Nigeria and in Great Britain (Ekpiken, 1970). The Ekpe Society (Bassey n.d.), a Leopard-Spirit group of initiates, is their regulatory institution which makes use of the ukara cloth and possesses an ideographic system of writing named nsibidi. From 1979 to 1983, teaching structuralist-synchronic linguistics and semiotics at the University of Calabar in Nigeria created some degree of student hostility. In this paper it is attempted to reply to them. To do so, the so-called semiotic square had to be misused while still defining categorial terms. This square has been framed within the evolutionary process of a regional history (Aye, 1967). Then a transformational analysis of culture which needs to be tested elsewhere is proposed. It is hoped that this model may help to structure the amorphous field of interdisciplinary research in African studies. An attempt to describe Efik self-perception and how most of them see the development of their consciousness in time follows. Two of the most obvious objectives were: 1) to understand how change in the course of Efik history affected an African people located at the crossroads of many cultures and what could constitute the real challenge to them of building a modern society in an environment which may be characterized today by two major criteria: “non-identity” and “non-alterity;” and 2) to examine how for the Efik themselves historical events persuaded them of having lost their past or even their recently adopted identity and why this nihilist ideology left them with no desire for what seemed to be an unpromising future.