Ala

At Owele, when the whole community gathered to sacrifice to Ala, a man who had once killed another man was not allowed to join in. If he stayed in town for the festival, he had to sit up on a platform for the length of it so that his body never touched the ground. The ground was the goddess. He had already offended her once, and nobody wanted him leaning on her again.

That rule was written down by C. K. Meek, a colonial government anthropologist, in *Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe* (1937), and his verdict on Ala is blunt. The most important deity in Igbo life, he wrote, was not the high god Chuku, nor the sun, nor the lightning god Amadioha, but the Earth: Ala in the Owerri country, Ale or Ane around Nsukka and Awgu, Ana and Ani elsewhere. She owned people, the living and the dead alike, and so the cult of the ancestors ran straight into hers. The dead went into her. Meek called her Queen of the Underworld and, in a phrase that fits her better than any title, the unseen president of the community.

Every hamlet had a shrine and a priest of Ala, and every group of villages had a senior shrine, the one belonging to whichever settlement had occupied the land first. Nothing about these places looked like a temple. The usual sign of the goddess was a living tree with a clay dish at its foot to hold offerings. Some communities added stones, iron spears, flat iron rods or a cairn; the one Meek measured at Owele stood three feet high and five across, flat-topped, with a single upright stone on its crown. Others kept great hollowed wooden gongs called ikoro, carved at one end with a woman’s head, which were beaten to call a general meeting and, in older days, to call men to war.

The rites were farmers’ rites. At the end of the yam harvest around Nsukka, each villager arrived with a yam, cracked his fingers in salute to the tree and said, “Ala, we have come.” The priest swore he carried no ill will, poured palm wine, walked a chicken in a circle over the heads of the crowd, and splashed its blood on the pots and branches. Then every man sliced the head off his yam to bury later in the middle of his own farm as a charm, and the rest was cooked and eaten on the spot. At Awgu, at the start of the rains, the young men carried pots of palm wine to her stone, and the senior priest asked Ala to keep her children safe from untoward events, falling out of a palm tree being the example he chose. It is a reasonable thing to ask of the ground.

Her real business was law. Homicide, kidnapping, poisoning, stealing and adultery were all offences against Ala, and in Meek’s day so was the birth of twins or of a child the community judged abnormal, each of which had to be purged by rites to her. The missionary G. T. Basden, writing in *Among the Ibos of Nigeria* (1921), gives the Igbo phrase for this kind of wrongdoing as *ulu-ani*, the defiling of the land. Crime was dirt on the Earth. Her priests guarded public morality, oaths were sworn by her, and a man hoping to rise by taking a title first had to win the goddess’s favour through her priest. Even animals could trespass. A goat that climbed onto a roof had committed an offence against Ala, and a fowl that pecked at the *aka* snake, a species sacred to her, was handed over to her priest.

She moved house with the families who served her. Meek describes a household head leaving an old compound and taking the goddess’s stones with him, along with the pot buried beneath them. At the new site he dug a hole, set the pot in it with an egg, filled in the soil, planted the stones on top, split a kola nut over them and told Ala plainly that he had brought her along and expected to be protected at least as well as before, and better if the last house had gone badly.

For a face, the record has to leave the villages and go to the mbari houses of the Owerri Igbo. The art historian Herbert M. Cole, who began fieldwork among the Igbo in 1966, describes coming upon a larger-than-life figure of Ala by a roadside: an older woman in sun-dried clay, a child at each side, the other figures around her half her height or less. Cole calls Earth the mother of the other gods, of plants, animals and people, the ground of morality and tradition at once. An mbari was built rarely, as a great sacrifice to Ala in the face of disaster. Specially chosen men and women were initiated as spirit workers, and for the large mbari of the 1930s they lived apart for a year or more. The clay they used came from termite mounds and was pounded in mortars until it had the texture of pounded yam, and it took the same name, *fufu*; the workers said they were going to the yam farm when they went to dig it. Professional artists modelled between fifty and a hundred and fifty figures, and the walls were painted, often with a sun, a moon and a rainbow high above the scene. Then the whole house was left to crumble back into the Earth it honoured. After the Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967 to 1970, Cole notes, a few were rebuilt in cement, which made them more like museums than sacrifices.

The sources disagree about her husband. Meek names the sky, Igwe, a son of Chuku, who fertilizes Ala with rain as a man fertilizes his wife, though he adds that Igwe never had a cult to compare with hers. Cole instead pairs her with Amadioha, god of thunder and rain, and calls him the lesser of the two in art and thought. Neither source gives Ala a birth, a childhood or a myth in which she acts as a character; she is not a figure in stories so much as the floor they happen on. Meek, reaching for a lineage, wondered whether her name might be related to the Babylonian underworld goddess Allatu. It is a guess from 1937, and nothing since has made it more than that.

Chinua Achebe put her at the moral centre of *Things Fall Apart* (1958) under the name Ani. In the novel, Okonkwo beats his wife during the Week of Peace kept in the earth goddess’s honour, and Ezeani, her priest, tells him he has insulted Ani and fines him. It is fiction, but it is fiction written by an Igbo novelist about the world his grandparents knew, and it catches the thing Meek’s tables catch: the Earth took offences personally.

Her power is the power of the ground to give or withhold. Ala makes women fertile and yams swell, protects farmers on the palm tree and strangers on the road, and, in Meek’s words, deprives evil men of their lives. Her limits are just as physical. She speaks only through divination and through her priests, she can be appeased with the right sacrifice, and in some places she refused any offering from a man whose teeth had not been chipped and filed. She cannot be avoided, since everyone stands on her, but she can be made to wait until the rites are done.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ala in Igbo religion?

Ala is the Igbo goddess of the Earth. The anthropologist C. K. Meek wrote in 1937 that she was the most important deity in Igbo public and private life, more central than the high god Chuku. She is also known as Ale, Ana, Ane and Ani, depending on the dialect.

What is Ala the goddess of?

Ala is the goddess of the Earth, fertility and public morality. She owns both the living and the dead, so she is closely tied to the ancestors, and crimes such as homicide, theft and adultery were treated as offences against her. The missionary G. T. Basden recorded the Igbo phrase for such wrongdoing as ulu-ani, the defiling of the land.

What is an mbari house?

An mbari house is a large open-sided structure built by the Owerri Igbo as a sacrifice to Ala. Initiated spirit workers modelled dozens of painted clay figures inside, with Ala as a large seated mother figure with children at the centre. The house was left to decay once finished, although a few were later rebuilt in cement.

Who is Ala’s husband?

The sources name two different partners for Ala. C. K. Meek recorded the sky, Igwe, who fertilizes the Earth with rain, while the art historian Herbert M. Cole pairs her with Amadioha, the god of thunder and rain. Both writers agree that her partner mattered far less than Ala herself.

Is Ala in Things Fall Apart?

Yes, Ala appears in Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel Things Fall Apart under the name Ani. Okonkwo beats his wife during the Week of Peace held in the earth goddess’s honour and is fined by Ezeani, her priest.

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