African art scholars are yet to give any cogent reason for the classification of African art into traditional and modern. Although the fact that much art actually arise from a tradition – in tradition’s sense as a set of canonical values governing a group or a practice – subtly obviates the pejorative essences of the term “traditional”, its relationship to its older sibling (primitive) is, perhaps, validated by the fact that it is only the history of African art that is the subject of such classification.1 Indeed, all art derives from tradition. In spite of the claim to originality, artists do not create from a vacuum.

It is to the above classification that classical African artists owe their anonymity. The pre-contact African artist was not so individualistic as to sign his/her work. Art belonged to everyone. But it remains curious that Western ethnographers, anthropologists, and art historians did not make efforts to identify the individual authors/creators of the “finds” they took away from Africa, especially when they (the researchers) belonged to a tradition in which individualism and creative credit were highly prized. Until recently, so-called “traditional” African art was neither properly acknowledged or credited. The Fang carver that produced the mask that helped to deliver modern art through Picasso and his associates thus remain anonymous along with many other African classicists whose works have been studied in Western museums and galleries by generations of Western supremacist scholars.

It is reported, for instance, that scholars and colonial administrators collected uli stamps from some Igbo “traditional” women painters in Eastern Nigeria, but not much of such study has mentioned the names of these women, although none forgets the names of the expatriates involved.2 It was not until the 1990s that the faces of some uli women painters were seen for the first time in the (high) art circles. In an exhibition titled Uli: Different Times, Different Hands organised at University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in 1992, Obiọra Udẹchukwu, a modern uli painter, paraded both “traditional” and modern uli women artists.3 The two paradigms were shown side by side and the exhibition provided some insight into the stylistic appropriation that had given rise to what became, perhaps, the most original and philosophical creative idiom to emerge in Nigeria in the 20th century.

Beyond such tokenism, the uli women painters and their work have become an endangered species. They are not necessarily a spent force, but frightened horses, cowed and over-awed by a conquering, imported tradition which uses religion as its principal war horse. If uli murals were done mainly on shrine (mud) walls and select private compounds, it would seem logical to conclude that the new gods of the continent do not inhabit mud houses and that mud as a general building material is out of vogue. This implies that cultures and traditions are never static. They shift along the sands of times, adapting their meaning and essences to new realities. In the light of this fact, therefore, why has uli not found new expressions in contemporary ideas and creativity? Why has it remained a relic, part of the tatters of a past that must be jettisoned in its entirety?

The answer must be found in the corrosive tendencies of neo-colonisation which thrives on the politics of elimination. Neo-colonisation is a poor cousin of globalisation, that band-wagon phenomenon which only aims to Westernise (if not Americanise) the entire world. When juxtaposed with the nihilist psychology that has enveloped Nigeria in its self-inflicted process of under-development, the situation becomes much worse. Culture-identity effacement is hopeless enough; when retrogradation and the obliteration of history are added to it, cultural anonymity results.

This is the danger that rears up its head in contemplating the uli painting project in Nri which was initiated and supervised by Professor Obiọra Udẹchukwu and C. Krydz Ikwuẹmẹsi in the harmattan of 2003. Although Udechukwu had carried out the same project in 1984 in association with Okike Journal, Chike Aniakor and Herbert Cole, it was very difficult reassembling the women to repeat the mural in 2002 and 2003. The search took about a year. Most of the women had died. Some had grown very old. But the disturbing category was the one comprising women who declined to participate in the resumed project for the bizarre reason that they had converted to Christianity. While trying to rediscover these women, I came across one of them at the small market in Nri who lamented that the “uli women had been diminished by death, old age, and the Christian faith.” She said she could not participate in the uli project because she believed it was “a work for the heathen”.

When some women were finally reassembled in November 2003 to work on the Iyi Azị shrine walls, they were a beleaguered lot, vestiges of a past which certainly held - and still holds - much promise for those who participated in it much more than does the present with all its uncertainties. But in spite of the conflict in time, the women, like the Ghanaian mythical bird – sankofa4 – returned to the dark recesses of memory, stoking embers of a diminished fire in an energetic painting session that spanned four market days.

Imagination, Power and Astonishment
A typical uli painting session is a classic exemplar of the dynamics of community arts and cultural democracy. It is not the exertion of one painter. In the Iyi Azị painting project, the women numbered about 12. They were of various ages. The older women played the role of consultants and moral supporters. They helped occasionally with the painting, but in the main, they sat and watched while the younger women darted here and there juxtaposing forms and colours on the restored walls.

It must be noted here that these women were generally very old, largely ripples of a forgotten era. The youngest ones were certainly up to sixty years of age. The older ones were up to eighty. Some moved with walking aid. Others were so feeble that they trembled. Generally their age reflected the endangered nature of uli, the spirit of dissonance and decay that bedevil culture in Nigeria and other parts of Africa.

The uli mural, like modern painting, starts with the preparation of ground. It would be wrong here to create the impression that uli is naturally done on mud walls. That uli originated in a traditional setting where walls were entirely made of mud does not preclude the possibility of its success on cement walls and other grounds. This is so, because uli does not only refer to the pigment used in the painting tradition. It is also generally used to refer to the style and tradition in which it is used. In other words, outside uli body painting, uli in Igbo mural painting refers to the style, the cosmetics associated with the style and the overall intricacy associated with the design. The intricate symbols and designs could be replicated with any medium on a variety of support apart from the mud wall.

Experiments by Eziafọ Ọkarọ in Ogidi and Oliakụ Nzẹkwu in Nsụgbe demonstrate that uli is possible on cement walls in modern architecture, for instance. Eziafọ Ọkarọ used to live in an uli-decorated mud house which was recently rebuilt in cement by her relations. She was thus constrained to paint the façade of her room in the new cement structure, albeit very tentatively. Oliakụ, on her part, was bolder in her approach. The way the designs crudely stood out on the emulsion-painted walls portended enormous possibilities for uli beyond traditional Igbo women’s bodies and mud fences in the remote villages.

In traditional scenarios the typical uli mural on mud walls was done with earth colours numbering about four: nzu/ọcha, edo (yellow), ufịẹ (red), oji (black). Blue (from washing blue) was added much later to the palette. The colours were applied to a prepared wall in a variety of manner and style to generate graphic imageries. These imageries combine the collective myth of the community and the idle aspirations of the artist. Their charm and power have been sustained in some modern painting in Nigeria where uli has factored a major stylistic paradigm.5

But if some modern Nsukka-trained artists have been able to adapt uli to the challenges of high art (painting, sculpture, drawing, textiles, etc), why has the uli idiom not found its way into modern architecture and other functional design possibilities? The reason, perhaps, may be found in the curse of neo-colonisation where a tendency to Westernisation has taken a front seat. Modern Nigerian art may pride itself in its ability to align with tradition and seek new energies in the past, but the same cannot be said of modern architecture and other designs in these parts. In Nigeria, the concept of design is as sterile as the concept of society itself. Nowhere else is the sterility of modern Nigeria more vivid than on the monstrously utilitarian facades of contemporary architecture and in the craze for “white house,” which only underscores the emptiness and ephemeralness of taste that characterise contemporary culture in Nigeria. The situation is also evidence of cultural stagnation, which is the worst that can happen to a people. When a people loses the link between the past and the present, the future becomes very bleak indeed.

In modern day Japan, for instance, traditional Japanese architecture can be seen standing side by side with the modern.6 The same marriage of tradition and modernity is also the hallmark of Japanese cuisine. Such creative fusion is also visible in the design spirit of Ghana where adinkra and kente motifs have been successfully adapted to functional commercial designs. Also, on a recent visit to Bamako, I saw a girl dressed in t-shirt and slacks wearing linear decorations on her palms and soles which resembled uli calibrations. That it is difficult to find a girl – or even an old woman – wearing uli decoration on her body in contemporary Igboland is certain. It is also certain that uli, as I have pointed out, does not survive outside the ivory tower of high art.

But whether these facts translate to uli being an extinct and impossible idiom is open to debate. If this claim is to be sustained on the premises that uli plants cannot be found easily in contemporary Igbo communities the same way the earth colours used in the mural have become very scarce, then it should be emphasised that uli is not only the plant and the colours. The uli spirit is in the design elements, the symbols and motifs, which are open to a myriad modernising adaptations, but which have been neglected in the prevailing cultural self-effacement that have encircled Nigerian ethnicities, including the Igbo. I have only gone to this length to asseverate that uli as a design paradigm is not tied to mud wall. If the modern uli artists could succeed in evoking the uli spirit in their work using modern – if Western – mediums, there is every reason for uli to find resurrection in modern exterior and interior designs, fabrics, antimacassar, bed sheets, ties, postcards, mugs, table cloths, and similar products. Tentative efforts may have been made in these directions by a few Nsukka artists, but they have never been good enough or conceived on a sustainable scale.7 But it was not along this line that the Nri women regrouped in 2003; it was not for them to articulate a possible manifestation of uli in modern design ideas. For the women belong to a moment in history distanced from the present, a moment we are allowed only to view in glimpses which were creatively enacted by the women themselves through their painting, song, and dance.

Rite of Renewal: Renovating the walls of Iyi Azị
The walls of the shrine of Iyi Azị, a major deity in Nri, were the tatters of a lost world. Twenty years back, it would have enjoyed regular renovation by women gifted in the uli tradition. By the time Obiọra Udechukwu and C. Krydz Ikwuẹmẹsị caused the walls to be reworked in November 2003, it had not been painted for several years. The scarcely visible patches of paint on parts of the walls were surviving evidence from the last renovation commissioned by Udẹchukwu in the mid-1980s. In the distant past, this kind of renovation was inevitable during festivals, although it could be carried on at other times.

The women set to work the first day with the process of sizing. The size consisted in aja ọtọ, mud slip, which the women used to smoothen the wall surfaces with the aid of ntịtẹ (rag), covering cracks and crevices created by age, insects and atmospheric factors. Further burnishing was done with mkpụlụ nkwọ, fine pebble, which is patiently rubbed against the surfaces to render them more receptive to the primer and indeed the final painting. This was followed up with a special red mud slip (aja nwa mmọọ, literally: “sand of the spirits”) which obviously played the role of primer. The aja nwa mmọọ primer was left to dry properly for a few days before the final process of painting could commence.

The painting exercise was a communal affair. Twelve women were involved, but the most active were Mma Nwobu, Ifeatụ Nwokoyẹ, Ịfeọma Igboabalụ, Ọnwụkwẹ Nwosu, Nwọchịnọmụmụ Ẹnẹmmọọ, and Bịanụba Nwosu. All these women were married from other Igbo towns into Nri. But they all had their own artistic backgrounds, having been involved in the uli tradition as young maidens in their respective towns of origin. Yet having worked together on occasions in Nri, they shared some commonalities in vision, style and technique. As Obiora Udechukwu (1984) has reported,

Igbo kwenyelụ n’ọra, sị na “Aka wẹta, aka wẹta, ọnụ eju.” Aka uli dị n’ụdị n’ụdị. Onwelụ ndi ọlụ fa bụ ‘uli nkpowa’, nwe ndị na-adụ ife ọdụdụ, nwee ndị ‘uli kịlịkịlị’ na-aka mma n’aka. Ndị agadị nwaanyị ike gwụgolu, ndị na-anarọ afụzi uzo ọfụma, ndị aka na-amazi lilili, nwekwulu ife fa na-alụ. 8

The painting itself was thus a commune of ideas. No single woman could lay claim to the whole or parts of the painting, although each was noted individually in the community for her dexterity in uli art. The resulting work belonged to them all and to the entire community.

The most creative of the women executed the painting. The oldest among them, Nwagọ Ẹzẹbụilo, a holder of the Iyọm title (which is the feminine equivalent of the ọzọ title reserved largely for women of achievement) rendered the initial drawings. She started with the royal python, ẹkẹ ọgba, and then introduced other forms. All these were done in black. Other women then took over. Some marked out the design areas in a style known as mgbuwa (segmentation); some made the general layout of forms, while others followed up with ornamental details and motifs. Ornamentation was mainly in the other colours: blue, red, white, and ochre, beautifully alternated to achieve some form of balance.

Uli painting, both on body and wall, relies on spontaneity. The Nri women, therefore, did not work with carefully thought-out sketches or designs. Their imagination and hands collaborated most constructively to give rise to images and imageries which can be both aesthetic and functional. Although they worked as the spirit moved them, the resulting designs obviously derived from their history and collective psyche. Objects such as ụgbọ amala (canoe), ọgẹnẹ mkpị n’abọ (two-pronged metal gong), oji (masker’s metal staff), aghụ (wall gecko), itẹ ọna (cast aluminium pot), mma (knife), nwanyị ime (pregnant woman), and others were deployed in the abstract mould to populate the walls. They were like snapshots of the Igbo cosmos vividly appropriated in an ancient collage.

The Nri women in their work problematised the supremacist notion of African art which tended to cast it in an inferior light against its Western counterpart. The work of the women has the capacity to rival any work in the world. For not only does it encode a fair dose of philosophy, it also respects some principles of design appropriate to its time, essence, and objectives. Although it relies on a pristine ideology, it has the power to appeal to all tastes and times. It is, perhaps, to this fact that the women alluded in their ritual dance on the last day of the painting when they sang inter alia:

Ndị anyị na fa tol’ okolobia
sị n’anyị akarụ gwo;
gbafa nkịtị, anyị akarọ nka
n’ọ bụ ọgọdụ anyị kalụ nka

(Those with whom we sowed
the wild oats now claim that
we are old;
don’t mind them; we are not old
it’s our cloth that are old)

Not only that. The women also asserted in other songs:

Ọmẹnanị y’ẹjẹ En’igwe
(Tradition will go to heaven. or
Tradition will attain eternity.)

Ọkwọ anyị bụ nnẹ ndị ụka
(We ourselves are the mothers of the
Church-goers)

Going by the songs, the women themselves seem to appreciate the danger facing the tradition for and in which they lived. But they are also conscious that it should find expression in other means, especially in the face of the dilemma that still defines the notions of religion, culture, and life in general in these parts. This fact may be illustrated in an exchange between the women and a reverend father who passed by on the penultimate day of the exercise. The cleric greeted the women and asked with mock sincerity: “You must be very busy decorating your church?” and they all chorused “Yes”. Then they cursed in low tones, mumbling about “hypocrites who lived in the church but did no good to anyone, except to divide society”. The statement tends to evoke Obierika’s words in Achebe’s anthropological novel, Things Fall Apart:

He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.9

The process of dissonance remains a feature of neo-colonial Africa. Uli is not exempt from this reality.


Omenani y’eje Enigwe: Uli and the Politics of Modernisation
The dilemma and consequent decay that attend cultural enterprise in Nigeria, as in much of Africa, is one of the greatest misfortunes of modernisation. The theory of fetishism woven around many cultural practices in Africa during the hey days of colonisation has been sustained in the prevalent neo-colonisation that has found expression through the channels of politics and religion.

All over Africa, politics remains a second-hand phenomenon which only provides a means for aping Western systems of governance. This has made nonsense of traditional institutions and systems of authority, while creating travesties of the original models as they exist in Europe and America. Hence, democracy in Nigeria, for instance, is not necessarily a system which guarantees majority participation in governance and nation building, but one which enables the have to continue to have and the have-not to continue not to have; it is the decentralisation of violence and corruption and not the devolution of power to the people. Religion, on the other hand, appears to be a more remarkable tool for neo-colonisation. Unlike politics, it does not stop at confounding existing institutions and systems for its own advantage; it tends to uproot the collective psychology in a bid to implant extraneous ones.

The negativisation of the notion of culture in Nigeria is a phenomenon that was born in the colonial situation; but it has enjoyed a new and more significant birth in the hopelessness occasioned by the failure of social institutions in modern times. Colonisation dealt a coup de grace on traditional institutions which had anchored the visions of life that provided meaning for the various cosmologies that were transformed into Nigeria. Political independence and the religion of Europe, more commonly known as Christianity, offered new possibilities to the peoples of Nigeria as it did to other peoples of Africa. When the social institutions collapsed as a result of mismanagement and corruption, the religion of Europe held the last ray of hope, especially with the alluring and formidable logic of eternity. This has given rise to a renewed and intensive process of deculturation which has rendered the autochthonous weltanschauung bankrupt and colourless.

It is such fossilisation of tradition that has turned many words and practices into taboo. In certain circles in Nigeria, a word like “culture” itself is taboo; “shrine” is taboo; masquerade is taboo; their meanings have been negativised in the prevailing atrophy that has been summoned on the society. Yet they are still freely used in other societies where ignorance and fanaticism have not become variants of the intellect. It is an irony, for instance, that a word like “shrine” which has become anathema in common parlance in Nigeria continues to survive and remain acceptable in Catholicism and its other cousins.

That uli art is extinct is only part of a scenario that has become a “normal” process as outlined above. It could easily be argued that it is “a mud art” and that mud is no longer a popular architectural material. Indeed a project led by Doris Weller, a German artist, in the early 1990s had relabelled uli “ụpa art.” Ụpa is the Igbo word for red earth. The nomenclature only confounded the meaning and essence of uli, in spite of whatever good intentions Weller may have had.10 Taken literally, it tended to suggest that uli was an earthy kind of art whose possibilities and techniques were encircled by sand and mud. But it is now debatable whether Weller’s scholarship was faulty in some respects or whether she ran into the murky grounds of erroneous translation. Both variables could be possible. Uli – or even ụpa – is not the material. As I have explained above, it is the motifs, the symbology, that defined and sustained the tradition. If socio-political circumstances have foisted new values upon society, old ideas and traditions can find new channels of expression and align themselves to the prevailing challenges. When this does not happen, the affected society runs the risk of sterility of a psycho-cultural nature. It is, therefore, not strange that uli, like many other classical art forms, is drowning in the waters of westernisation. What is strange is that it has not been fully reinvented and re-engaged by modern artists, designers and product developers in spite of its enormous potentials.

Re-engaging Uli: a conclusion
I returned to Nri in the rainy season (around July) of 2004 to begin recording for a documentary on uli. The Iyi Azi shrine had been overgrown by weeds. The murals that were painted during the 2003 renovation were fading. I persuaded the women to renovate the façade in aid of the recording. Although the drawings were as exciting as the previous ones, the process of priming was not as complete. The women could not find aja nwammọọ; they resorted to aja ọtọ, using it as size and primer. As for duration this time, two days sufficed. The documentary is funded by Pendulum Art Gallery, Lagos, as a means through which interest in uli could be rekindled in order to create a basis for a possible adaptation of uli to diverse socio-economic uses.

In the three decades following the civil war in Nigeria, some modern Nigerian artists at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, appropriated ideas from classical uli paintings and drawings, using same to enrich their works in search of essence and philosophy. The three decades of experiment crystallised into a major idiom that is acclaimed internationally.11 Whether this fact has ensured the perpetuation of uli, or whether it has been of any extra-artistic advantage to the classicists themselves is quite controvertible. Indeed, it can be argued that the adaptation of uli into high art subtly cast the traditional uli women in the light of primitivism, since their work was seldom exhibited to the public, but only read about in history books or seen in slides by way of tokenism usually made possible by their modern followers. Moreover, the claim to a relationship to the classicists by the moderns is, perhaps, more convincing at the linear level; beyond lines, the claim is often problematic and is only plausible to the extent of the artist’s claim. Sarah Adams puts this fact in clear perspective in her account in Ottenberg 2002:

In January 1995 Ekedinma Ojiakor and Martina Okafor…from Agulu, Anambra State, painted uli on a clay building in Okafor’s compound. I worked on the wall…with the two artists as an apprentice to get a feel for what it is like to actually paint uli. When we finished painting the wall we decided to have a celebration for our accomplishment, and I wore a dress that had been created for me by Ada Udechukwu, one of the artists in the exhibition The Poetics of Line: Seven Artists of the Nsukka Group…

The dress employed what I saw then as the highly uli-influenced lines and patterns that have come to be seen as characteristic of the Nsukka group, and I when I arrived at the compound I assumed it would be immediately recognized by Okafor and Ojiakor. Yet even when I had to point out what I thought were clear connections between Ada Udechukwu’s work and theirs, they seemed generally unimpressed. They were uninterested, didn’t seem to see a connection, and furthermore were mystified as to why I was making such a fuss over my drab black dress. This event opened up a range of questions for me about the relationship between the works of the Nsukka group and the works of the uli artists who have inspired them.12

I had a similar experience in Nri in 2004 when Okey Nwafọ and I tried to encourage the uli women to work with gouache on paper. The women saw little or no relationship between their efforts on the Iyi Azi walls and those on the watercolour paper. Curiously, one of the women initially made efforts to draw human beings, in a manner that suggested that she probably considered uli to be impossible beyond the traditional grounds of the human body and mud wall. This further calls to question the “success” of the acclaimed adaptation of uli into high art, especially in relation to the imperative of sustaining the tradition somewhere between the cradle and the often esoteric circles of high art.

There is no doubt that when interest in uli among contemporary Nigerian and other artists and scholars wanes, uli would die as felicitously as it found its way into modern art. I shall not bother with the argument here whether or not the modern uli artists have left a broad enough based legacy to ensure the survival of uli and their own efforts beyond their own time in history. The modernisation of uli as a creative idiom is only one possibility in its perpetuation that has been tried out in the most elastic manner and the success will logically wane sooner or later. There is thus a need to find new expressions for uli. This may be a new task for artists and scholars in the coming years. But the expressions must be located outside the highly policed confines of academics, museums, and galleries. Uli enthusiasts must find a place for it at the grass roots, the way it has been done for similar paradigms in other parts of Africa, through the means of sustainable commercial designs. This will not only save uli from the dangers of extinction, but will also validate the place of the women painters in history, not as glorified primitives, but as veritable classicists whose works can inspire generations of artists and other creative people in many different meaningful ways.









Notes and References
1. See C. Krydz Ikwuẹmẹsị, 2000. “Beyond these Pigeonholes: Redefining African Art in the 21st century,” in Chike C. Aniakor and C. Krydz Ikwuemesi, Crossroads: Africa in the Twilight. Abuja: National Gallery of Art, pp.19 – 28. Critiques such as Ọlụ Ọgụibe and Salah Hassan have also criticised the problematic classification of African art.

2. Elizabeth A. Péri, 2002. “ Varieties and Qualities in Uli Painting Based on Drawings from the Igbo Ozo and Igbo Abamaba Areas, collected in the 1930s,” in Simon Ottenberg, The Nsukka Artists and Nigerian Contemporary Art: Washington. D.C. and Seattle: Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and University of Washington Press, p. 38.

3. The exhibition included Ada Udẹchukwu, Ndidi Dike, Bridget Egbeji (all modern artists) and Mgbadunwa Ọkanụmẹẹ (traditional uli painter), among others.

4. See John Picton et al, 2000 on El Anatsui. But the sankofa myth is not peculiar to Ghana. Artists Southern Africa also liken themselves to sankofa in their pursuit of a history and an identity.

5. For more than 30 years, artists trained at, or associated with, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, have claimed a sustained relationship with uli painting tradition of the Igbo of eastern Nigeria. Some of the major artists of Nsukka are Igbo, others are not. But they all share the commonality of interest in uli.

6. C. Krydz Ikwuẹmẹsị, 2003. A Critical Travelogue. Enugu: Citadel Publishing. See Part II.

7. Such artists as Barthosa Nkurumeh, Oziọma Ọnụzulike, Iyke Okenyi, Chijioke Ọnụọra, and a few others have used uli design to embellish cards, ceramic wares, sculptural furniture, and textile. But the trend is yet to transform into a major sub-movement in uli; which may be what uli needs badly at the moment if it must enjoy a third rebirth .

8. “The Igbo believe in community and say that “Many handfuls fill the mouth.” There are different styles in uli. There are people who are skilled in ‘uli nkpowa’ (broad uli designs), while others are good in ‘uli kilikili’ (intricate uli designs). Weary, old women, with trembling hands also have roles to play.” Spellings in the Igbo quotation are as they were written by the author. Obiọra Udẹchukwu, 1984. “Ọgwụgwa Aja Iyi Azị, Nri 1984.” Ụwa Ndị Igbo: Journal of Igbo Life and Culture. No. 1, June 1984, pp.57-60.

9. Chinua Achebe, 1958. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., pp 124 – 125.

10. See C. Krydz Ikwuẹmẹsị, 1996. “Ụpa Art is a Misnomer.” Champion, Saturday March 4, 1995.

11. So far, the highest point in uli’s development remains, perhaps, the 1997 Smithsonian exhibit organized by Prof. Simon Ottenberg in Washington, D.C., under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution. Uli/Nsukka artists have also featured prominently individually at international art events.

12. Sarah Adams, 2002. “One Person Does Not Have the Hand of Another: Uli Artists, the Nsukka Group and the Contested Terrain in Between,” in Simon Ottenberg, op.cit, pp.53 – 54.