Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the ways in which masquerade performance has changed in the past fifteen years at Uga in Anambra state. Masquerade practice has been challenged by the evangelical churches that have proliferated throughout southern Nigeria during this period. Many notable masquerades have been burnt and their associations disbanded with many middle-aged members of the community withdrawing from participation in favour of church affiliations. This paper explores the dialectical interrelationships between two trends that have become more salient during this time. Firstly youth perform masquerade within regulated and policed public spaces, where the use of charms and other metaphysical powers are forbidden, to produce and valorise a localised Uga culture and identity (albeit that such performances are contested by many born again Christians within the community). Secondly youth masquerades are no longer suborned within the gerontocratic framing of more senior and powerful masquerades (that are in decline) and rather are utilised to assert a localised "modern" autonomous identity by and for youth. There is the replacement (and sometimes subversion) of the conceptual domains that the successful middleaged and elders construct and lay claim to through the spaces, practices and spectacle of Mmonwu performance.