Anjenu
Anjenu are the nature-spirits of the rivers and the bush in Idoma religion, among the lesser divinities standing below the supreme Owoicho. Conceived chiefly as female, they are protective yet capricious powers: they appear to people in dreams, are blamed for infertility and ill-health, and are at the same time petitioned to grant children and to cure sickness. Men invoked them to make their wives conceive, and women appease them with offerings of bottled river water and calabash gourds. Their shrines characteristically hold sacred water, the eka medicine calabash, sacrificial food, and frequently a carved wooden image of the spirit, sometimes accompanied by a mud figure of a lion or leopard. The Anjenu cult is religiously and artistically hybrid, drawing together the Hausa bori possession spirits, the Igala alijenu and the pan-African water-deity Mami Wata; its sculptures, documented by Sidney Kasfir and held in major collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are a celebrated genre of Idoma art carved by named masters including Oklenyi of Okungaga.
Domains
- water and rivers
- fertility and healing
- wilderness and bush
Powers
- to grant or withhold human fertility
- to cause and to cure illness
- to appear to people in dreams
Epithets
- ahanaSidney L. Kasfir, 'Anjenu: Sculpture for Idoma Water Spirits,' African Arts 15, no. 4 (1982): 47-51, 92. (secondary)
Relations
- subordinate to: OwoichoThe Anjenu rank among the lesser nature-deities subordinate to the transcendent Owoicho within the Idoma hierarchy of spiritual beings.Robert G. Armstrong, 'The Idoma-Speaking Peoples,' in Daryll Forde, Paula Brown & Robert G. Armstrong, Peoples of the Niger-Benue Confluence, Ethnographic Survey of Africa: Western Africa Part X (London: International African Institute, 1955). (secondary)
Sources
- Anjenu are the water-and-bush nature spirits of the Idoma, associated with fertility, healing and illness, venerated at riverside shrines furnished with carved female figures and medicine calabashes.: Sidney L. Kasfir, 'Anjenu: Sculpture for Idoma Water Spirits,' African Arts 15, no. 4 (1982): 47-51, 92. (secondary); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'Figure: Seated Female (Anjenu),' Okpoto peoples (Idoma), Nigeria, Benue River, 19th-20th century, wood and pigment (Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection), object no. 309902. (secondary)