FOSTERING ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT THROUGH AFRICAN INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE : THE EXAMPLE OF SELECTED IBIBIO FOLKSONGS

Environmental catastrophe is a real threat to the ecosystem and sustainable livelihood today and in the future. However, the global call for environmental sustainability and climate change mitigation appear only to adopt models from only science and technological thinking without input from indigenous ecological knowledge. This paper titled Fostering Environmental Communication and Human Development through African Indigenous Knowldege: The Example of Selected Ibibio Folksongs takes a look at how the folklores and songs of Ibibio people of Akwa Ibom State Nigeria are incorporated into performance signification of environmental information and education and its implication in the globalised environment of the twenty first century and the current crusade for environmental sustainability in Africa. The paper concludes that a careful study through content analysis of selected folksongs and wise sayings from the Ibibio society and assessing their application to community education and development communication for sanitation and environmental awareness can support ongoing global call for the application of indigenous knowledge systems in solving environmental challenges in rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa. The paper recommends the integration of traditional folksongs and local ecological knowledge in environmental awareness and development communication programmes through the documentation, translation and incorporation into the reading materials in the schools, creative education syllabus and contemporary media programme content.


Introduction
Folk or traditional performances are contextualised enactments of the cosmo-vision and worldview of the society of their origin.They actualise community spirit, thought and filial connectivity and generate templates of societal aspirations and development.In Africa, folk performances occupy a place of significance and general acceptability in indigenous communities.The existing knowledge system in African communities also fosters constant recourse to performances as they sometime serve utilitarian functions including providing therapeutic impact in traditional medical practice (Wilson, 2006:1).This is to say that folk performances are well regarded and fully utilised in enhancing the spiritual, health, aesthetic and philosophical base of the community.It is also an instrument of identity formation as each folk performance carries the emblematic particulars of the people or society where it emerges from.Folk songs for example 'disclose in their varieties and aspects, the common origin of the various groups in Nigeria' (Eyoh, 2011:88).Folklores and oral normative devices link the production orientation of the performances to the rubrics of communal philosophy because embedded in these performances are values, systems and principles that direct sustainability and livelihoods in the community.Beyond their aesthetic and sociocultural functions most folk performances are powerful vehicles of communal education, social engineering and development communication.
Environmental conservation, sustainable agricultural practices, water resources management and ecological balance carry serious significance in traditional societies and are constantly highlighted in indigenous arts and cultural displays.Much as such values were held very high and entrenched in the daily workings of indigenous African societies, today's picture is a direct opposite of the past even in the face of more disturbing dimensions of environmental dislocations, climate change and ecological crisis in the present.A combination of poor cultural conservation attitude by the indigenous peoples themselves and the incursion of televised foreign cultural images via satellite channels and the internet has almost brainwashed the society and reduce the indigenous knowledge and values to the margins of existence.Young people in the rural areas of Africa now rush with abrasive energy to the urban centres and ape hybrid cultural materials and icons.The music of foreign extraction rhymes better in the ears of our people in utter abandonment of indigenous tunes and lyrics that did not only carry messages of development but also acted as an informal apparatus of community development and social sustainability.
The significant need for ecological conservation and environmental sustainability did not need a special structure of orchestration as it is the case presently, but was embedded in the folk performances and normative vehicles in the community.This development is not only worrisome but is also against the grains of the future development of the continent and the very foundation of the society.The need to act fast and reverse the trend is imminent and necessitates the call for the positioning of culture as a pivot for development communication instead of mainstreaming only scientific and technological knowledge in finding solutions to environmental problems as it appears the case presently.The challenges of the environment, researchers insists should adopt a multidisciplinary apparatus in finding solutions and the need for humanistic knowledge in understanding environmental issues is increasingly orchestrated in current discourses in the field.

Culture and Performance as Pivot of Development Communication
The role of culture and performance as a pivot of development in the society has enjoyed several years of interrogation and interest (Malik, 1992;Woolcock, 2002;Mbakogu, 2004;CDC, 2006;Radcliffe and Laurie, 2006;Omolewa, 2007;Deshkal, 2007;Ghai and Kumar, 2008;Tufte and Mefalopulos, 2009;Crompton, 2010).The utility function of culture and performance admits different dimensions of manifestations as educational, informational, aesthetic and social mobilising resource in the society.Performance and culture has been variously highlighted as a value-building institution that engineers change in the society.Its functional viability as the representational expression of the ideals, ethos, philosophy, aesthetics and moral foundation of every society has been projected in many channels.What it has done to strengthen human relations, understanding and wellbeing has also been orchestrated on many occasions.The profound contribution of performance and culture in building great civilisations and nurturing knowledge development has already attained a seminal position in many societies for many decades now.What would life look like without the traditional musician, the painter, the poet, the actor, the story teller, the weaver, the dancer, the sculptor, the carver to mention but a few of the skills of the members of the culture and performance family?
The articulation of culture and performance as pivot of development communication is a move towards the repositioning of development discourse and planning.Development as stated elsewhere in this paper is a multi-prong phenomenon that incorporates different dimensions of realisation in different societies.What is considered development in context A may not be considered development in context B. Different societies and peoples have their peculiar ways of engaging and interpreting development.The onus is therefore on development planners and facilitators to study each society and base their development programmes on the existing knowledge systems that governs life in that society.The materialisation of this concept in development practice means a careful employment of culture-based practices because culture, in most cases, is the route to this knowledge system.
To further buttress this point, there is an urgent need to review the very etymology of knowledge systems.M'Raiji (2011:26) views indigenous knowledge systems as the 'institution that a community has, over generations, and put in place for efficient administration and management of a society'.He goes ahead to observe that this institution is home grown and respected by the members of a community (M'Raiji, 2011:26).The cardinal importance of incorporating knowledge systems, such as the cultural normative devices and performances in creating templates of community development is clearly generated in the opinion cited above.Again, development should primarily be for the people and people can only identify with what emerges out of their culture.
It is therefore the strong position of this paper that, culture is a key development material that must be understood and applied in development activities which particularly targets marginal communities and indigenous people's locations.These cultural resources have been identified as potent materials in mass sensitisation, conscientisation, community education and social engineering in various societies (Takem, 2005).Ghai and Kumar (2008:17) after years of engagement in development practice and research especially among marginal communities in India, concludes that 'marginality originates and is perpetuated by the interplay of culture, ideology and power ingeniously orchestrated by the state under close surveillance of its panoptic gaze and legitimised by dominant historical tropes.'These are factors that cannot be overlooked when engaging with communities with the characteristics presented above.The success of any form of engagement, development programme in particular, requires a circumspect exploration of the cultural ethos and paraphernalia that informs existence and development in that area.As already indicated in a variety of researches, behaviour is central to practices in every society and culture is the root of most behaviour therefore a successful programme in environmental communication should adequately implicate behaviour science and cultural understanding (Lehman and Geller, 2004).This is the context in which culture and performance is eminent as the infrastructure of environmental communication in developing societies and the basis of its exploration in this paper.Foregrounding this concept will require additional insight on the concept of environmental communication.What is environmental communication?

Environmental Communication and Applied Media in Development
Environmental communication is an emerging concept that incorporates the various communication programmes that targets ecosystem conservation and environmental sustainability.It encompasses the various innovative and creative ways that the message of environmental sustainability is packaged to generate more commitments towards ecological stability and biodiversity protection.The modus In this context, communication targeting environmental development integrates hybrid methodologies and techniques in a participatory dimension for development communication.Applied synergistic practices such as applied theatre or theatre for development, alternative media practices falls within the purview of environmental communication.Ebewo (2009:27) identifies this as 'an outcomebased, participatory and popular theatre practice' geared towards community development.The implication of such practice on environmental development has already been acknowledged in various researches (Takem, 2005;Nda, 2010;Inyang, 2011).The necessity of contextualising the folk performance of the Ibibio people of South Eastern Nigeria substantially articulates its spreading of information and communal education on environmental matters.This is considered most timely and appropriate in the current global crusade for environmental sustainability especially in Africa.

Ibibio Performance
The Ibibio people occupy modern day Akwa Ibom State and are the fourth largest ethnic group in contemporary Nigeria (Falola and Heaton, 2008).Akwa Ibom State is situated in the South-South section of Nigeria and covers a total area of 8,421 square geometries.It has a population of 2.4 million people (NPC, 2008).The state was created in September 1987 through the geopolitical restructuring of the Nigerian federation by the military government of that era.The major occupations of the people are farming, fishing, civil service and petty trading and Ibibio language and its dialectical variants such as Annang, Oron, Eket, and Andoni is spoken commonly in the state (Udo, 1983;Ukpong, Akpan and Akang, 2001;Udoh, 2003).There are various performances and cultural displays which constitutes the indigenous theatre of the Ibibio people.These manifests in a rich diversity of multi-dimensional performances and artistic expressions in the forms of oral narratives, music, dances, folklores, songs, drama, visual elements, crafts, among others (Ebewo, 2005).The substance and renderings of the Ibibio performance has already enjoyed years of scholarly interrogation arriving at the conclusion that the Ibibio people parade a theatre capable of actualising the communication and educational needs of the society (Akpabot, 1981&1986;Ogunbiyi, 1981;Ebong, 1990;Sadoh, 2008;Johnson, 2010).Significant in the list of such performances are the folk songs and wise sayings that are indigenous to the people and which have survived years of oral trans-generational transfer to this day and serve as the cultural base of a folk music genre of a contemporary extraction.Folk songs and wise sayings are integral to the expression and understanding of the Ibibio universe and worldview.They constitute the artistic realisation of the people's perception of life and existential dynamics.They also carry nuances and properties that illustrate the communal perception of the environment and ecological issues.An Ibibio proverb admits this assertion in the light of its stipulation that 'ke owo aba nte nkankuk omo' which translated means that a person's life is replicated in his environment.A person who lives a healthy life is noted in the clean state of his surroundings.The environment assumes a place of importance in the cultural perception of the Ibibio society as it is considered a physical symbolisation of a man's internal state of being.
Ibibio people are a people conscious of natural order and its impact on the wellbeing of the society.They do not compromise with the issues of personal cleanliness and the neatness of the surroundings.Another Ibibio proverb accentuates this ideation by locating a person's wealth to the neatness of his surrounding thus: 'Nsana ebiet owo idepe ke okuk, nsanaidem ado uyai amana ado iyene.'The translation of this proverb declares that a clean compound or surrounding is not bought with money; cleanliness is both beauty and wealth.Another strand of the proverb says that 'Nsanaidem owo idepe ke okuk, nsanaidem oto esit idem', which translated means that personal cleanliness is not bought with money but being neat emerges from the inside out.
The cardinal role of folk sayings, proverbs and wise saying in inculcating the tenets and principles of environmental consciousness in the people is critical to the survival of the society as these are societies that still incorporate local knowledge in maintaining sustainable livelihood even in the present times.Such indigenous development resource is also critical to the contemporary effort in development practice.Researchers insist that they should be incorporated into development initiatives in modern times (Akpabio, 2011).It is on the basis of this understanding and in a bid to expand the space of academic understanding of this issue that this paper undertakes to study how selected Ibibio folk songs and wise sayings are engaged in local environmental communication even in the present dispensation.

The Structure of the Ibibio Performance
The Ibibio people retain a cultural system that parades many performances and enactments that are often staged to commemorate important seasonal events.Ibibio performance or the performance of the Ibibio people is a communal theatre like most communities of Africa.It is a theatre that emerges from the mythological and social processes that sustains the typical African philosophy of the community (Akpabot, 1981).It is therefore not the theatre of an individual imagination and stardom but a theatre that draws its aesthetic particulars and finesse from collective conceptualisation and production.The Ibibio performance is a cyclical theatre and responds to the cyclical manifestation of the African spirituality that perceives life in a continuum and luminal terms.The arena of the Ibibio performance is dominated by artistic displays that exemplify the community's ethos and belief in the power of all as opposed to one.These performances are rooted in practices that project the gains of togetherness as critical to productivity and fertility.The natural environment itself with the trees, the rivers, the animals, birds, hills, wind, sky, the earth and all other forms of the natural flora and fauna are visibly incorporated into the Ibibio theatre scenery and spectacle and so generates an a performative environmentalism that is rare in the conventional Western concept of theatre.
The Ibibio people are culturally sophisticated people and so still maintain strong alliance to their cultural practices even in the face of the massive onslaught of globalisation with its drive to displace and dislocate peoples and their cultures.Though there are obvious transitions in the performing arena in the Ibibio society with evident presence of multi-culturalism and hybrid cultural materials drawn from interactions and intersections across diverse cultural platforms, the indigenous performance practices and orientation of the Ibibio people are still in existence.One of such cultural practices is the arts of folk performance that materialises in the forms of folk songs and wise sayings.This paper aims to analyse a selection of such wise sayings and folk songs and establish their visibility as instruments of environmental advocacy.
Ibibio wise sayings and folk songs are drawn from the common repertory of the Ibibio oral tradition.Williams (2009) observes that the Ibibio oral literature follows the common pattern of existential storage in the collective memory of the society and transfer through the informal oral communication channels that has survived many years of communal preservation.Oral tradition is indisputably the precursor of theatre and performance in the African world and this is also true for the Ibibio as it is true in other parts of Africa (Abalogu, Ashiwaju and Amadi-Tshiwala, 1981; Okpewho, 1992).
Folk performance therefore maintains a paramount place of importance in the Ibibio society and is linked to the very foundation and survival of the race.Ekpa (2012:91) affirms this assertion and observes that, 'To the Ibibio, music and life are inseparable.'To enable us achieve more clarity in our understanding and appreciation of the environmental communication function that these folk songs and wise sayings play, there is need to note their classification into two categories: the choral and the proverbial types.The choral type of folk song is the one that is offered in a choral rendition when occasion demands while the proverbial type manifests as mnemonic devices that supports local narrative sessions called Ekong Nkee.
Ekong Nkee is a communal gathering of locals after farm work, under the spotlight of the moon, to narrate stories that carry moral lessons for the listeners.The story is often narrated by an elderly member of the society to an audience which consists of the entire family or household but with apparent emphasis on passing life's lessons to the young ones.Such stories are drawn from the agrarian nature of the society and so parades animal characters such as the lion, the tortoise, birds, elephants and human personalities that are often extremely intelligent, wise, old, strong and capable of withstanding and overcoming difficult conditions, threat to life with added capacity for spiritual insight and ability to control the elements.

Selected Folk Songs and Wise Sayings and their Usage in Environmental Communication in Ibibio Communities
This paper is focused on two folk songs that also incorporate wise sayings that graphically express messages of environmentalism and community development.The folk songs are titled 'Utom Idung'(Community Service/Work) and 'Ido Ukang Nnyin' (Our Communal Attitude).The texts of the songs are as follows:
When the community is kept clean, people Enjoy themselves, when it is full of dirt, sickness Walks about like an indigene.Dirt is not good, Unclean things don't suit our taste, our community Does not welcome dirt and dirty people.Come out and join others in community clean-up So that when the sanitary inspector comes, you Will not run into the bush like a rabbit breaking Out of a trap!Uto ido odo mme ette nnyin eke enyiehe ibaha Aba se iye iba aye ado ke mbure.Idung isanake nanga ekesi sana, obio aye ado kembure. Translation:

Our Communal Attitude
The culture or ways of our people is becoming disorderly (2x).The attitude or habits of our fathers Is now bastardised.The method of salutation in the community is now bastardised.The styles of singing and dancing is also not what is used to be.The way Of addressing people is also not in order.The habit Of hard work and the eating habit, all bastardised.The orderly manner of eating and cleanliness are now not what it used to be.The ways of our fathers are now discarded and disorderly conduct is enthroned.The community is not as clean as it used to, it is now disorderly and unkempt.

Analysis of the Folk songs and Wise Sayings
The first folk song under consideration titled 'Utom Idung' emerges from the existing context of communal commitment to environmental protection.In Ibibio communities just like in other indigenous communities in Africa, the responsibility of environmental conservation is a collective one.The community is the primary regulatory authority for environmental practice and every member of the community is expected to play a part in upholding the practices that will enhance safety and sustainability in the community.The song is therefore a communal call for engagement in keeping the community clean.Utom Idung replicates the typical experience in our villages where special days are set aside for communal cleaning of the environment.It is a practice that dates back to many generations and is maintained till today.Such cleaning days are built on the template of an existing protocol of adult responsibility to keep the community clean and safe.
The song expresses the community's position on environmental sustainability.It is expected that all the community members must respond joyfully and participate in cleaning the community with a mind that individually accepts the task of keeping the environment clean.It is therefore both a song of inspiration, praise and admonition.Stanza one establishes the communal context of the call to participate in the community cleaning exercise.Here there is obvious communal acceptance of the need for a clean environment as imperative to healthy living.The angle of operation is situated in an individual commitment and willingness to respond to a call captured in the first line, 'Utom idung ankood' which translated means the communal task is demanding of me or calling me.The voice of a community member, a patriot is used to convey this communal call.The persona expresses a joy and willingness in responding to the call by saying 'ndadara mboro' meaning I am responding with joy or I am responding with pride.The persona's response is used to instigate other responses as he/she encourages others: 'inkene iboro' meaning join me in responding.
This indicates a feeling of communality backed up with responsibility.Each person responding is considered 'ama eti nkpo' (the lover of what is good).We therefore see a communication context that is devised to inspire all to participate in environmental protection in a language that is persuasive yet friendly.This is where modern environmental communication programme miss the point as the modus of communication adopts a language that is instructive, alienating, prescriptive and sometime out rightly unfriendly.The fact of the matter is that each community has her own way of sending out the message of development.Each community has her own way of persuading even unwilling persons to be involved in the task of keeping the community clean.Such technical resources needs to feature prominently in development programmes involving indigenous as they are bound to create more impact than the information, education and communication (IEC) handouts from the so called development experts 'from abroad'.
The second stanza of the song consolidates what was developed in the first.It contains materials that enforce mass participation in the environmental exercise using the language of satire.Satire is a tool of conscientisation and sensitisation in traditional performances especially in the Ibibio society.Its effectiveness in community information dissemination and communal education is already acknowledged by scholars and researchers in Ibibio theatre and oral literature (Ebong, 1993;Ikiddeh, 2005).The emphases on stanza two is on admonishing every individual to respond to the communal call.The direction of communication here is to drive a commitment from all in case there are people who will want to be stubborn.Such persons are equated with the character of a pig known for being dirty and in the Ibibio social context any reference to the pig is seen in absolutely derogatory terms and nobody wants to be considered a pig.So the song's advocatory admonition 'ake minama, abat nte edi' is strong enough to command response as no family wants to be seen in such demeaning light.The admonition goes ahead to emphasise weeding community streets, sweeping the surroundings and cleaning the latrine as this will enhance healthy living in the community.
The last stanza of the song is a realignment of thought on communal perception of the environment.The significance of a clean environment is connected to safety, good health and well being in the community.Cleanliness is contextualised as wellness while lack of it is surmised as representing a free movement of sickness and disease in the community captured in the proverbial reference to 'udongo aye asanga nte eyen isong' meaning that disease and sickness walking about in the community like an indigene.Here we note the substantial encapsulation of a powerful message in a local wise saying.The role of environmental communication always is to create awareness and extract behaviour modification.Looking at the context of the Ibibio society, this aim becomes easily achievable as the existing communication patterns in the society supports.Apart from creating a communal atmosphere for discourse on the environment, the social realisation of the songs in actual practice during the communal exercise creates an atmosphere of lively engagement in the community as it is known to be the practice in the communities.
The second song titled 'Ido Ukang Nnyin' meaning "the ways of our society" or "the attitude of our people" is a lamentation about the lost ways of the tribe.This song is chanted by a concerned citizen who laments about the disorderly turn of events in the community.The ways and manners of doing things in the community is seen to be off what it used resulting in a mixed media of attitudes and disorderliness captured in the word 'mbure'a which means "disorder".The concern touches on the abandonment of what used to be the norm.For example, there is an observable departure from the acceptable ways of doing things that is considered in thinking of the people as a form of environmental degradation.This is because in the Ibibio worldview, the environment assumes a larger perspective of connotation to cover not only ecological materials but also the generality of the various expression of life in the community.The ways of salutation, eating, dancing and singing, social interaction is seen to be bereft of the sanity that it once had in embrace of a culture and attitudes that are contrary to the norms in the society.This song is therefore used as an instrument of social warning and critique, to draw the attention of all the members of the society to the areas where things are seen to be out of the norms.The role of folk performance as a vehicle of sensitisation and social awareness is again fostered in this song.

Recommendations
This paper assessed and asserts the relevance and continuing role of cultural idioms and indigenous performances in development communication in Africa.The example of folksongs and wise sayings which still dominate the communication landscape of most indigenous societies is hereby contextualised.The example of the Ibibio folksongs that is suggested in this paper is therefore an attempt to redirect the attention of development planners, policy formulators, academics and facilitators to the value of development communication that draws from indigenous knowledge systems of Africa.

Conclusion
The paper took off from the premise that the indigenous folk performances of the Ibibio society are useful instruments of environmental communication and considers them viable in contemporary engagement in development advocacy targeting environmental issues in indigenous communities.The need to tap these oral resources in development practice is also increasingly being orchestrated.There is a communality of research opinions pointing to the viability of mainstreaming narrative materials in development communication in Africa, especially in informal and non-literate environment, for the achievement of meaningful result.Also, the need to redress the various imbalances of the environment caused by humans will also require re-educating people to be more environment-friendly.This will require not only formal education but an informal communication and participatory educational process that are capable of sustaining interest while sending out the message of behaviour change.
This paper further accentuates the necessity for documenting and archiving this indigenous cultural resource with a view to integrating them into the formal education structure of our societies as it will help in building a template of understanding and applying local resource in solving contemporary problems in Africa.The position of this paper aligns with the practice in Asia countries especially in India where local knowledge is mainstreamed in locating solutions to development problems.In saying this, it is also the position of the paper that the current positioning of environmental problems on only the templates of scientific and technological know-how is not working to the advantage of African countries where local knowledge still constitutes the source of livelihood sustenance and sustainable development.
The paper concludes that traditional knowledge industry in Africa admits different models of application and is useful in discovering the route to sustainable development in the continent.

International Review of Humanities Studies www.irhs.ui.ac.id, e-ISSN: 2477-6866, p-ISSN: 2527-9416 Vol.2, No.1, January 2017, pp. 59-74
Lover of what is good, those who sweep Community streets are lovers of good things.The one who weeds the street is a lover Of good things.The hand works, the eyes admires.

The richness of International Review of Humanities Studies www.irhs.ui.ac.id, e-ISSN: 2477-6866, p-ISSN: 2527-9416 Vol.2, No.1, January 2017, pp. 59-74 this
cultural resource in sending out development messages and fostering easy understanding is yet to be fully explored, tapped and integrated into current effort in environmental communication in Nigeria and perhaps in other African countries.What this has produced is a lacuna in community input and local content in development programming that has created a vacuum in the development and expansion of the context of the application of this indigenous knowledge into contemporary initiatives and current development challenges in our societies.This is the basis for this paper's position that viable environmental communication and environmental awareness should be rooted in existing paradigms of communication in the recipient society.This paper therefore recommends that the integration of traditional folksongs and local ecological knowledge in environmental awareness and development communication programmes through the documentation, translation and incorporation into the reading materials in the schools, creative education syllabus and contemporary media programme content.Positioning indigenous cultural resources as materials of development communication and education should be the focus and not a thoughtless bid to develop like the West.