NNP Get Merch!

About this campaign

Fundraising in support of NNP objectives and activities. For this campaign we are offering for sale the Nsibidi Congress T-Shirt ...The graphic on this T Shirt features the Nsibidi symbol for "Congress" a group of connected figures within a circle and which is what the Nigerian Nostalgia Project hopes ultimately to achieve for Nigeria.

Nsibidi is a system of symbols indigenous to what is now southeastern Nigeria that are apparently pictograms, though there have been suggestions that some are logograms or syllabograms. The symbols are at least several centuries old—early forms appeared on excavated pottery as well as what are most likely ceramic stools and headrests from the Calabar region, with a range of dates from 400 to 1400 CE. There are thousands of nsibidi symbols, of which over 500 have been recorded. They were once taught in a school to children. Many of the signs deal with love affairs; those that deal with warfare and the sacred are kept secret. Nsibidi is used on wall designs, calabashes, metals (such as bronze), leaves, swords, and tattoos. It is primarily used in Cross River State among the Ekoi, Efik, Igbo people, and other nearby peoples.

Outside knowledge of nsibidi came in 1904 when T. D. Maxwell noticed the symbols. Before the British colonization of the area, nsibidi was divided into a sacred version and a public, more decorative version which could be used by women. Aspects of colonization such as Western education and Christian doctrine drastically reduced the number of nsibidi-literate people, leaving secret society members as some of the last literate in the symbols. Nsibidi was and is still a means of transmitting Ekpe symbolism. Nsibidi was transported to Cuba and Haiti via the Atlantic slave trade, where it developed into the anaforuana and veve symbols.