Among the Owerri Igbo, Ala is honoured with mbari, and mbari is one of the more remarkable things done for a deity anywhere. When a diviner determined that Ala required it, usually after a run of misfortune, a community would commission a house: an open-sided structure of mud, filled with painted clay sculpture, at the centre of which sits Ala herself, seated, often with a child, sometimes with a sword.
The rest of the house is a catalogue of the world. The sculptures recorded by Herbert Cole include gods and ancestors, but also police officers, bicycles, colonial officials, women in childbirth, animals, and figures whose behaviour is being held up for public mockery. The people chosen to build it were secluded for the duration, sometimes for a year or more, treated as ritually set apart, and their work was unveiled at a single ceremony.
What happens next is the point. The mbari house is not maintained. After the unveiling it is abandoned to the weather, and the mud and the sculpture return to the ground. Building it was the offering; keeping it was never part of the exchange. The house dissolving back into the earth is a return to Ala of something made from her own material.
Very few mbari houses survive, and their construction had largely ceased by the later twentieth century. What Cole documented in the 1960s and 1970s is most of what is known in detail. The practice matters beyond its own region because it shows an African religious art tradition that was deliberately impermanent, made to a deity's specification and then surrendered, which sits awkwardly with the assumption that religious art is made to last.