Among the Yoruba peoples of southwestern Nigeria, the Ogboni society (called Osugbo in Ijebu (2)) is an important institution that fulfills a number of political, judicial, and spiritual functions. Before the era of colonialism, this council of respected elders exercised tremendous power and influence in its various roles involving the selection and removal of kings, judicial hearings, and punishment of offenders who violated the sanctity of the Earth (Ile).
The Ogboni society is not often associated with the use of figurative wood sculpture, but the cast brass images (edan and Onile) commissioned by its members are well known (Fig. 2). While these nearly ubiquitous Ogboni brasscastings have been the subject of intensive study, (3) woodcarvings commissioned by Ogboni members have not received much attention from researchers.
Richard Burton may have been the first to mention an Ogboni woodcarving in print. In Abeokuta and the Cameroons Mountains, he described the door of an Ogboni meeting house: 'The panels are adorned with iron [ironwood?] altorelievos of ultra-Egyptian form; snakes, hawk-headed figures, and armed horsemen in full front, riding what are intended to be horses in profile; the whole coloured red, black, and yellow' (Burton 1863:253). Carved doors with similar iconography exist today. (4) J. R. O. Ojo's study of drums and bullroarers (1973), along with the occasional entries on drums and doors in exhibition catalogues and other texts, some of which are mentioned below, are the primary sources for Ogboni bas-relief work. As yet, however, there is no available study of Ogboni figurative carving in the round, perhaps because so few examples have been published.
But a survey of the literature, along with my inquiries to scholars who have specialized in the study of Ogboni art as well as the overall artistic production of Abeokuta, indicates the existence of a much more substantial tradition of carved Ogboni figures than their rare appearance in published sources suggests. In 1960 Peter Morton-Williams illustrated a woodcarving depicting 'Eru-Ogboni (the slave of Ogboni) devouring a deceiver,' which he had collected in Oyo for the Nigerian Museum, Lagos (Morton-Williams 1960: pl. IIc). While in Abeokuta in 1964, Timothy Chappel noted that a 'large number' of carvings by Sokan Akinyode (of the Esubiyi family workshop in Abeokuta) decorated the Ogboni council chamber adjoining the royal palace of the Alake (king) of Ake (Chappel 1972:299). At least one carving of an Ogboni figural group attributed to Sokan can be found today in the National Museum, Lagos (Fig. 3). Robert Farris Thompson published a figurative Ogboni-related housepost that was collected before 1925 and is now at the Fowler Museum of Cultural History at UCLA (Fig. 4). Henry Drewal illustrated a standing figure in an Ijebu style, depicting an Osugbo member and perhaps carved by Thomas Ona Odulate (Drewal 1980:68). Elsewhere Drewal mentioned certain 'large-scale male and female Ogboni wood sculptures' that were photographed by William Fagg in Ila-Orangun (Drewal 1989:161-62). (5) In a letter, Hans Witte provided me with snapshots of two carvings, clearly in the style of Abeokuta, from the study collection of the University of Ibadan. One is a human figure, kneeling on the left knee and with clenched fists making the Ogboni gesture of greeting: the left fist over the right with thumbs concealed (Fig. 5a, b). The other example depicts a standing male Ogboni official holding a staff in his right hand (Fig. 6).
Chappel recently informed me that there are some tiered figural groups, which probably came from Ogboni houses, in the National Museum, Lagos (personal communication, 2001). During a brief visit to this museum in July 2002, I was able to photograph one such group from Abeokuta (Fig. 7a, b) (6) and another single figure detached from its base (Fig. 8). These objects are part of a small corpus of polychrome Ogboni carvings to be examined here. They are related to two others published by Witte (1998: figs. 3, 8) and the abovementioned unpublished (and unpainted) figure he photographed in Ibadan. This group also includes a variant that appeared in a 1971 catalogue of an exhibition of African art held at Syracuse University--although the carving at that time was not associated with Ogboni (Fig. 1)--as well as a nearly identical carving at the Art Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park (see Nitecki 1971: no. 633). It was my study of this latter figure (Fig. 9), begun in 1998, that led to the present article.
Attempts to find published information about these Abeokuta figures were unsuccessful, though one very noteworthy exception is discussed below. Much more help came from my personal contacts with scholars who have specialized knowledge of Ogboni art or who actually conducted research in Abeokuta, which I have not. This essay is the result, and it attempts to throw some useful light on a small group of overlooked works, all of which originated in the same family workshop in Abeokuta.
Private Notes
Sources help by: Christopher Slogar