Igala's Royal Masks

Igala’s Royal Masks Borrowed, Invented, or Stolen? Sidney Littlefield Kasfir all photos by the author except where otherwise noted n contrast to the numerous small-scale gerontocracies 1979, 2011: 37–39). Here I will cut that argument short and simply found in the area we now know as eastern Nigeria, a state that, despite all the cultural similarities, there is an Igala lan- strong centralized kingship grew up (or was imposed) guage (which is more closely cognate with Yoruba than Idoma), sometime before the sixteenth century near the Niger- there is an Idoma language (also cognate with Igala), and there is Benue Confluence, nexus of north-south and east-west no Akpoto language, suggesting that the label applied to the entire riverine trade. Its present identity as “the Igala kingdom” region, “Akpoto,” is another name for “unknown territory” on the glosses over a complex historical entity that has shifting claims of part of nineteenth century writers. Later, the British administra- originI among several regional powers over the centuries (Fig. 1). tion came to realize that nearly all of the Idoma-speaking lands Spatially, it is contiguous with Igbo/Ibaji settlements to the south (aje) demonstrated close historical ties with the Jukun and the fed- and western Idoma settlements to the east. Both of these connec- eration of early states known as Apá or the Hausa term Kwararafa. tions are highly visible in Igala masquerade culture. Beyond that, The term “Akpoto came to represent the “indigenous people” who Igala oral histories allege important historical ties to Yoruba, Benin, predated the arrival of newcomers following the breakup of the and Apá/Kwararafa political formations that also figure in Igala Apá federation in the early seventeenth century and the population political and visual culture (Clifford 1936, Murray 1949, Boston shifts it caused among the twenty-odd Idoma-speaking lands. In 1969, Miachi 2012). And the oldest, founding tradition is that the neighboring Igala, these “owners of the land” (i.e., those who were first atta appeared in the form of a leopard with transformative the first to live there) are the Igala Mela, the nine indigenous clans. powers. With such a complicated past, it is hardly surprising that Igala lacks a unified canonical version of its mask history. 1 Nigeria’s main ethnic groups. Tiv and Idoma On the early British exploratory trading expeditions, such as Dr. are actually on both sides of the Benue. Map: Luna Digital Images William Baikie’s 1854 voyage of the Pleiad up the Niger (“Kwora”) and Benue, only the narrow coastal strip along the east bank of the Niger south and north of the Idda capital is identified as “Igara” (Baikie 1856). All the rest of what we consider Igalaland today is bundled together on John Arrowsmith’s map with what is now known as Idoma, both under the general rubric “Akpoto,” a vague term usually interpreted as “indigenous people” (Fig. 2). In the past I have spent many words discussing the “Akpoto question” as it was applied by the British explorers, traders, and ad- ministrators to people who think of themselves as Idoma (Kasfir Sidney Littlefield Kasfir is Professor Emerita of Art History, Emory University, Atlanta. She is the author or coeditor of five books and many articles and is now working on a sixth book, Colonialism’s Acquisitive Hunger: Forming the Early Canon of Nigerian Art. She is also engaged in a comparative study of early modernism in two art schools, Makerere in Uganda and Nsukka in Nigeria. [email protected] 62 african arts SPRING 2019 VOL. 52, NO. 1 Downloaded from| http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/afar_a_00444 by guest on 26 September 2021 521.indb 62 11/20/2018 12:12:59 PM 2 Arrowsmith’s map from the 1854 journey of the Pleiad. Source: Baikie 1856. The other major component of Igala politics and culture comes historical conditions for the movement of masquerades, a very from the Igbo, who are among the earliest migrant settlers oc- special type of commodity. cupying the Ibaji area directly south of Idah. They share much The classic version of Igala history in ethnographic writing of the same masquerade culture although they are not a part of posits three successive, or possibly overlapping, periods charac- the palace retinue. terized by Yoruba, Benin, and Jukun hegemony. A parallel struc- Economically, the Igbo controlled the lower Niger River trade ture of political authority that balanced the power of the nonroyal south of Idah, at which point Igala traders transshipped it north- clans, the Igala Mela, against that of the king, along with geograph- ward. The level of trade on the Niger, all carried by canoes, was a ical proximity and closely cognate Yoruba and Igala languages, are source of wonder to the early British explorers (Laird and Oldfield the basis for an assumption by colonial writers such as Clifford 1837, 1: 165): “I was surprised to learn from Dr. Briggs that there and Boston of early historical and genealogical connections be- appeared to be twice as much traffic going forward here as in tween the two cultures. This is not an argument that Yoruba king- the upper parts of the Rhine ….” The Igala kingdom, until the ship itself extended into Igala, but that the linguistic and political mid-nineteenth century when Europeans took control of much markers we recognize as Yoruba may have included a wider region of the trade, therefore based its wealth and power on transship- than previously thought. ment of all manner of goods, from slaves to necessities such as ag- The evidence for a Benin connection is of a different kind and ricultural products and salt and luxuries such as imported cloth involves neither language nor the structure of palace authority. and beads. In this sense, it resembles the Cross River and its hin- Rather, it is based in two other pieces of evidence: the Igala war terland despite the very different form of government. And as I with Benin, which is recorded by the Portuguese as happening in will argue, this trade in commodities provided the economic and 1517 and won by Benin, and the distinctive brass pectoral mask 3 Brass mask ejubejailo suspended from the neck of the Atta of Igala during an audience with visitors. Source: Allen 1840 VOL. 52, NO. 1 SPRING 2019 african arts 63 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/afar_a_00444 by guest on 26 September 2021 | 521.indb 63 11/20/2018 12:12:59 PM 4 Brass mask belonging to the Atta of Igala (left) and comparable mask from Benin (right), both in 16th c. Benin style. Photos: Luna Digital Images 5 Map of Lower Benue region in the early 20th century. The Tiv migrating from the south have now displaced the Jukun eastward so that Tiv occupy what was once a part of Kwararafa controlled by the Jukun. Map: Kasfir 1979 on a series of 241 interviews conducted between 1976 and 1978. It is not, in itself, a collected oral account but an attempt to ex- plain an extremely complex masquerade corpus by piecing together many of its parts. One the other hand, the most recent atta’s own version of how these masks were acquired, collected in interviews by Igala anthro- pologist Tom Miachi in 2012, is completely different and reasserts a well-known oral tradition: The masks were war booty, left behind on the battlefield by a fleeing Jukun army. My purpose in this essay is to compare the validity of these contrasting historical explana- worn by the atta, which is of undoubted Benin royal provenance tions in light of the visual evidence of the masks themselves. and from the same period. (Baikie, writing in 1854, a half cen- There are numerous collected stories of masquerades accompa- tury before the so-called Benin bronzes were “discovered” by the nying warriors into battle (Yoruba and Idoma as well as Igala), al- British, said that the large “brass plate” closely resembled “the sign though this supposed defeat of the Jukun army by the Igala is hard of an insurance office”) (Figs. 3–4). to correlate with the widely held popular belief that the present Boston assumes that this sixteenth century interlude, during which Igala was in some way under the suzerainty of Benin, fol- lowed a much longer Yoruba connection. The Benin-period hy- pothesis accords well with what we know of Benin during the reign of Esigie, when territorial wars were frequently pursued. The third, Jukun-dominated phase of the precolonial and pre-Fulani jihad kingship of the mid-nineteenth century is the one espoused most consistently by the Igala themselves but, as we shall see, it is histor- ically all over the place. As we have seen, the Igala Mela also controlled the very pow- erful ancestral masquerade, Egwu Afia (cognate in many ways with Yoruba Egungun and even more with Onitsha’s Egwugwu and Idoma Ekwuafia, the Igbo and Idoma versions both referred to as “tall ghosts”). To rival this, the atta, as he consolidated his authority over various indigenous or settler clans (the so-called Akpoto and others), purportedly confiscated (or had estab- lished—still an unsolved question) a mask from each. These eight masks are known collectively as the Atta Egwu, and represented the palace’s ritual dominance and its identity as “the face of the nation” (Sargent 1988). The public representation of the atta’s political dominance was the Ocho Festival, in which the masquerades all appeared in proper ritual order. While an elegant and logical explanation, this is the construct of a professional historian, R.A.

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