Egungun

The pot is set on the ground in front of the grove and water is poured into it while the chanting runs on, homage to Oranyan, homage to Sango, homage to all the kings of Oyo, homage to the powers that founded the town. Then Mowuru lifts one of the two narrow one-sided axes it carries, one in each gloved hand, and breaks the pot. The followers come forward and stamp the pieces smaller under their feet. It means the enemies of Oyo have been dealt with for another year, and the town square is already filling up.

Egungun is what the Yoruba call the dead when the dead come back wearing cloth. The word covers any masked performer, and it has been translated as powers concealed, but its proper sense is narrower and stranger than costume: these are ará òrun, dwellers in heaven, the ancestors who left the visible world and did not stop attending to it. The Yoruba divide the cosmos into orun, the otherworld of spiritual forces, and aye, the world of the living, and they say that aye is a marketplace and orun is home. You go to market. You come back. An egungun is that sentence made physical, an ancestor who has walked back into the marketplace for an afternoon.

The masking is said to have grown up in Oyo, the northern city-state that built the most formidable Yoruba empire, and to have spread outward from there across Yorubaland, possibly as early as the seventeenth century. There is also a story about how it began, recorded by William Bascom in 1944. Death and his followers used to raid the market at Ile-Ife and kill whoever they found, and the king could do nothing about it. A man called Amaiyegun made himself a costume that covered every part of him, so that when he put it on nobody could tell who he was. On the next market day he and his followers came dressed the same way and attacked Death, who could not recognise a single one of them, and they took his weapons and drove him off. Bascom read it as an attempt by human beings to get the better of dying. It is hard to read it any other way.

The costume is called the eku, and it is the whole of the art. Cloth lappets hang in overlapping layers from a padded crown, damask over velvet over satin over silk, and underneath all of it, on the oldest masquerades, the indigo-dyed strip-woven aso oke that was once the most expensive fabric in Yorubaland. Families add a new layer most years. Peeling one back is a way of moving backwards through the household’s taste and fortune, decade by decade. Some eku carry a load of carved objects on the head. The one belonging to the Alapini family in Oyo is topped with the skulls of monkeys and chimpanzees on a flat wooden board, which is understood locally to mean that this particular egungun can kill a witch. A carved wooden mask of the late nineteenth century, now in Chicago, shows a face under a colonial pith helmet ringed by birds, the birds standing for the concealed power of women.

Making an eku is a household project. Whoever can sew prepares the lappets, whoever can carve makes the headdress, whoever can crochet makes the face veil, and whoever can bead or appliqué decorates the rest. The stitching itself is done by men called aláàrán, inside the igbale, the sacred grove, because the construction of the eku is one of the secrets of egungun. Women are never allowed into the grove. They lead the chorus that chants the lineage praise poems, and the senior women hold the titles Iya Agan and Iya Moje, which can only be given after menopause, at which point they are said to have become men. Only men wear the cloth.

In Oyo the highest of all the egungun chiefs is the Alapini, who sits on the king’s council of state, and his family’s masquerade is Jenju, called the king of all egungun and the tormentor of witches. The man who wears Jenju must be a stranger from another town, a different stranger almost every outing, found a few days beforehand and paid in money and cloth. On the day, a goat is killed in front of the house, the stranger steps into the blood and drinks some of it, then stands on Jenju’s stone inside the grove and prays for the town before the eku goes over his head. After that his behaviour changes, because the spirit has taken him, and the man is no longer the point.

Mowuru is a different case entirely. It belongs to the Alaafin of Oyo, is housed in the compound of his household servants directly opposite the palace, and is worn by a man from neither family. The spirit inside it is not an ancestor of any of them. It is a warrior of the old city, summoned on the instruction of the Ifa oracle when the present king found himself surrounded by enemies, and it is fed every fifteen days with gin, a hen, a goat and bean pudding. Sewn into the eku, one parcel at the crown and one at the chest, are Ifa texts and palm nuts that have never been disturbed by any amount of restitching. When Mowuru finally enters the palace it addresses the Alaafin by his bare first name, with none of the honorifics owed to a king, on the grounds that it knew his ancestors personally.

Not all of it is grave. The type known as Onidan, the miracle worker, whirls until its circular cloth flies out level with the ground, and out of that spinning cloth come the idan, the wonders: a gorilla that chases women through the crowd, a town fool who laughs at things that are not funny, a European couple who kiss in public and pass each other written notes instead of talking, a man and his three wives with enormous handbags, and last of all a bride. The cool draught thrown off by the whirling panels has a name. It is called the breeze of blessing.

What an egungun can do follows from what it is. It carries ase, the force that animates everything, and it spends several weeks each year walking the town with it, blessing compounds, cursing the king’s enemies, settling family quarrels that the living have argued into deadlock. What it cannot do is sustain itself. The spirit has to be invoked by name, fed on kola and gin and blood at five-day or fifteen-day intervals, and consulted through Ifa about what it wants next, or the potency lapses. A masquerade lasts exactly as long as a lineage can afford new cloth and still wants to buy it.

The cloth crossed the Atlantic. On the island of Itaparica in the Bay of All Saints, an African called Tio Serafim founded a house around 1820 where he called up and spoke with the egun of his own father, still venerated there under the name Baba Okulele. A decade later Marcos Pimentel bought his own freedom, sailed back to Africa with his son so the boy could be initiated into the secrets, and returned to Bahia carrying the seat of Baba Olukotun, reckoned the primordial ancestor of all the Nago. Their descendants’ house, the Omo Ile Agboula at Ponta de Areia, was listed as Brazilian national heritage in 2015.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Egungun?

Egungun is the Yoruba masking tradition in which the spirits of ancestors return to the visible world inside a full-body costume of layered cloth, and it is also the name for the masked ancestor itself. The word covers any masked performer and has been translated as “powers concealed.” Individual egungun have personal names, owners and feeding schedules, and are treated as beings rather than as performances.

Where does the Egungun masquerade come from?

The tradition is generally traced to the Yoruba kingdom of Oyo in what is now southwestern Nigeria, possibly as early as the seventeenth century, and spread from there across the Yoruba region. A widely told origin story, recorded by William Bascom in 1944, credits a man named Amaiyegun with inventing a costume that hid him completely so that he and his followers could ambush Death at the market of Ile-Ife.

Who is allowed to wear an Egungun costume?

Only men masquerade. The costume, called the eku, is sewn by male specialists inside a sacred grove that women may not enter, and the wearer is chosen by the head of the masquerade society. For the Oyo masquerade Jenju the wearer must be a total stranger from another town, hired a few days in advance and paid in money and cloth.

What do Egungun do for the living?

They carry requests from the living to the ancestral dead and bring back blessing, judgement and protection. During the annual festival they walk the town for weeks visiting lineage compounds to bless or punish descendants, and even royalty must ask their favour for a prosperous year. Some egungun, such as the Oyo masquerade Mowuru, are also invoked specifically to destroy a ruler’s enemies.

Is Egungun still practised outside Africa?

Yes. Egungun worship crossed the Atlantic with enslaved Yoruba and survives in Brazil, where houses on the island of Itaparica in Bahia have venerated named ancestors since the 1820s. The Omo Ile Agboula at Ponta de Areia was listed as Brazilian national heritage in 2015.

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