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Carved Ogboni figures from Abeokuta, Nigeria: Adugbologe who shines like the new moon. There is no place where he is not known on this earth
African Arts, Winter, 2002 by Christopher Slogar
But such power would not last. The years between 1889 and 1945 were a critical period, characterized by the historian A. I. Asiwaju as a time when, due to colonialism, "... cults of political significance, such as Ogboni and Oro, were deprived of their political functions" (Asiwaju 1976:212).
Sydow's Visit
In 1943, very near the end of the period examined by Asiwaju, Eckart von Sydow's account of his 1939 visit to Abeokuta was published posthumously. (21) It includes some very interesting photographic illustrations. In one of them (Fig. 14), we see four Ogboni members in their distinctive attire, as depicted in the carvings. (22) Another (Fig. 15) is a portrait of a carver identified as "Adugbologe," who is most likely Oniyide, because the founder had long since died by the time Sydow made it to Abeokuta. A third image captures the interior courtyard of an Ogboni lodge--apparently that of the Adugbologe compound--with about a dozen members in view (Fig. 16). Behind them, just under the corrugated tin roof, stand two massive wooden sculptures. The one on the right, blurry and partially obscured, is an image of a mother and child. This motif is widely encountered throughout Yoruba art and is also seen in the Ogboni brass castings, in which case it recalls the nurturing role of Earth as mother to all, the source of fertility. (23) On the left side of this photograph is a clearer image of, a two-tiered figural group whose upper tier prominently displays a titled Ogboni member wearing the familiar wide-brimmed hat, striped wrapper, and sash. He holds a figural staff in his right hand and a small rectangular plaque in his left that presumably carries an inscription but is indistinct as published. Two attendants stand at the ready beside him, while another lies prostrate at his feet. The lower tier of the work is partially obscured in the reproduced photograph, but Sydow mentions that it includes four figures, two of which display the Ogboni hand gesture of left fist over right. (24) Sydow also states that one "Chief Adilah" told him that the main figure was "das Bild unseres letzten Oluwo," or "the image of our last Oluwo" (Sydow 1943:30). (25) Sydow goes on to mention a second Oluwo figure ("garishly painted") as well as a box crowned by an Oluwo with attendants and further decorated with interlace patterns and representations of edan Ogboni, which recalls the carved wooden boxes noted above. The larger figural group Sydow illustrated is remarkably similar to the polychrome example now in the National Museum, Lagos (Fig. 7). Its lower tier prominently displays a row of four kneeling figures; the outer two occupy movable panels attached with hinges. A small female figure, which looks to be a painted ibeji image, is positioned at the rear, facing outward.
Sydow's photograph of the Ogboni courtyard provides important contextual information for the placement of the carved images. That a figure of a mother and child was positioned adjacent to the figure of the Oluwo was surely a deliberate choice, and it clearly reflects a wider prevalence of the theme of the male-female couple in Ogboni art and thought. In fact, in Lagos (National Museum, Lagos, no. 1953.3.1) there is a companion object to the one in Figure 7 that I was not able to photograph or examine closely, but which depicts a female figure as the main subject of the upper tier. Thus, it is very likely that some Yoruba female figures now described simply as "shrine figures"--perhaps because their iconography may not display obvious Ogboni attributes as they are currently understood--are in fact the female components of what was originally a pair, or an even larger program, of images made for Ogboni houses. Drewal's comment concerning the male-female theme as it relates to the brass Ogboni images may be equally appropriate to the wooden ones as well: "A single figure always implies a second ..." (Drewal 1989:162).
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