OBJECT history 132 series of ceremonies that reenact the battles fought by the founding fathers, complete with elaborate martial displays (fig. 5). Parts of these ceremonies are held in front of the shrine images, which have been elaborately painted with white, red, black, and yellow pigments. Around 1910, British anthropologist Northcote W. Thomas photographed the exterior of one such Urhobo shrine in the midst of an elaborate ceremony (fig. 6). The two statues under consideration here would have been kept within such a shrine erected to honor members of the founding family, who struggled valiantly to overcome physical challenges. They would have been the most important and visually prominent statues within the shrine, sited at the center, with the nursing mother to the left of the warrior. They FIG. 4: The shrine of Owedjebo, depicting the male warrior of the same name. Orherhe, Agbarho Urhobo, southern Nigeria, May 1969. Photo: Perkins Foss. ble curvature is rendered so precisely only by the most highly skilled of Urhobo artists. As Samuel Erivwo has written, “an amalgam of peoples of Benin, Igbo, and Ijo origin” initially populated Urhoboland.1 These peoples, who came to be known as the Urhobo, live on the western fringe of the Niger River Delta. They honor their most highly venerated ancestors with spectacular shrine art. Among the most impressive statues known anywhere in Africa, these life-sized images, each carved out of a single log, are imposing in stature, authoritative in posture, and convey an aura of power and mystery. 2 They depict the men and women who, myriad generations ago, struggled to establish a community under arduous conditions. Urhobo art is best understood within the social and especially the religious context in which it was created. The Urhobo divide their existence between Akpo (the world of the living) and Erivwin (the world of the dead). Between these two spheres of existence lie the edjo,3 described by Erivwo as “a generic name for all spiritual beings that are believed to exist in another sphere.”4 An edjo is a sacred concept of “spiritual essence”5 or force that can be attached to virtually any substance, from a particular place on a stream or an individual tree or even a place in the air, to a group of individuals who carried out particularly heroic acts. This latter is vital to the present discussion. In all cases, the edjo becomes identified when it brings some kind of exceptional power, usually of a supernatural nature. The extraordinary abilities that the village founders utilized came from the edjo, and in the process these individuals became so imbued with such mystical resources that they themselves became edjo. One example, cited by Chief Omamohwo, is the story of the warrior Owedjebo, who, when going into battle, was believed by the enemy to be “a real person, who can be shot,” but through the protection of the edjo, such was not the case and he returned home victorious.6 Such individuals are commemorated by wooden statues called edjo-re-akare, literally “edjo-incarved form.” These works of art are created to exist within the confines of shrines, each in the form of a secluded building (oguan re edjo). The edjo-re-akare are grouped in the shrine along with various other components that enhance the visual power of the tableau. These include a ceramic vessel that contains sacred medicines (orhan), an array of the skulls of animals that have been annually sacrificed, wooden staffs owned by individual family leaders, and wrought iron implements that are kept by diviners associated with the force of the edjo (fig. 7). Annually, an Urhobo community will hold an elaborate
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