Among the Yoruba nations of southwestern Nigeria.

Among the Yoruba nations 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 noticeed elders exercised tremendous power and influence in its various characters involving the selection and removal of kings, judicial hearings, and punishment of delinquents who violated the sanctity of the Earth (Ile).

The Ogboni society is not repeatedly associated with the use of figurative thicket sculpture, but the cast brass images (edan and Onile) commissioned from its members are well known (Fig. 2) While these nearly ubiquitous Ogboni brasscastings have been the subdue of intensive study, (3) woodcarvings commissioned by way of Ogboni members have not received a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of 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 satiated front, riding what are intended to be horses in profile; the whole coloured r black, and yellow" (Burton 1863:253) Carved doors with similar iconography exist today. (4) J R O Ojo's reflection of drums and bullroarers (1973) along with the occasional entries onward drums and doors in exhibition catalogues and other true copys some of which are mentioned below, are the primary sources for Ogboni bas-relief work. As further however, there is no available subject of attention of Ogboni figurative carving in the globular perhaps because so few examples have been published.

on the other hand a survey of the literature, along with my inquiries to scholars who have specialized in the cogitation of Ogboni art as well as the overall artistic production of Abeokuta, indicates the existence of a to a great degree more substantial tradition of carved Ogboni figures than their rare appearance in published sources intimates In 1960 Peter Morton-Williams illustrated a woodcarving depicting "Eru-Ogboni (the slave of Ogboni) devouring a deceiver," which he had infered 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 from 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 the same carving of an Ogboni figural dispose attributed to Sokan can be set up today in the National Museum, Lagos (Fig. 3) Robert Farris Thompson published a figurative Ogboni-related housepost that was heap uped 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 manner depicting an Osugbo member and perhaps carved at Thomas Ona Odulate (Drewal 1980:68) Elsewhere Drewal mentioned certain "large-scale male and female Ogboni grove sculptures" that were photographed according to William Fagg in Ila-Orangun (Drewal 1989:161-62) (5) In a literal sense Hans Witte provided me with snapshots of sum of two units carvings, clearly in the mode of speech of Abeokuta, from the inquiry collection of the University of Ibadan. common is a human figure, kneeling onward the left knee and with clenched fists making the Ogboni action of greeting: the left fist from one side of to the other 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 newly informed me that there are a certain number of 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 single such group from Abeokuta (Fig. 7a, b) (6) and another single figure detached from its base (Fig. 8) These uses are part of a small corpus of polychrome Ogboni carvings to be examined here. They are related to brace others published by Witte (1998: figs. 3 8) and the abovementioned unpublished (and unpainted) figure he photographed in Ibadan. This assemblage 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, guild Park (see Nitecki 1971: no. 633) It was my studious mood of this latter figure (Fig. 9) begun in 1998 that l to the existing article.

Attempts to find published information about these Abeokuta figures were vain though one very noteworthy exception is discussed below. a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of more help came from my personal contacts with scholars who have specialized knowledge of Ogboni art or who actually directioned research in Abeokuta, which I have not. This essay is the accrue and it attempts to cast some useful light on a small cluster of overlooked works, all of which originated in the same family workshop in Abeokuta. (7)