The Ẹpa Masquerades of Èkìtì: A Structural Approach

Forms appear out of other forms, that is they are contained by them: the container is everted, to reveal what is inside … It follows that past and future become present: any one form anticipates its transformation, and is itself respectively the transformation of a prior form.

(Strathern 1992: 249)

Phillip Allison, formerly of the Nigerian Forestry Commission and then the Nigerian National Museums and Monuments Commission, is probably best known for the survey work that he carried out on the stone sculptures of the Cross Rivers region in Nigeria. However, the recently cataloged Phillip Allison archive contains material derived from research that was undertaken in other regions of Nigeria.¹ Among the extensive documents are photographs of a masked performance, labeled as “Ẹpa masquerade ceremony,” taken in 1960 in the village of Ikùn-Ọba (Figs. 1–2). Allison’s collection diary notes that he visited Ikùn on July 15, 1960, as part of a collection and survey journey that included visits to the towns of Òwò and Ìkòlé.

In his diary Allison writes that in Ikùn he encountered “five Egúngún [sic] with Janus faced helmet masks surmounted with carvings and feathers and porcupine quills, they carry swords and ornamental axes; they are followed about by singing crowds of women.” He notes that he is told that “this Egúngún [sic] symbolises the new yam and promotes fertility amongst women.” He also notes that the festival is rather dull, and by 4:30 that afternoon he is back in Ìkòlé and is much more animated by the political crisis that saw the Western House Assembly dissolved and elections set for August 8.

The festival that Allison’s photographs document is known locally as Egbùrù and is performed for a local deity (ìmólè) of that name. The masks are of a form routinely described as Ẹpa or Ẹpa-type. During the festival, five of these masks appear over a two-day period. Four of the masks have superstructural carvings that stand above the wooden mask that actually covers the head, while the mask that is called Egbùrù is a single, large, Janus-faced head covering.

ẸPA AND ẸPA TYPE MASQUERADES

Allison’s photographs are not the only ones of the masquerade festival at Ikùn. In 1990 I was also given access to the festival, and some part of that experience formed the basis for a paper written in 2000 comparing Ẹpa and Ẹpa-type masquerades with other forms of masked performance extant in Èkìtì, particularly with those of Egígún, a masquerade form closely related to Egúngún performed to celebrate the departed dead (Rea 2000; see also Rea 2017). The endeavor in that chapter was to disentangle the two forms of masked performance, pointing to the structural and metaphysical differences between them. As such, and placed next to John Picton’s (2000) similar disentangling of Egúngún and Gèlèdé, the attempt was to complicate the notions of masquerade in Yorùbá culture, particularly its iteration as defined by different regional forms and types of masked practice. The point was that the focus on the mask as an object tended to conflate a number of ideas about the regional distribution of Yorùbá practices and identities. The mask had become, in popular perception, a diagnostic object defining regional categories. Both papers were obviously influenced by Picton’s more general meditation on “what’s in a mask” and the diversity of forms and ideas that he had noted in western Nigeria (Picton 1990).

The aim of this paper (with Allison’s photographs as a prompt) is to revisit Ẹpa and Ẹpa-type masquerades. To do so is to add to a corpus of literature which, to an extent, appears reasonably exhaustive. Clarke (1944), Thompson (1974), Vander Heyden (1977), and particularly Ojo (1974, 1978) have all written and documented different forms of mask and performance that have been labeled Ẹpa or Ẹpa-type.² The forms of these masks are relatively well...