Caryn Livingston

27 March 2016

Egungun Masking and Women in Yoruba Culture

Religious and cultural ritual depicted in African literature fascinates me, especially because while it seems very exotic to me as someone who has limited exposure to it, as an American who is not religious, I am aware just how many of my own culture’s similar practices are taken completely for granted. I find these sorts of practices to be an interesting insight into some of the beliefs that circulate through a culture, even when they diverge from their origins. The literary example that directed me down this line of thought was Amusa’s reaction to the egungun ritual garb Jane and Simon Pilkings wear as a fancy dress costume in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman. In my early research into the subject, which I was almost completely unfamiliar with apart from brief mentions in last semester’s reading of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, I discovered that the somewhat theatrical representation of ancestors who have died, known as egungun, is an extremely important cultural subject for the Yoruba people, and one with a strict taboo around someone like Jane ever taking part. My goal in this assignment is to better understand what this ritual reveals about Yoruba culture and its views of women, and whether or not the taboo is related to a negative view of women.

I began my research with an internet search for egungun ritual and the Yoruba people, which directed me to Laura Strong’s essay “Egungun: The Masked Ancestors of the Yoruba.” The essay is located on a website run by Laura Strong called Mythic Arts, which addresses several mythological and spiritual topics from various cultures. Strong’s essay emphasizes the importance of departed ancestors as an ongoing part of life due to the Yoruba view of reality, where existence continues after death and “the transition from the realm of the living to the abode of the dead is not finite,” but is instead cyclical with movement between the various worlds. One type of movement is the departed ancestors’ appearance on earth in the form of masked figures, which are the egungun. These egungun are an important way to maintain cultural values relating to the Yoruba worldview because they reinforce the belief system as they “are sought out for protection and guidance, and are believed to possess the ability to punish those who have forgotten their familial ties.”

The first essay pointed me to other relevant sources, one of which was scholarship by Wole Soyinka himself. In his book Myth, Literature, and the African World, Soyinka describes the ways that Yoruba art and drama overlap with religious ritual as part of a wider understanding of the Yoruba culture. According to Soyinka, African drama is part of a “culture whose very artifacts are evidence of a cohesive understanding of irreducible truths” (38). The theatricality involved in the egungun costuming, where men in the community dress up as ancestral spirits, is a type of drama. However, Soyinka differentiates it from western drama, which he calls “a series of intellectual spasms which, especially today, appears susceptible even to commercial manipulation” (38). The egungun costuming, though it is frequently involved in ritual drama, is more comparable to the Eucharist of the Catholic Church than to a western concept of costume. By assuming the garb that depicts a Yoruba man as a departed ancestor, he is playing a role that “establishes the spatial medium not merely as a physical area for simulated events but as a manageable contraction of the cosmic envelope with which man—no matter how deeply buried such a consciousness has become—fearfully exists” (41). Amusa’s fear at what Jane and Simon are doing with the egungun costumes is more easily understood when you view the ritual as part of a metaphysical drama where man encounters powerful, sometimes vengeful, forces. According to Soyinka, participation in the ritual is a potentially dangerous act “undertaken on behalf of the community,” and during the act, “the welfare of that protagonist is inseparable from that of the total community” (42). This would certainly be a terrifying possibility from Amusa’s standpoint, as Jane and Simon tampering with worlds they didn’t understand could have dire effects for the entire community.

In her essay, Strong also emphasized how unusual it was for her as a woman to be taking part in research on the egungun, because women were forbidden to understand the details of this ritual. One source she referenced from the early twentieth century noted that Christian missionaries in the region reported that women who discovered certain ritual secrets relating to the egungun were executed. However, due to the colonial interest of the time, it is difficult to ascertain how reliable these reports were. Strong also referenced a modern source with more even treatment of ritual roles Yoruba women fill, via Margaret Thompson Drewal’s book Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency.

Drewal’s book notes a strict division of roles based on sex in the religious life of the Yoruba. The division in the culture is so stark as to in effect create a taboo on women wearing masks as part of a ritual. Ritual roles are assigned in a way that emphasizes biological differences and creates the culture’s concept of gender (172). Clear differences between the genders are emphasized through several cultural practices, including one intended to determine a child’s nature where “the husband brought a bush rat to represent the energetic, agile action of males . . . while the wife brought a mudfish, alluding to the coolness and easiness ordinarily associated with females” (173). The distinction the Yoruba make between men and women doesn’t necessarily assume that men are inherently more powerful and thus suited to take part in the egungun ritual, however; it instead posits different roles for men and women “so that there is a thematic consistency between the two forms of representation” (174). Men, therefore, take part in religious ritual through the egungun masks and costumes, which may represent either males or females, while women in the community serve as priests and mediums for both male and female gods. The cultural taboo that would make Jane Pilkings’ crime the more egregious in Soyinka’s play because she is a woman does not mean Jane is of lower value than her husband, but relates to her female biology, which the Yoruba people emphasize in their practices. Women are priests ore mediums because they are the primary nurturers in the society and are considered best-suited to nurture the gods, while Drewal posits that the origin of the taboo against women masking, which is that “there is an analogical relationship between a pregnant woman and a full body mask,” is based on the idea that a woman’s body may already be masking something—specifically, a future member of the community.

          In conclusion, the egungun ritual in Yoruba culture seems directly related to the emphasis the culture places on performativity, both in its understanding of the universe and in how men and women fit into the fabric of the community. The conclusion that a taboo on women taking on certain religious roles is related to the importance the culture places on conforming to certain gender standards is interesting, and very similar to roles the Catholic Church allows men and women to take based on biological differences. If I were to continue this line of research, I would be interested in examining how a Yoruba worldview might translate into new religious practices brought in by colonial governments to see how the performative background might transfer into practice of Christianity, for example. I am also interested in developing a better understanding of ritual for the Ibo people, as depicted in Things Fall Apart, as the Ibo also include egungun in their ritual.

Works Cited

Drewal, Margaret Thompson. Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.

Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature, and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976. Print.

Strong, Laura. “Egungun: The Masked Ancestors of the Yoruba.” Mythic Arts, 2000. Web. 23 February 2016. http://www.mythicarts.com/writing/Egungun.html.