Head

The Ejagham group of peoples, often referred to as the Ekoi, live on either side of the Nigeria/Cameroon border. Keith Nicklin (personal communication) has suggested that this head comes from the middle Cross River region, from either the Ogoja area or Obubra – probably the latter. Skin-covered heads could be used in two ways: as a surrogate head carried in men’s warrior association dances, funeral ceremonies and masquerades, for example in the Yakö area; or as part of a cap mask.

Surrogate heads were made either of wood (like this one) or a human skull, covered with skin, normally antelope skin, and were carried in the hands. In former times, a man could only join a warrior’s association after killing an enemy and taking his head. By the early twentieth century these warrior’s societies became prestige associations open to those who could pay fees and complete initiation; the heads were those of sacrificed slaves or, later, made of wood and skin. The main purpose of such groups in the 1920s was to ensure that a man could have an elaborate second burial.

Here, however, since the skin does not cover the whole base, where there is a roughly circular bare patch ringed with peg holes, the head is more likely to have formed part of a cap, or head-dress mask, where a head or figure is mounted on a basketwork pedestal which the masker wears on his head (see Thompson in Vogel, 1981: 175-6).

While the use of skin to cover the heads undoubtedly enhances the realism, Thompson suggests that the pegging down of skin was a charm or symbolic indication of the embedding and controlling of the spirit in political contexts. He also refers to a skin-covered skull in the Linden-Museum, Stuttgart, which was found to contain a variety of substances, making it a powerfully ‘loaded’ charm.

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