Legend · Traditional; revived 1990s · Mixed
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Egbesu is the Ijaw power of justice, and by tradition it may only be called on in self-defence or to right a wrong. For most of the twentieth century it lived in folk songs. Then the oil war brought it back, and soldiers started stopping young men to look for its marks.
Every war god has a reputation. Egbesu's is unusual, because its whole point is restraint. Egbesu is the Ijaw deity of justice, the spiritual force for fighting evil in the creeks of the Niger Delta. But that force comes with strict conditions. It may only be used in defence or to correct an injustice, and only by people who are in harmony with the universe. Its symbols are the leopard, the panther and the lion.
In other words, Egbesu has a theory of just war built into it. According to its war ethics, the only good reason to go to war is self-defence. Fight for any other cause and you are on your own. Fight for the right one and the god stands with you, and victors in a just war are rewarded.
The cult had its own chain of command. At the top was the Egbesu king, the chief priest. Under him were high priests called Okparans, then other priests, and then the foot soldiers, the Kulikuliwei. Only the chief priest could declare war. The Okparans could only do it if he was absent. A community could not simply decide it was angry and march. Someone had to stand before the god and say this fight was just.
And then there is the belief that made Egbesu famous beyond the Delta. Followers say the Egbesu force can give fighters spiritual power, including protection from enemy bullets.
After the British took over the Ijaw lands in the late nineteenth century, the old Egbesu cult went into decline. For a long time most Ijaw people only knew the god and its philosophy from folklore and old war songs. It became something grandparents sang about rather than something young men joined.
That changed with oil. The Niger Delta conflict grew out of tension between foreign oil companies, the Nigerian government and the minority peoples living on top of the oil. Projects went ahead on Ijaw land. People saw pollution, poverty and no fair share of the money. When young men began to organise against the state and the companies, they reached back for a spiritual force that matched their cause. And Egbesu, the god that only fights against injustice, was exactly that.
The Egbesu Boys appeared in the early 1990s. They took up arms against the authorities over the damage the oil industry was doing and the way oil money was not invested locally. Many young men joined after secret initiations by priests. According to Wikipedia, initiates were marked with scars on a hidden part of the body, and some wore amulets. Before going out, young fighters painted their faces with white chalk and put medicated leaves on their foreheads. Mothers of the community, male elders and priests stood behind them. Their traditional headquarters was at Amabulou in Bayelsa State. Other groups took the name too, among them the Egbesu Boys of Africa, the Red Egbesu Water Lions and the Egbesu Mightier Fraternity.
The clearest picture of what Egbesu meant in those years comes from Human Rights Watch, writing about the end of 1998.
In December 1998 Ijaw youths issued the Kaiama Declaration, and it set 30 December as a deadline. The army moved several thousand troops into the Ijaw areas of Bayelsa and Delta states. On 30 December, thousands of young people across the Ijaw areas, in Yenagoa, Bomadi, Oloibiri and elsewhere, came out and danced a traditional dance called the ogele. In most places it went off peacefully. In Yenagoa it did not. Early that morning up to 2,000 young people, dressed in black and holding candles, came up from the waterside singing and dancing along the main street. Soldiers met them with force. That evening, a state of emergency was declared, and in the days that followed there was more violence on both sides, including some armed youths exchanging fire with soldiers.
Then came something that tells you how seriously everyone took the god. Over the next few days, Human Rights Watch reported, soldiers stopped young men and checked their bodies for marks showing they supported Egbesu. Many Ijaw believed Egbesu gave protection from bullets if a certain ritual was followed, and so, HRW noted, did many of the soldiers sent to put the protests down. Young men who joined the protests were called "Egbesu boys", often as an insult. In one account to HRW, police pushed open a door and said of a man inside, "he is an Egbesu boy." Women in Yenagoa paid a terrible price in that crackdown, and many were raped by soldiers and police.
That is the strange double life of Egbesu. To the state, its marks were evidence against you. To its followers, the same marks were protection. Underneath the bullets and the amulets sits an old rule that both sides might have done well to remember: war is only justified in self-defence, or to put right a wrong.
