Lost history · 1938–2023
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The Oron carved their dead into tall bearded figures. A museum was built to keep them safe. Then a war came, and many of them ended up in cooking fires.
The Oron live on the western bank of the Cross River estuary, in what is now Akwa Ibom State. It is a wet, green world of mangrove, creeks and forest, and for a long time it was a trading coast. But if you ask an art historian what the Oron are known for, you will usually get one answer. They carved their dead.
The carvings are called ekpu. Each one was an ancestor figure, made to stand for a man of the family who had died. These were not general spirits or gods. The long beard on almost every one was a sign of old age and of ritual authority, the kind of weight a senior elder carried in life. When the family made offerings to an ekpu, they were honouring someone whose place in the lineage they knew.
You would know an ekpu if you saw one. It is tall and thin, carved from a single block of hardwood, the body and neck running up in one long column. The legs are often barely there, tapering away into a point or a small base. Almost every one has a big beard, jutting down to a point or curling upward, and on top of the head there is usually a cap or a knot. Over the years, families poured palm wine and oil over them as offerings, so the old ones are dark, nearly black, shiniest on the head, the shoulders and the tip of the beard, where the libations pooled.
Scholars note something else about them. The scholar Keith Nicklin argued that this whole body of carving is distinctly Oron, quite separate from the mask-heavy wood sculpture of the neighbouring Ibibio. The beard alone is often enough to tell an Oron figure apart. And the names of the carvers were not handed down, so we know the ancestors better than the artists who made them. Some later figures even wear European top hats and carry walking sticks, a proud way of showing that this grandfather had done well in the palm-oil trade with Europeans.
By the twentieth century, a lot of this was falling apart. As Christianity spread and old practices faded, families stopped tending their obio. The shrines were left to the rain and the termites. Wood that had been looked after for generations started to rot.
A colonial collector named Murray set out to rescue what he could. Between 1938 and 1947, as the African Art Archive tells it, he gathered more than 600 ekpu, and he did it against the resistance of conservative Oron elders who did not want their ancestors taken away. He found many shrines abandoned and many figures already badly damaged by insects and weather. You can argue about whether an outsider should have been carting off family ancestors. But it is also true that without that collecting, many of these carvings would simply have decayed where they stood.
In 1958 a museum opened at Oron to house them. Wikipedia puts the collection at about eight hundred known ancestral figures, and describes them as among the oldest and finest wood carvings to survive anywhere in Africa. For a small town on the estuary, that is quite a thing to hold. The ancestors had a new home, a building made for them, with people paid to look after them.
Nine years later, Nigeria went to war with itself.
When the civil war broke out in 1967, the Oron Museum sat in the east, in the middle of it. Troops occupied the building, and it was damaged. Someone decided the carvings had to be moved for safekeeping, and they were taken to Umuahia. When the fighting reached Umuahia too, they were moved again, to Orlu, about seventy kilometres away.
What happened at Orlu is the part that stops people. As the writers of an article in The Conversation put it, the people there did not know what these objects were worth, and they used them as firewood. Think about what that means. Wartime Biafra was a place of hunger and shortage. Fuel was scarce. And here were stacks of old, dry, well-seasoned hardwood. Carvings that had stood in Oron family shrines for generations, that had survived termites and missionaries and a colonial collector, were split and burned to cook food for desperate people.
Not all of them went into the fire. Many were looted during the chaos, and the African Art Archive notes that hundreds of the best-preserved figures were stolen and smuggled out into the international art market. Some Oron ancestors may be standing in private collections abroad right now, far from the estuary, their names lost.
After the war, the museum was rebuilt and reopened in 1975. It now holds what remains of the ekpu along with other objects from across Nigeria, and it also shows bunkers from the civil war and has a crafts village. In 2023 the Akwa Ibom governor, Umo Eno, renovated it.
So if you visit Oron Museum, you are looking at survivors. Each surviving ekpu is a grandfather who made it through. And somewhere behind each one are the others, the ones who became smoke over Orlu so that someone could eat.
