Foreheads of the Dead

The Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art puts it in one sentence: the term relates to the association of a person's so, the fate that governs his or her fortunes, with the forehead, and sculptures such as the screens provide a means of controlling disembodied spirits by fixing their position. To fix a spirit is to give it an address. A house whose founder has an address can feed him, consult him and, when he is angry, know where to go to make peace.

The screens are the ancestral half of a system whose other half IjawConnect has described elsewhere: the owu, the water people danced by the Ekine society, and the oru, the founding heroes of the towns. Egbesu, the justice deity of the central and western delta, belongs to a different register of the same world. In the Kalabari east, what a great man needed after death was not a law but a seat.

Elem Kalabari, the city Europeans called New Calabar, was for centuries one of the trading powers of the eastern delta, exchanging ivory, pepper, palm oil and enslaved people for brass, guns, gunpowder, spirits and cloth. The wealth and the violence of that trade rebuilt Kalabari society around the wari, the canoe house. A house was a lineage and a business and a regiment at once, and a clever man who arrived as a slave could end as its head. Honouring the dead founder lent his living successor the authority to govern a corporation of kin, clients and dependents. The Art Institute of Chicago's formulation is exact: honouring the amanyanabo of the past lent legitimacy to the amanyanabo of the present.

In 1879 the city broke apart in civil war between the Amachree and Barboy factions. By 1884 the Kalabari had founded the new towns of Abonnema, Buguma and Bakana near the British post at Degema, and the houses carried their screens with them. It was in those towns, a generation later, that the screens would face the fire.

The revival came from inside the Kalabari world. Garrick Sokari Braide was a Kalabari Anglican lay evangelist, born at Obonoma and based at Bakana, who in 1915 preached healing, abstinence, Sunday observance and the destruction of charms and shrines, and drew a following the Dictionary of African Christian Biography puts at more than a million. His converts burned what they found. The colonial government imprisoned him in 1916; he died in 1918, and his movement became the Christ Army Church, one of Africa's first independent churches.

The British Museum's account is that, at the request of Kalabari chiefs, a number of screens were placed under the protection of the district officer P. Amaury Talbot, who presented nine to the British Museum and two to the Pitt Rivers Museum. They were dismantled in haste, arrived without records and were not catalogued until 1950, five years after Talbot's death, when William Fagg registered them as Af1950,45.331 to 348. Barley later found that there was no satisfactory evidence to guide their reassembly and that mistakes were made; detachable pieces, he wrote, had been redistributed at random. Any confident reading of a particular London screen's arrangement has to carry that warning.

Screens are also held in Minneapolis, Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, New Haven and Geneva, and have passed through the European art market. Not all are what they seem. Because Kalabari houses renewed and rearranged their screens as a matter of course, and because dealers have assembled saleable objects from loose parts, a screen under glass may be a composite, a later replacement or a reassembly rather than one intact nineteenth-century shrine.

Three of these are photographs of real screens that anyone may republish. Two are reconstructions we built from the documented iconography, because the museums that hold those objects reserve their own pictures. The rest are screens we can name but cannot yet show. That gap is the repatriation argument in miniature: the objects left the delta, and so did the right to picture them.

There is a real tension here and this article does not resolve it. The transfer may well have been consensual in the narrow sense, and it may well have saved the screens from Braide's fires. It also took place inside a colonial order the Kalabari had not chosen, and it removed the screens from Nigeria rather than safeguarding them at Degema. Barley's account of the botched reassembly complicates any tidy story of protective stewardship. The only documented return, Boston's in 2014, concerned a screen smuggled out in the twentieth century, not Talbot's.

What is achievable now is digital. The Talbot screens are photographed in the British Museum's online collection, and the bekinarusibi screen is mirrored on Google Arts and Culture. Bringing them visually home, annotating them with Kalabari knowledge and correcting museum records with the expertise of the houses that made them is work a platform like this one can begin without asking anyone's permission. No 3D-scanning or Digital Benin initiative exists for the Kalabari screens. That gap is an invitation.