Body Arts: Marking, Hair and Cosmetics

For most of Yoruba history the body was the primary carrier of identity information, and it was written on directly. Cut marks on the face declared a person's lineage and often their town, so that a stranger's origin could be read across a market. Hair was dressed in named styles that signalled age, marital status, occasion and sometimes political affiliation. The head was the focus of all of it, because in Yoruba thought the head is not a body part like the others. Almost all of the facial marking is now gone, ended within two generations, and the hairdressing survives in transformed commercial form.

The head as the ground of body art

Yoruba thought distinguishes orí òde, the outer or physical head, from orí inú, the inner head, which is the seat of a person's destiny and of the portion of àṣẹ allotted to them, and behind both stands ọ̀kè ìpòrí, the primeval material from which the inner head was made 1. This is why Yoruba sculpture gives the head a quarter to a third of total body height, and it is why body art concentrates on the head. Dressing the hair, marking the face, and shaving for ritual are operations on the most consequential part of a person.

The proverb usually cited is that one does not plait or cut another person's hair without the consent of the owner of the head 2. The relevant sense of "owner" is not possessive; the head is a person's own destiny and nobody else has jurisdiction over it.

Ìlà: facial marking

What it was. Ìlà, literally line or stripe, are the cut marks made on the face, usually in infancy. They were made by a specialist practitioner, the olóolà, using a razor or other sharp blade, and the cuts were rubbed with a native dye made from charcoal to stop the bleeding and to keep the skin from closing flat, so that the healed line stands proud and dark 2. The word for the practice is ìlà kíkọ, mark-writing, which is the right metaphor: the face was inscribed.

What it did. The primary class of marks is lineage marks, given to every child born into a patrilineal family as a matter of right, confirming full clan membership 2. Because lineages cluster in towns, and because certain patterns were characteristic of particular towns and kingdoms, the marks also identified where a person was from. In a region of many small polities frequently at war, and in the nineteenth century of mass enslavement and displacement, a face that could be read was a considerable practical asset: it identified kin, it identified allies, and it made a captured or displaced person traceable to a home.

Ọlanikẹ Ọla Orie's linguistic analysis argues that the attested patterns are not arbitrary but are rooted in Yoruba number symbolism, so that the stripe patterns constitute a structured system rather than a set of local decorations 3. That is the most rigorous published treatment of the formal structure.

Named patterns. The commonly listed types are Àbàjà, Pélé, Gọ̀mbọ̀ or Kéké, Owu, Nupe and Gbẹ̀rẹ̀ 2. Àbàjà is identified with Ọ̀yọ́ and consists in its basic form of three or four horizontal lines on each cheek. Pélé consists of three long vertical lines on the cheeks and is associated with Ilé-Ifẹ̀. Gọ̀mbọ̀, also called Kéké, consists of multiple straight and curved lines about half an inch apart on the cheeks either side of the mouth, with four long vertical lines drawn from the scalp curving into four perpendicular lines on each cheek, and is characteristic of Ògbómọ̀ṣọ́ 2. Patterns combine and vary, and Samuel Johnson's The History of the Yorubas, written in the late nineteenth century, reproduces sketches of the stripe patterns which remain a primary reference 3.

A distinct and much smaller category is marks made for other reasons: medical incisions for administering herbal preparations under the skin, and marks made on a child believed to be àbíkú, a spirit-child repeatedly born and dying, to identify them if they return.

Kólò refers to decorative body marking, cicatrisation applied to the torso and limbs, particularly on women, which is aesthetic and erotic rather than identifying. It is a separate practice from ìlà and has declined even more completely, to the point that it is effectively undocumented in living practice.

The decline, which is close to complete. Facial marking fell away sharply from the late twentieth century, and the causes are cumulative rather than singular 2. Christian and Islamic disapproval, which redefined the practice as pagan. The end of the conditions that made it useful, since national identity documents, schooling records and urban life do the identification work the marks once did. Medical concern about unsterile blade use, sharpened by HIV transmission risk. Aesthetic change, with marks reclassified as rural and backward and their bearers subject to mockery. And legal prohibition: Nigeria's Child Rights Act of 2003 prohibits tattoos and skin marks on children, which removes the practice's entire basis, since the marks were made in infancy 2.

The pattern reported repeatedly is that people who bear marks did not give them to their children, on the explicit view that the time of facial marking had passed 2. That is a tradition ending by the decision of the people who hold it rather than by suppression alone, and it means the knowledge is going with the last generation to carry it. An educated Yoruba adult today can very often name the marks their grandparents carried and cannot read an unfamiliar pattern.

Two things should be said without sentimentality. The practice caused real pain to infants who could not consent and carried real infection risk, and its end is not a loss on those measures. It also encoded a system of lineage and town identity of considerable sophistication, and that system is being lost as a body of knowledge, which is a different kind of loss and is not compensated by the first.

Hair

The two techniques. Yoruba hairdressing divides into ìrun dídì, hair that is plaited or braided flat to the scalp with nothing added, and ìrun kíkọ́, hair that is wrapped with thread or with thin plastic strands so that sections stand out from the head in stiff shaped forms 4. Both are worked in named styles, and both are done by specialists, historically women working in the compound or the market.

Named styles. Ṣùkú is among the best known: the hair is drawn upward from all directions and gathered into a raised bun or crest on the crown, giving a tall, regal silhouette 4. It exists in many named variants, including ṣùkú elégbè, ṣùkú onídìdì, ṣùkú fúlà and ṣùkú ológèdè 4.

Kòróbà takes its name from the Yoruba word for basket or bucket, and the plaits are worked to fall outward and downward around the head in the shape the name describes 4.

Adé Ọba, king's crown, is worked to resemble a crown and is recorded as having been reserved in earlier times for the wives of kings 4.

Ìpàkọ́ ẹlẹ́dẹ̀, literally the back of a pig's neck, describes a style plaited backward from the forehead to the nape.

What hair signified. Style marked stage of life, marital status, occasion and social standing, and specific styles belonged to specific circumstances: styles for a bride, styles for a mother of newborn twins, styles for a woman in mourning, styles for priestesses of particular òrìṣà 4. The shaved head has its own meanings, in mourning, in initiation and for infants. Because a person cannot dress their own hair in these styles, hairdressing is inherently social, and the hours it takes are part of what it is.

The twentieth century transformed rather than ended this. Threading and cornrowing continue, chemical relaxing and wigs and weaves entered from the mid-century, and the natural hair movement of the 2000s onward brought traditional styles back deliberately and self-consciously. The J. D. Okhai Ojeikere photographic archive, made in Nigeria from 1968 onward and now internationally exhibited, systematically documented well over a thousand hairstyles and is the single most valuable visual record of the tradition; Ojeikere was Bini rather than Yoruba but photographed extensively in Lagos and across southern Nigeria.

Cosmetics

The everyday cosmetic materials are few and are shared across ritual and ordinary use, which is itself the point: the same substances that dress a body for a party dress it for a shrine.

Osùn, camwood, ground from the heartwood of Baphia nitida into a red powder mixed with oil or water, rubbed on the skin as a cosmetic and a protectant, used heavily on infants and on new mothers, and used to dress ẹrẹ̀ ìbejì and other shrine figures. Its red is the colour of heat, of Ṣàngó and of vital force.

Efun, white chalk or kaolin, the counterpart to osùn, cool where camwood is hot, associated with Ọbàtálá, used to mark the body in worship and for infants.

Tìróò, antimony or galena ground fine, applied to the eyes and to the lids of infants, both cosmetic and understood to protect the eye.

Ìlàrí and adì, palm kernel oil and other oils, used to dress skin and hair.

Aró, indigo, which stains skin as well as cloth, used to darken and pattern.

Aṣọ, cloth itself, should be counted as body art rather than as a separate department, which is Abiodun's argument in the chapter titled from the proverb that we greet cloth before we greet its wearer 5. The gèlè, the tied head wrap, is the clearest case: it is architecture built on the head for an occasion, it is judged by the same criteria as any other made thing, and its whole purpose is to elaborate the part of the body that carries a person's destiny.