People · 15th century; statue 1954 · Tradition
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Her husband called her lazy. She had no children of her own and nowhere to go home to. Yet a prince hid in her house by the market, and when he became Oba Ewuare the Great, he made sure Benin would greet her grave for the next five hundred years.
If you walk along Oba Market Road in Benin City, near where it meets Ibiwe Street, you will pass a bronze statue of a young woman. It stands on the side of the road that faces the market. Under it, Benin people say, is a grave, and the grave belongs to a woman called Emotan. Her shrine is about five and a half centuries old, and it is the best known shrine in the city.
What makes her story so moving is how small her life looked while she was living it. The account kept by the Edo heritage site Edoworld does not dress her up. It says plainly that she was not thought of as a success in her own time.
She was born in a village called Eyaen, not far from where the Aduwawa cattle market now sits on the road from Benin to Auchi. Her birth name was Uwaraye. When she was old enough, she was married to a Benin City chief, Azama of the Ihogebe district, as his second wife.
The first wife, Arabe, was the kind of woman a household leans on. She ran the home well and bore all the children. Uwaraye, on the other hand, never became pregnant. She helped to look after Arabe's children instead. She was also slow in the kitchen, and her husband gave her a teasing name for it: Emitan, which the account translates as "Lazy-Bones". The nickname stuck, and over the years it softened into the word we know today, Emotan.
But she was not useless, whatever her husband said. She was very good at making evbarie, the soup seasoning made from fermented melon seeds. She could also spin cotton into the finest, thinnest thread. As Arabe's children grew up and took on house chores, Emotan had more free time, and she spent it trading at the Oba Market.
Then her husband died. Her own parents had died long before, and there was no place for her back in Eyaen; her village family did not take her in again. So she took her goods to the market and made a home for herself right across from it. She was a widow with no children and no family to fall back on. All she had left was the market.
Emotan made a living there. She sold her evbarie, and she also ran what the account calls an "odds and ends" stall. Some of the things on it were ordinary. Others were the kind of thing a healer or a priest might come looking for: red parrot feathers, dried python heads, fat from boa constrictors, and stones taken from the gall bladders of elephants.
She also became something the market badly needed. Mothers who came to buy and sell would leave their small children with her while they went deep into the market. Emotan usually said yes. When one of the children fell sick while in her care, she nursed it until the mother came back, full of thanks. In a quiet way, the woman who had no children of her own ended up minding a great many.
This is where her life crossed paths with the history of the kingdom. In the days of Oba Ohen, there was trouble over who would rule after him. A prince named Ogun was one of Ohen's sons, and he lost out. His younger brother, Uwaifiokun, took the throne. In Benin memory, Uwaifiokun is remembered as a usurper.
Ogun went through hard times. Emotan took him in. Her house by the market gave him shelter and comfort, and it also gave him something more useful: a place to listen. Everyone passes through a market, and everyone talks there. From Emotan's home, Ogun could hear what ordinary people in the town were saying and judge how they felt.
The account says it was in that same house that Ogun and Emotan planned how to bring Uwaifiokun down. One day the Oba came in procession to the Oba Market. Ogun went out from Emotan's house to meet him, and killed him. With that, the fight over the throne ended, and Ogun became king in his father's place. He took the name Ewuare, which means "the heat has abated". Benin remembers him as Ewuare the Great.
Emotan did not live long after Ewuare came to the throne. Because she had no children, her property passed to the Oba, and so did the duty of burying her. He buried her in her own house by the market, the same house that had hidden him. Later he planted an uruhe tree over the grave, and he gave an order that has been kept ever since: any procession celebrating something in the city should stop to honour her there.
People still do. Newly made chiefs go to the shrine. So do the children of anyone who has died, during the part of the funeral rites called isoton, when sons and daughters turn their dead parent into an ancestor with an altar at home. If you spend a few days in Benin, the account says, you will probably see one of these isoton processions making its way to and from the shrine in the evening. The only time nobody goes is during Igue, the two-week festival that brings in the Edo new year, when no burial rites are held at all. The gifts people bring belong to the Aikaeronmwon, the royal jester, who looks after the shrine.
The tree that Ewuare planted stood for more than three hundred and fifty years. It fell from old age in the reign of Oba Osemwende, who planted a new uruhe in its place and put an iroko tree beside it for support. Those two trees lasted about a hundred years, until a bad storm brought both of them down.
In 1954, Oba Akenzua II, working with the British colonial government, chose to mark the grave in a new way. A small model of a young woman was cast by the bronze workers of Igun Street. The full-size statue was then cast in Britain, paid for by the British Council, and set up over the grave.
So the woman whose husband called her lazy now stands in bronze in the middle of the city, and Benin still stops to greet her.
