People · Early 1500s; 1897; 1977
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Her face is on T-shirts, trays and cloth across West Africa. Fewer people know the woman herself, the war she fought for her son, or why Nigeria had to use a copy.
If you grew up in Nigeria, you have probably seen her face a hundred times without knowing her name. It's on plates, trays, wax-print cloth and T-shirts. People call it the FESTAC mask. But behind it is a real woman, Idia, who lived around the turn of the sixteenth century in the Kingdom of Benin. She was a wife of Oba Ozolua and the mother of the prince who became Oba Esigie. She came from Ugieghudu, and in Edo she is still called Idia n'Iye Esigie, "Idia, the mother of Esigie".
When Ozolua died, there was no easy succession. One son, Ogidogbo, lost his claim after injuring his leg in a contest with his brothers, because a king could not have a bodily impairment. That left two rivals: Esigie, Idia's son, and Aruanran, the son of another wife. One story says the two boys were born around the same time, and that although Aruanran came first, Idia's household got word of Esigie's birth to the palace before the other news arrived. So Esigie went into the royal record as the older prince.
Then it came to war. Benin traditions all agree that Idia helped her son win, though they disagree on how. Some say she raised soldiers and used her knowledge of medicine and ritual. A more vivid version says she went to Unuame in Udo territory disguised as a woman selling food, and cooked for Aruanran's troops. The soldiers who ate her food were believed to switch their loyalty to Esigie, and she is said to have done it again when a second division arrived. In the end Esigie's forces attacked Udo, and Aruanran, cornered by a lake, is said to have drowned himself rather than be captured.
What happened next is the part that changed Benin for good. Earlier custom is said to have required the mother of a new Oba to be put away, or even killed, so she could not become a rival centre of power. Esigie did the opposite. He created a new title for his mother: Iyoba, the mother of the Oba. Idia was the first to hold it.
He built her a palace at Lower Uselu, called Eguae Iyoba, the court of the Iyoba. She had her own chiefs, servants, land and villages. Some chiefs hated the idea, and one tradition says Idia went into hiding for a time because she feared she would be assassinated. But the office survived her. Later Obas installed their own mothers as Iyoba after taking the throne, and the title is still part of Benin kingship. Tradition also credits Idia with the Ekasa dance and the curved coral-bead headdress shaped like a parrot's beak that later Iyobas wore.
She kept fighting, too. In the war against the Igala kingdom of Idah, usually dated to 1515 and 1516, Idia sent her own troops from Uselu under her head slave. Her soldiers are said to have killed the Igala commander. In another story, an ibis flew over Benin's army crying and beating its wings, and the diviners read it as a sign of defeat. Idia refused to retreat, told Esigie to have the bird shot down, and the campaign went on to victory. One of her praise songs describes her fighting with a double-edged sword.
After her death Idia became a favourite subject of Benin court art. She appears on bronze heads, ivory pendants, altar tusks and bells. The most famous is a small ivory pendant about 24.5 centimetres high, now in the British Museum. Across the top is a row of tiny bearded Portuguese heads, originally eleven, now ten. Below the face is an open lattice standing for her coral necklaces, and on her forehead are two vertical cuts once filled with iron, the most reliable sign that it is Idia. The Oba wore pendants like this at the chest or waist during rites meant to drive harmful forces from the kingdom.
The pendant left Benin in 1897, when the British expedition against Benin took court objects from the royal palace and scattered them through European museums and private collections. Eighty years later, Nigeria chose the pendant's image as the emblem of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Lagos in 1977. Because everyone called it FESTAC 77, the carving became the "FESTAC mask", even though it was never meant to cover a face.
Nigeria asked the British Museum to lend the original for the festival. The museum refused. According to the historian Nkiru Nzegwu, it asked for a guarantee of £2 million, which the Nigerian government was willing to give, and still the loan did not go ahead. So Oba Akenzua II turned to the Igbesanmwan, Benin's guild of ivory carvers, and had them make two copies for FESTAC. Nzegwu sees the quality of those copies as proof that the carvers of the twentieth century still had their ancestors' skill.
There is one more twist. For a long time, some scholars thought the pendant showed an Oba or another man. Many people who saw the FESTAC emblem never realised it was a woman at all. So the face that became a symbol of a whole continent belonged to a mother who fought a war for her son, and for years even the experts forgot she was a woman.
