Igunnuko in Abeokuta presents one of the most striking examples of how Nigerian cultural traditions have travelled across communities and acquired new local meanings. On 9 March 2024, an Igunnuko masquerade was photographed in Abeokuta, Ogun State, on the same day that major events marking the 37th Lisabi Festival were taking place in the city.
With its extraordinary height, enveloping robes and concealed performer, Igunnuko is visually distinctive. Yet its historical importance goes well beyond spectacle. The tradition has important roots in Nupeland and became incorporated into parts of Yorubaland through centuries of migration, settlement and cultural exchange.
Its presence in modern Abeokuta therefore reflects a much wider Nigerian story, one in which traditions crossed linguistic and political frontiers long before today’s ethnic and administrative boundaries were established.
Igunnuko in Abeokuta and the 2024 Lisabi Festival
The 2024 Lisabi Festival was the 37th edition of the modern Egba celebration commemorating Lisabi Agbongbo Akala, the celebrated eighteenth-century leader associated with Egba resistance to the authority of the Oyo Empire.
Major celebrations took place in Abeokuta on 9 March 2024. Among the traditional rulers present were the Alake and Paramount Ruler of Egbaland, Oba Adedotun Gbadebo; the Olowu of Owu Kingdom, Oba Saka Matemilola; and the Osile of Oke-Ona Egba, Oba Adedapo Tejuoso. The programme also honoured the late Chief Tairu Braimoh Olaleye as Hero of the Year.
An Igunnuko masquerade was photographed in Abeokuta on the same date.
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The appearance is historically interesting because Lisabi belongs to Egba political history, while the deeper origins of Igunnuko point towards the long cultural relationship between Nupe and Yoruba-speaking communities.
The photograph illustrates how modern cultural celebrations can bring together traditions that have different historical origins but have become established within contemporary Yoruba cultural life.
The Nupe Roots of Igunnuko
One of the clearest accounts of Igunnuko’s ancestry appears in historian Akinwumi Ogundiran’s The Yoruba from Prehistory to the Present.
Writing about northern Yorubaland and its neighbours, Ogundiran describes communities in the Middle Niger region where Yoruba and Nupe populations lived in close proximity. He records that the Igbomina Yoruba adopted the Nupe Igunnu masquerade from Nupe settlers living among them.
The Nupe were traditionally known as Tapa in many Yoruba communities. Relations between Nupe and Yoruba peoples stretched across centuries and included commerce, settlement, warfare, political competition and religious exchange.
Cultural transmission did not occur in only one direction. Ogundiran also records traditions that the Nupe adopted or adapted aspects of Ifa divination from their Igbomina neighbours. Similar connections involving religious practices demonstrate the permeability of the cultural frontier.
Igunnuko can therefore be understood as part of this wider history of exchange.
From Nupeland to Yoruba Communities
Cultural traditions rarely remain unchanged when communities carry them into new environments.
As Igunnu or Igunnuko traditions became established among Yoruba-speaking populations, they developed within local religious, musical and social settings. Communities preserved important elements of the masquerade while incorporating them into their own cultural worlds.
A tradition may originate in one community and later become deeply rooted in another through generations of practice.
Jola Ogunlusi’s 1971 study of the Igunnuko Festival in African Arts helped document the masquerade within Nigerian cultural scholarship. More recent research has shown that Igunnuko remains part of the ritual and musical life of some Awori communities in Lagos State.
Akin Adebola’s study of Igunnuko among the Awori, published in 2025, describes organised festival practices, specialist custodians, music, ritual activities and masquerade performances. Some songs associated with the festival retain Tapa linguistic elements, reflecting the tradition’s historical connections with the Nupe cultural world.
The persistence of such elements demonstrates how cultural memory can survive after a tradition has travelled far from its earlier geographical centre.
Why Igunnuko Is So Tall
The extraordinary height of Igunnuko is among its most recognisable characteristics.
The masquerade is enveloped in cloth that conceals the performer, producing an imposing vertical figure capable of dramatic movements. Among some Awori practitioners, Igunnuko forms are supported by structures that allow the masquerade to tower above spectators.
Related Nupe masquerading traditions have also used elaborate internal frameworks. Some documented forms contain collapsible structures that allow the masquerade to change its apparent height, rising, contracting and swaying dramatically during performance.
This helps explain why descriptions of Igunnuko construction vary. The masquerade has existed in different communities and has not necessarily been constructed in precisely the same manner everywhere.
What remains central is the transformation of the concealed performer into an extraordinarily tall ritual presence.
Within traditional masquerade culture, concealment is itself significant. The public identity of the performer disappears beneath cloth and structure, allowing the masquerade to assume a separate ceremonial identity recognised by the community.
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Ritual Protection and Anti-Witchcraft Beliefs
Igunnuko has also been associated with ritual protection and beliefs concerning witchcraft.
Twentieth-century anthropologist S. F. Nadel conducted extensive research among the Nupe and recorded the importance of witchcraft beliefs and organised practices intended to counter people believed to possess harmful supernatural powers.
His 1935 study, Witchcraft and Anti-Witchcraft in Nupe Society, became an important early ethnographic account of these institutions.
Similar traditions occur in Igunnuko practices among some Awori communities. Accounts of the festival describe ritual activities concerned with combating witchcraft and cleansing the community.
Such practices belonged to the religious worldview of the communities concerned. Institutions intended to protect communities from perceived supernatural dangers could also exercise social and ritual authority.
Igunnuko’s role was therefore not limited to entertainment. In communities where the tradition retained religious importance, the masquerade formed part of a wider system of ritual practice, communal identity and protection.
Lisabi and the Egba Struggle Against Oyo
The setting of the 2024 photograph adds another important strand of Yoruba history.
Lisabi Agbongbo Akala is remembered as the leader associated with the successful Egba revolt against Oyo authority in the late eighteenth century.
Historian Andrew Apter places the revolt between approximately 1775 and 1780. The uprising was directed against the ilari, representatives of Oyo authority whose presence among the Egba had become associated with exploitation and abuses.
Akinwumi Ogundiran also identifies Lisabi with the movement that liberated Egba communities from Oyo exploitation.
Lisabi subsequently became an enduring symbol of Egba resistance, collective action and political independence. His memory survived through oral traditions and communal remembrance, eventually forming the historical foundation of the modern Lisabi Festival.
The festival celebrated in Abeokuta in March 2024 therefore commemorated a history distinct from the Nupe ancestry of Igunnuko.
The presence of Igunnuko within the wider cultural environment of the celebrations reflects the layered nature of modern Nigerian festivals, where traditions with different historical backgrounds may exist side by side.
More Than a Yoruba Egungun
Igunnuko should not simply be grouped indiscriminately with every Yoruba masquerade under the general description of Egungun.
Yoruba masquerading traditions are diverse. Different communities maintain masking institutions with their own names, histories, costumes, religious associations and performance practices.
Igunnuko’s Nupe connection gives it a particularly distinctive historical position.
Its development within Yoruba communities also demonstrates that cultural identity is not determined solely by where a tradition first originated. A practice transmitted between neighbouring peoples can become firmly established in its new environment while still preserving traces of an earlier cultural ancestry.
The Igunnuko tradition is therefore simultaneously evidence of Nupe heritage and Yoruba cultural adaptation.
A History of Exchange Across Nigerian Communities
The relationship between Nupe and Yoruba societies was never defined by a single historical experience.
At different times, relations involved military rivalry and political expansion. At others, they involved trade, migration, settlement and everyday interaction between neighbouring communities.
Northern Yorubaland and the Middle Niger formed an important zone of contact. Communities met each other in markets, settlements, political alliances and religious institutions. Words, beliefs, technologies and ceremonies could consequently cross cultural boundaries.
Igunnuko is a visible survival of this process.
The tradition challenges the idea that Nigerian ethnic cultures developed independently inside clearly separated territories. Long before colonial rule created administrative boundaries, communities were already interacting across regions that would later be associated with different ethnic identities.
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Conclusion
Igunnuko in Abeokuta is more than the sight of an unusually tall masquerade moving through a Yoruba city.
Its history reaches northwards towards the Nupe communities of the Middle Niger. The Nupe Igunnu masquerade travelled into Yoruba communities, particularly among the Igbomina, while later generations adapted the tradition within their own cultural environments.
Its extraordinary costume and height made it visually memorable, while its ritual associations gave it importance beyond public entertainment. In some communities, Igunnuko became connected with protection, purification and traditional beliefs concerning harmful supernatural forces.
The masquerade photographed in Abeokuta on 9 March 2024 also appeared against another layer of history: the modern commemoration of Lisabi, whose revolt against Oyo authority in the late eighteenth century became one of the defining memories of Egba political history.
These histories reveal something fundamental about Nigeria’s cultural past.
Nigerian societies have always interacted.
Igunnuko survives as a striking reminder that traditions can migrate, become localised and remain alive for generations while still carrying traces of the communities from which they came.
Author’s Note
The history of Igunnuko demonstrates that Nigerian cultural identities developed through centuries of contact rather than in isolation. Its movement from the Nupe cultural world into Yoruba communities shows how migration, neighbourhood, trade and religious exchange allowed traditions to cross boundaries and acquire new meanings. Recognising those Nupe roots does not diminish Igunnuko’s established place in Yoruba cultural life. Instead, it reveals a deeper history in which Nigerian communities repeatedly influenced, borrowed from and enriched one another.
References
Ogundiran, Akinwumi. The Yoruba from Prehistory to the Present. Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Nadel, S. F. “Witchcraft and Anti-Witchcraft in Nupe Society.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 8, No. 4, 1935, pp. 423–447.
Apter, Andrew. “The Historiography of Yoruba Myth and Ritual.” History in Africa, Vol. 14, 1987.
Ogunlusi, Jola. “Three Nigerian Festivals: Igunnuko Festival.” African Arts, Vol. 4, No. 4, Summer 1971.
Adebola, Akin. “Musical Practices of Igunnuko Festival Among Awori People of Lagos State.” AE-FUNAI Journal of Music and the Arts, Vol. 2, 2025.
Ogunnaike, James. “Ogun Monarchs Harp on Unity at Lisabi Festival.” Vanguard, 9 March 2024.
