The Monarch in Pink
Explicit Evocations of Female Sexuality in the Art of the Yoruba Origin Ogboni Esoteric Order
Description of Work in Progress
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
'O pink robed monarch,
the king in the world,
small yet powerful,
minuscule yet potent,
she of the rhythm of emergence and withdrawal,
we salute you.
May your favour be our pleasure
our relationship with you our mutual fulfillment
o you that sleepeth not but may be aroused only by the one sensitive to your delicacies.'
That salutation is derived from a name for the clitoris in Yoruba thought, 'oba inu aye', 'the king in the world' , as described by Loland Matory in Sex and the Empire that is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion.
On a correlative note, who would have thought that ideas about the clitoris would be a point of entry into the knowledge currently available to the world on the the deeply secretive Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order?
The loose ideological confederation of esoteric groups named Ogboni, intimately related to the also secretive Osugbo, are known to many Nigerians as a mystery both powerful and suggestive of something to be wary of. These are organizations of whom much is said but little understood in the Nigerian social space on account of the balance of secrecy and influence they have demonstrated over the centuries till the present.
The clitoris is the female sexual organ devoted to pleasure and nothing else, its extreme sensitivity drriving from its more than 8,000 sensory nerve endings often making it central to the temporarily transfigurative physical and mental experience of orgasm, as experienced by women. The Wikipedia essay on the subject, referencing various scholarly and more general texts, describes it as " the human female's most sensitive erogenous zone and generally the primary anatomical source of human female sexual pleasure".
In Yorubaland, along with other parts of Nigeria, Africa and Asia, some people cut off the clitoris entirely or cut off a part of it to inhibit female sexual pleasure, thereby encouraging sexual discipline, it is believed, or to protect the unborn child believed to be at danger from this very small but potent organ.
Why then does Ogboni art, as evident from online searches and books, at times depicts women as both naked and with their clitoris discreetly depicted but very prominent, as shown in the pictures in this essay?
Why should such a reputedly conservative group as the Ogboni, traditionally described as a society of elders, thus celebrate the clitoris, and among a people who have a long tradition of cutting part or all of the clitoris, both to tame female sexuality and to protect babies in the belief that if the clitoris touches the baby's head during childbirth, the child would die or that cutting the clitoris enables safe delivery?
What relationships does this seeming contradiction have with Rowland Abiodun's observation, in "Woman in Yoruba Religious Images", of the understanding of the power demonstrated by the clitoris in terms of the hidden but potent force represented by the ancestors, and the occult force of women at the nexus of birth and death, creativity and destruction, as represented by the concept of 'Iya Wa Osoronga', which may be translated as ' Our Mothers Sorcerous, or with Loland Matory's account of the clitoris as king in aye, the Yoruba understanding of the world as material and social conglomeration?
There is no answer to these questions in the scholarship available to me so far, this scholarship being the core of writings on Ogboni accessible though academic databases.
I am trying to respond, through speculation based on a study of Ogboni visual art in the context of classical Yoruba conceptions of the female body and self and the human body in general, to the questions provoked by the nexus of conflicting values in Yoruba culture converging on this female biological feature.
It is a subject of profound significance at the intersection of biology, psychology and spirituality, with the distinctive Ogboni deployment of this biological form evoking these conjunctions, which in themselves resonate with their intersections in Western scholarship and Hindu thought.
I am so excited by the progress I am making as the knowledge network involved keeps growing and the ideas keep expanding.
I shall be honoured to have first hand information from anyone who is aware of the rationale for this style of depicting the female form in Ogboni art.
I am also open to speculations on the subject.
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