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Oba of Benin in the 17th century
Ohuan
Edo brass relief plaque from the Kingdom of Benin, depicting a naked youth associated in Benin art with traditions of Ohuan's public procession before his accession, when he was known as Odogbo.
Ohuan (also rendered Ongwa, Ouan and Ohuon; born Odogbo) was the nineteenth Oba ('king') of the Kingdom of Benin. He succeeded his father, Ehengbuda, in the early 17th century. The chronology of his reign is uncertain: proposed dates range from about 1606 to 1640 or 1641, while another chronology places his reign between 1610 and 1630. Historian Osarhieme Osadolor dated the end of the Oba's personal command of military expeditions to Ohuan's accession. Military command passed to the Iyase ('commander-in-chief'), who gained political authority.
Ehengbuda's only son, he was known as Odogbo before taking his regnal name Ohuan. Oral traditions differ in their descriptions of his sex and appearance. Some accounts portray him as an attractive or effeminate young man who was mistaken for a woman; others state that he was born female and became male through medicine. According to one widely recorded tradition, Ehengbuda required Odogbo to walk naked from Uselu to the Benin capital to demonstrate publicly that he was male and therefore eligible to rule. The procession was associated with the origin of the ifieto, a title for ceremonial attendants at royal processions. Traditions also state that Ohuan's mother, named Ohogha in one account, was not installed as Iyoba ('queen mother') after his accession.
A political event associated with Ohuan's reign was his conflict with Iyase Ogina, a military chief appointed during Ehengbuda's reign. Ogina exercised authority independently of the palace and rebelled shortly after Ohuan's accession. Ohuan temporarily withdrew to the village of Evbohuan, where he assembled supporters before defeating Ogina, recovering control of the capital and exiling him to Okogo. Some traditions subsequently describe Ohuan's government as peaceful and credit him with founding settlements, even though surviving accounts differ sharply in their assessments of his character. Ohuan died without children and left no brother or uncontested direct heir. His death was followed by disputed successions among distant branches of the royal family. Traditions of his public procession were commemorated in Benin art and Igue festival rituals. A shrine in Benin City was associated with accounts of his transformation from female to male. Later coronation songs recalled the threat to royal succession linked to his childlessness.
Background and chronology
Accounts of Ohuan's life and reign draw largely on oral traditions, including those presented in historian Jacob Egharevba's A Short History of Benin. Egharevba collected traditions from Benin titleholders, priests and elders from the 1930s onwards and supplemented them with older written records. Anthropologist Paula Ben-Amos and historian John Thornton compared oral traditions with contemporary European accounts and archival documents in their 2001 study of Benin's political history.
Historical accounts differ in their dating of Ohuan's reign. In the 1968 edition of A Short History of Benin, Egharevba dated Ohuan's accession to about 1606, described a thirty-three-year reign and placed the accession of his successor Ahenzae in about 1641. Historian Osarhieme Osadolor, in his 2001 thesis, dated Ohuan's reign to approximately 1606–1640. Anthropologist Percy Amaury Talbot's The Peoples of Southern Nigeria, first published in 1926, placed Ohuan's accession at about 1610 and Ahenzae's at about 1630, rendering the latter's name as Ehenzai. Ben-Amos suggested in 1995 that Ohuan might have died as early as 1630. In their 2003 history, Peter Roese and Dmitri Bondarenko reported that some of their informants described Ohuan's reign as brief. The authors mentioned that those informants' accounts associated few major events with Ohuan's reign.
Ben-Amos and Thornton discussed Ohuan's conflict with Iyase Ogina alongside a tradition concerning his father, Ehengbuda. In that tradition, Ehengbuda barred the Oba from personally leading military expeditions and transferred command to the Iyase.
Family and accession
Ohuan was Ehengbuda's only son and was known as Odogbo before his accession. An oral tradition recorded by Roese and Bondarenko names his mother as Ohogha and gives her home village as Ayen or Uyen.
According to Roese and Bondarenko, Iyase Ogina came from Okogo, a village near the Benin capital, and was appointed to his office by Ehengbuda. Egharevba wrote that Ogina had opposed Ehengbuda and committed adultery with one of Ehengbuda's wives. Roese and Bondarenko recorded a more detailed oral tradition in which Ogina had sex with Ohogha while she was in his care during pregnancy and childbirth. In that version, Ehengbuda did not execute Ogina because of Ogina's popularity and power, but commissioned a brass cast showing Ogina and Ohogha with the infant prince beside them. The tradition further states that this cast was entrusted to the Iwebo palace society and was intended to be shown to Odogbo only after his installation as Oba.
Traditions differ in their descriptions of Odogbo's sex and appearance. Egharevba described him as a young man whose feminine appearance led people to mistake him for a girl. In Benin Studies (1973), anthropologist Robert Bradbury distinguished accounts describing Odogbo as effeminate from a tradition in which he was born female and became male through medicine.
According to Egharevba, Ehengbuda instructed Odogbo to walk naked from Uselu to the Benin capital to demonstrate publicly that he was male. The attendants who accompanied him were also naked, with their hair cut and arranged before setting out. Egharevba wrote that the prince and his attendants were called ifieto ('hair curlers'). He also described later ceremonial attendants bearing that name who danced and sang in front of royal processions. In their 2003 history, Roese and Bondarenko associated the procession with the establishment of the ifieto title and reported that its holders continued to participate in ceremonies. After Ehengbuda's death, Odogbo succeeded him as Oba of the Kingdom of Benin and took the regnal name Ohuan.
In his 1994 study of Benin art, anthropologist Armand Duchâteau interpreted traditions of Odogbo's appearance and public exposure as evidence that Edo society questioned his fitness to rule because of his feminine traits. Ben-Amos and Thornton (2001) and Sweet Ufumwen Ebeigbe (2012) mentioned that women were excluded from the Benin throne. Ben-Amos and Thornton interpreted the female-to-male transformation story as a symbolic violation of royal norms.
Mother and the Iyoba title
According to Egharevba, an Oba's mother was normally invested with the title of Iyoba ('queen mother') about three years after her son's accession and was sent to live at Eguae-Iyoba ('queen mother's court') in Lower Uselu. He stated that Ohuan did not send his mother to Uselu. According to the tradition recorded by Roese and Bondarenko, Ohogha was not installed as Iyoba after Ohuan's accession and instead returned to her home village with valuable gifts. The account attributed her exclusion to her alleged failure to bear a "proper" male heir. Roese and Bondarenko also reported an Ayen custom in which descendants of Ohogha's family received one leg from each slaughtered animal.
Reign
Egharevba described Ohuan as an accomplished herbalist and maker of charms, crediting him with wise government, the founding of towns and villages, and the respect of his subjects. Roese and Bondarenko observed that elsewhere Egharevba described Ohuan as hateful, vengeful, and tyrannical, a characterisation at odds with the more favourable account in A Short History of Benin.
Conflict with Iyase Ogina
The principal political conflict associated with Ohuan's reign was the uprising led by Iyase Ogina. Accounts differ over when the rebellion began, placing it at Ohuan's accession, immediately afterwards, or three years into his reign.
Osadolor described Ogina as the first Iyase to serve as commander-in-chief of the Benin army during Ohuan's rule. He stated that Ogina drew support from other chiefs and political groups, accumulated state power, and convened councils at his own palace rather than that of the Oba. Osadolor interpreted the confrontation as a continuation of the conflict between Ehengbuda and the earlier Iyase Ekpennede. Egharevba stated that Ohuan retreated to Evbohuan for several months to assemble sufficient forces before attacking Ogina. Osadolor further explained that during this interval Ohuan used the refuge as a base from which to gather supporters for military action against the Iyase and his faction. Roese and Bondarenko likewise wrote that Ohuan had to leave the capital for Evbohuan before he assembled allies. In the traditions they examined, Ohuan's success in regaining control of the capital was attributed to magical power. Ohuan ultimately overcame Ogina, re-established control in the capital, and exiled him to Okogo (also spelled Okogbo). Egharevba, as well as Roese and Bondarenko, reported that Ogina later died and was deified. Osadolor described the rest of Ohuan's reign as peaceful after the "great struggle" and argued that the confrontation influenced Benin's military history.
Kingship and military authority
Osadolor dated the end of the Oba's personal command of military expeditions to Ohuan's accession around 1606. He linked the transfer of command to military chiefs to Ehengbuda's death. In his account, the chiefs gained political power as the king lost direct control of the army.
Osadolor stated that during the era of warrior kings, the Iyase had served as general commander beside the Oba. Though the Iyase as commander-in-chief was theoretically appointed by and dependent upon the Oba, Osadolor argued that the king in practice lost effective control over the army chief. He interpreted the absence of further Iyase appointments by Obas for the rest of the 17th century as a strategy intended to prevent another powerful rival from emerging. Osadolor linked the aftermath of Ohuan's conflict to the development of non-command military functions for senior members of the Eghaevbo n'Ore ('town chiefs'), including the Esogban, Eson, and Osuma. The Esogban, who ranked immediately after the Iyase within the Eghaevbo n'Ore hierarchy, was associated with the Oba's security during wartime and was required to stay with the Oba when the Iyase went to war. Osadolor wrote that the Esogban neither commanded troops nor acted as a front commander, but functioned as the political head of the Benin capital and was responsible for the shrine of Edion Edo, the ancestors of Benin. The Eson, third in the hierarchy, could act for the Iyase when the post was unoccupied, coordinating unit commanders without becoming the deputy commander-in-chief. Osadolor regarded the Eson's military role as mainly honorary because the Ezomo, the senior war commander of the metropolitan regiment, increasingly provided the army's practical leadership.
The Itsekiri inhabited the Kingdom of Warri in the western Niger Delta. Roese and Bondarenko suggested that Warri may have become independent of Benin during Ohuan's reign if his rule extended to 1641. They mentioned that Benin court traditions provided little detail on the matter.
Succession
Ohuan died childless, leaving neither a son nor a brother to succeed him. Egharevba identified his successor as Ahenzae, a great-grandson of ObaOrhogbua, and wrote that the throne passed among different branches of the royal family over the next six reigns. Roese and Bondarenko reported that a successor was sought among the Enigie, princes whose ancestors had been sent from the royal line to govern settlements.
Ben-Amos and Thornton argued that Egharevba's description of rotation among royal branches understated the succession crisis. They described competition for the throne among distant relatives whose genealogical connections were uncertain or unrecorded, and mentioned that published royal genealogies disagreed on the names and order of Ohuan's successors.
Oral tradition, art, and commemoration
Duchâteau connected images of nude youths in Benin art with oral traditions of Odogbo's later accession as Ohuan. He contrasted the narrative of Ohuan as female-born and altered through medicine with accounts describing him as beautiful and maidenly. Duchâteau interpreted the public route from Uselu to the Benin capital as a ritual presentation arranged by Ehengbuda to address doubts about Ohuan's sex. Ebeigbe described images of Odogbo before his accession as Ohuan in Benin art. She wrote that his naked procession was commemorated in Igue festival rituals and Benin art. Ebeigbe stated that Odogbo could appear as a nude male figure to stress masculinity, or as a female figure to refer to uncertainty surrounding Odogbo's true gender.
Roese and Bondarenko described a structure on Ebo Street in present-day Benin City locally called aro Ehengbuda ('Ehengbuda's shrine), where tradition located Ohuan's transformation. They stated that they could not enter because the location continued to be treated locally as a sacred site. Their description included an atrium with an impluvium, an iroko tree identified as Chlorophora excelsa, and an Obokha or Okha tree identified as Ceiba pentandra. They also reported that a priest was said to have overseen a sacred python and the shrine's charms during the early 1970s. One version of the shrine narrative collected by Roese and Bondarenko identified Inin of Udo as the person who prepared the medicines for Ohuan's transformation. In that account, Ohuan stayed inside the building for seven days and was then told to expose their body above an opening and receive an object into it. Reported variants identify the object as a mouse, rat or snake, the last of which the authors associated with the shrine's sacred python. Roese and Bondarenko regarded the question of whether Ohuan was intersex as unresolved.
Ohuan's lack of a direct heir was also incorporated into later ceremony. Roese and Bondarenko reported that an Ekasa song performed at ObaEweka II's coronation in 1914 recalled the danger of the royal line ending, with Ohuan's reign serving as the historical precedent. In an account published by ethnologist Mechthildis Jungwirth in 1968 and cited by Ben-Amos and Thornton, an informant recalled Ekasa dancers addressing Eweka II. The song recalled the danger of the royal line ending during Ohuan's reign.
Explanatory notes
↑Published royal genealogies disagree on the names and order of rulers following Ohuan.
12The Iyase was usually the commander-in-chief of the Benin warriors, followed by the Ezomo and the Ologbosere and Imaran.
↑The Oba's household was organised into three distinct associations, each responsible for particular aspects of palace life. The first, Iwebo, originally managed clothing and regalia for the Oba. Over time, its duties expanded to include oversight of financial and trading matters, under the authority of the Uwangue, a title linked to Ewedo. The second group, Iweguae, consisted of attendants and domestic servants, led by the Esere. The third, Ibiwe, was tasked with serving the Oba's wives and children, and its senior chief, Osodin, is traditionally traced back to Ewedo's time.
↑The Osuma, fourth in the town chiefs' hierarchy, coordinated military intelligence and surveillance. He was also responsible for security in the Ogbe quarter, where the Oba and most palace chiefs lived, and reported directly to the Oba and not to the army's commander-in-chief.
Ebeigbe, Sweet Ufumwen (2012). "Gone but Not Forgotten: The Commemorative Arts of Benin". AFRREV IJAH: An International Journal of Arts and Humanities. 1 (3): 246–257. ISSN2227-5452.
