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African Art

Each important Yoruba town or city has a palace for the local ruler. Like other Yoruba houses, they are built around a series of courtyards surrounded by covered verandas. The posts that support the veranda roofs in a palace are usually elaborately carved. The wood of the iroko tree, hard and resistant to insects, is favored for architectural construction. We know that this post was carved as part of a renovation to the palace of Efon-Aleye, after it was severely damaged by fire in 1912. The renovations were completed by 1916.

Post carvings in a palace often combine male and female figures as this one does, expressing the different types of power that Yoruba thought attributes to men and women. As the scholar John Pemberton has put it: 'the hidden power of reproduction and nurture belongs to woman. Overt power, as in the hunt and war, belongs to man. He sustains life with death; she sustains life with life.' The male figure, standing with weapons in hand, and the woman, seated and holding a child, typify these two forms of power.