Gelede

Gelede belongs to the western Yoruba communities of southwestern Nigeria and neighbouring Benin, and its purpose is unusual among masquerade traditions worldwide: rather than a men's society concealing its power from women, gelede is performed by men specifically to honour and placate a power the tradition holds women, and especially elderly women, to possess, called awon iya wa, our mothers, a force capable of great good, as fertility and protection, and great harm, as witchcraft and social disruption, if left unacknowledged.

Performances centre on large carved wooden headdresses worn atop the head, elaborately painted and often depicting scenes of daily life, animals, respected community figures or exaggerated caricatures of misconduct, worn together with padded costumes and cloth that transform the male performer's body into an idealised or comic female form, danced to the accompaniment of drumming and call and response song led by a chorus. The masquerade is performed at set points in the agricultural and ritual calendar and at funerals of senior women, and its underlying theology holds that the awon iya wa, properly honoured through spectacle, dance and public reverence, will use their power for the community's benefit, fertility, protection from misfortune and the wellbeing of children, rather than turning that same power to harm.

Gelede functions as social commentary as much as devotion, and this is part of what has made it a rich subject for scholarship on African performance traditions: masks and skits at a gelede festival routinely satirise contemporary figures and behaviour, corrupt officials, foolish foreigners, greedy traders, immodest conduct, giving the masquerade licence, protected by its ritual and comic frame, to say publicly what direct speech could not. The carving of gelede headdresses is itself a respected specialist craft passed through apprenticeship, and individual masks, though following recognisable genre conventions, are prized as original artistic compositions, a body of work that has entered major museum and private collections worldwide as an acknowledged tradition of African sculpture in its own right, sometimes to the discomfort of source communities who see ritually active masks removed permanently from performance use.

UNESCO inscribed gelede on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008, formal recognition of the tradition's living, continuing performance among Yoruba communities in Nigeria and Benin and, through migration, in diaspora communities beyond West Africa. The tradition has proven adaptable rather than frozen, absorbing contemporary subject matter into its satirical repertoire even as its underlying purpose, honouring the power of women elders through public spectacle, has continued largely unchanged across generations of performance.