John Thabiti Willis’s Masquerading Politics: Kinship, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Yoruba Town is an extraordinary achievement on several levels. First, conducting relevant research for this study required patience, endurance, and considerable diplomacy. Fieldwork in Yoruba communities is not easy, particularly negotiating the zones of secrecy and prohibition that insulate the egúngún masquerades from outsiders—not just “foreigners” from other countries and towns, but even from other lineage members within the same town. Willis entered closely guarded territory, winning an extraordinary degree of trust, respect, and access. One of the reasons there are so few studies like his is that most researchers simply cannot “take the heat.” I highlight this point because non-specialists may not appreciate the skill set required to navigate such difficult terrain so successfully.

Secondly, Willis clearly demonstrates the significance of egúngún masquerades not only in reflecting changing political and economic relations during the turbulent rise and fall of the Old Oyo empire, Atlantic slavery, the spread of Islam, and the establishment of British colonialism, but also more importantly, in shaping those relations. His focus on the southwestern town of Otta in the Awori subethnic belt (near the Fon areas in the Republic of Benin) provides a fascinating case study of an important historic crossroads. Like many Yoruba kingdoms, Otta is a composite of core indigenes and immigrant groups (Oyo, Gun, and Egbado refugees) consolidated into sections (or wards) around a king (o̩ba). As Willis shows, egúngún masquerades were central mechanisms of this consolidation, linking lineages within (and sometimes across) wards with civil chiefs, rival ruling dynasties, and as Willis shows for the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, even with presidential aspirants and national leaders (e.g., former president Ibrahim Babangida). Furthermore, Otta served as a bulking center for shipping enslaved captives to the Lagos and Badagary ports on the Atlantic coast, generating a new class of warrior chiefs and merchant big men (and sometimes women) who consolidated their political capital by innovating new warrior egúngún masks that shifted their ritual orientations from protective (warding against conflict and witchcraft) to aggressive (overcoming rivals), thereby establishing new channels of political and economic control. Such changes, Willis shows, accentuated the gender fluidity built into masquerade figures (and as he argues, Yoruba kinship and lineage more generally), as his sustained analysis of the mask Oya Arogunbola in chapter 5 attests. Not only were a class of senior female chiefs operating behind the scenes of what has been characterized in the literature as a male-dominated ritual association, but Willis’s material also suggests that powerful women sponsoring female masks could become structurally male, appropriating patrilines within agnatic lineages.

Thirdly, in terms of Yoruba historiography, Masquerading Politics significantly revises much received wisdom. The first two chapters place egúngún within the broader history of the Oyo empire, which rose up in the eighteenth century as a crossroads between Atlantic slavery and trans-Saharan trade, dominating many lesser kingdoms. Reading competing egúngún traditions of origin within this dynamic political field, while re-reading Samuel Johnson’s magisterial History of the Yorubas (Church Missionary Society, 1921), Willis shows that Oyo’s hegemonic expansion throughout eighteenth-century Yorubaland until its collapse circa 1836 was not only ritually consolidated through its royal Shango cult, extending Oyo overrule through ajé̩lè̩ and ìlàrí priests, but was equally institutionalized through its royal egúngún cults, a development that has been systematically neglected in the literature. Willis clearly demonstrates the historic role of egúngún in expanding and consolidating the Oyo empire, and links this synthetic discussion of the broader regional Oyo history to the arrival of Oyo egúngún in Otta, where they rearticulated with localized egúngún masks already associated with civil lineages. He thus clearly shows that the standard conception of egúngún linked to agnatic lineages within towns is only part of the story which needs to be extended to broader political jurisdictions of ruling dynasties and relations between vassal kingdoms and metropolitan centers.

Chapters 3 through 5 shift to Otta proper, where Willis more intensively analyzes the complex dynamics between immigrant groups, civil chiefs and the o̩ba, the war with Abeokuta, the rise of a merchant elite, the gendered impact of the growing palm-oil trade, and the arrival of British overrule, as shaped and mediated by the egúngún masquerades. In addition to oral histories, praise-poetry (oríkì), and the ewì chanting modes associated with egúngún performances, Willis makes judicious use of the remarkable papers and reports of James White, of the Saro Yoruba community of liberated slaves in Sierra Leone, who proselytized in Yorubaland for the Church Missionary Society. White’s descriptions of local egúngún and Gè̩lè̩dé̩ masquerades provide invaluable insights into the precolonial history of masquerade performances, linked as they were to political conflicts and developments.

No book is perfect, and I would like to have seen more systematic analysis of gender dynamics in relation to cultural idioms of blood, witchcraft, and fertility, with some local commentary on this topic. Moreover, the content of the oral histories and oríkì could be more systematically explicated, not simply cited as “evidence.” More significantly, the egúngún should also be located within the broader ritual arenas of orisha worship in Otta and beyond, since many of the same dynamics of rivalry and mediation between wards, chiefs, and kings shaped by egúngún are similarly shaped by the orisha cults in towns and kingdoms. This comparison is worth developing, because ritual idioms of female power and gender-shifting in orisha worship are more explicitly expressed, and such a comparison would highlight and broaden egúngún gender paradigms, both by similarity and contrast. And finally, it is sometimes difficult to see the forest for the trees when Willis traces the complex networks between local lineages, chieftaincies, and egúngún families. For specialists, such explications are an invaluable research achievement, but these networks need to be embedded in a broader picture for non-specialists to more easily apprehend and assimilate.

Nevertheless, the book as a whole stands as a major achievement not only in Yoruba history and historical anthropology, but in recent historiographic trends using ritual institutions and performances as primary historical sources. It will have a major impact in Yoruba studies, and in the study of West African history more generally. Willis should be commended for penetrating a complex and socially guarded ritual resource to glean the hidden histories manifested therein.