Ohafia War Dance

Ohafia is a group of Igbo speaking villages in the north of Abia State in southeastern Nigeria, historically organised around a reputation as warriors and around matrilineal descent, which is unusual among the Igbo. The war dance, iri agha, belongs to that history directly. It is performed by men in age grade formation, advancing and wheeling in ranks to a battery of drums and the wooden slit gong, in a red cap and a wrapper, moving with a swagger that is part of the form rather than an addition to it.

Its religious content is ancestral. The dance calls the names of warrior ancestors of the village and of individual lineages, and it belongs within the funerary honour due to a man of standing, who is seen off by the community he was held to have defended. Ohafia religious practice, like Igbo practice generally, treats the ancestors as continuing participants in the affairs of the living rather than as figures of memory, and a dance that names them at a funeral is addressed to them and not only about them.

Dancers historically carried a carved wooden head, standing for the taking of a head in war, which once conferred the title of ogbu isi and the right to certain marks and privileges. The practice ended long ago and the carried head is now an emblem of an old honour, not a claim about anyone alive.

What makes the Ohafia dance more than a martial display is that it is a way of asserting history. The songs and the called names identify which ancestors did what, which village was the aggressor and which the defender in a given conflict, and which lineage holds the credit. Neighbouring Ohafia villages perform accounts of the same events that do not agree, and the disagreement is carried in the dance rather than settled outside it. A performance is therefore a claim, and it is understood as one by the people watching it.

That gives the dance an unusual position in the atlas. It is not a liturgy and it is not addressed to a deity. Its religious relevance lies in the ancestral honour it belongs to, in its place within funerary rite, and in the fact that Igbo traditional religion, Odinani, treats the standing of the dead within the community as a live matter that the living are responsible for maintaining. On that reading the dance is one of the instruments by which the responsibility is discharged.

The dance is also performed today at cultural festivals, at state occasions and for visitors, and Ohafia people perform it in diaspora associations. Both settings are real, and the atlas records the funerary and ancestral use as the older and the more consequential without treating the newer one as false.