Ògún

Old Metal, New Machines

First attested
1852Samuel Crowther, A Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language (London: Seeleys, 1852), s.v. Ogun: "the god supposed to preside over iron, implements of war, and hunting". The same volume glosses him parenthetically at s.v. Agbedde (smith's shop) as "the god of smiths", inside the proverb "Ogun ko rọ ike, agbedde ko ro batta" — Ògún does not manufacture ivory, the blacksmith does not make shoes — and at s.v. Aja (dog) records "Okpa aja li afi ibọ Ogun", an old dog is what is sacrificed to Ògún. Read directly in the Internet Archive scan, identifier vocabularyofyoru00crow. Crowther prints the name without the sub-dot while marking it elsewhere in the same lines (rọ, ibọ), which is one of the confirmations that the deity's name is Ògún, not Ọgún. He was himself a Yoruba speaker and a CMS missionary, so this is an insider's lexicon compiled inside the missionary encounter, not a neutral record. His first edition is 1843 and very probably carries the headword; that edition was not checked, so 1852 is the earliest year verified here, not necessarily the earliest in print. Clapperton's Journal of a Second Expedition (1829), searched in full text, does not name him.

Crowther's 1852 vocabulary glosses Ògún as the god of "iron, implements of war, and hunting", and Sandra Barnes's argument is that a god held to a material rather than a domain never acquires a closed list of trades: the smith and the hunter, then the lorry driver and the mechanic — and an iron oath for which Nigeria's Oaths Act of 1963 still leaves room.

The òrìṣà of iron: work made holy, and the same metal is the blade. Still taking new trades.

Crowther's Yoruba vocabulary of 1852 glosses him as "the god supposed to preside over iron, implements of war, and hunting". Sandra Barnes argues that a god held to a material rather than a domain never acquires a closed list: smith and hunter, then soldier, lorry driver, mechanic. Nigeria's Oaths Act of 1963 lists Koran, Bible and Old Testament, then admits one taken "in any other manner which is lawful according to any law, customary or otherwise" — the room ethnographers report the iron oath occupying, a witness putting his lips to metal. The statute names neither iron nor Ògún. Soyinka made him the protagonist of Yoruba tragedy in 1969; Africa's Ogun (1989) followed him to Haitian Ogou and Brazilian Ogum, whose Catholic doubles are São Jorge in Rio, Santo Antônio or São Sebastião in Bahia — local, not a key.

Light

Work is holy in him. The smith, the hunter and the lorry driver share one patron, and a court system built on English law leaves room for a witness to swear on the metal he works with rather than on a book.

Shadow

The same metal is the blade. Barnes and Ben-Amos traced the sacralising of iron to the war-making of Benin, Ọ̀yọ́ and Dahomey; and Yoruba tradition remembers Ògún, home from battle and answered by silence, cutting down his own people at Ìrè.

Sources and verification10 sources · 2 links

Primary source

  • Samuel Crowther, A Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language (London: Seeleys), 1852, s.v. Ogun; also s.v. Agbedde and s.v. AjaThe earliest attestation verified for this entry: the deity glossed in print as presiding over iron, implements of war, and hunting. Cited for the attestation, not for any inference drawn from the order of the three words.
  • Pierre Fatumbi Verger, Notes sur le culte des Orisa et Vodun à Bahia, la Baie de Tous les Saints, au Brésil et à l'ancienne Côte des Esclaves en Afrique (IFAN), 1957The field documentation underlying specific Africa/Brazil correspondences, including the Bahian association of Ogum with Santo Antônio or São Sebastião — which is why the Bahian double is printed here as a pair of variants rather than one name. The folio was not opened by this editor; no page range is asserted.
  • Oaths Act (Nigeria), 1963 No. 23, commenced 1 October 1963; Cap. O1, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 2004, 1963, s. 5(1)(a)-(b)That Nigerian statute names Koran, Bible and Old Testament and then permits an oath taken 'in any other manner which is lawful according to any law, customary or otherwise, in force in Nigeria' — a provision about the MANNER of swearing. The Act names neither iron nor Ògún; it leaves the room the iron oath is reported to occupy.

Scholarship

  • Karin Barber, 'How Man Makes God in West Africa', Africa 51:3, 724-745, 1981That an òrìṣà is sustained by the attention of devotees and diminished without it — the standing correction to reading Ògún as a slot in a pantheon.
  • Sandra T. Barnes and Paula Ben-Amos, 'Benin, Oyo, and Dahomey', Expedition 25:2 (Penn Museum), 1983The sacralisation of iron alongside warfare and state-building in Benin, Ọ̀yọ́ and Dahomey c. 1400-1700 — the first half of the Shadow. Open access at penn.museum; read directly.
  • Karen McCarthy Brown, 'Systematic Remembering, Systematic Forgetting: Ogou in Haiti', in Barnes (ed.), Africa's Ogun, 1989That the Haitian Ogou is a family of named manifestations, not a single figure carried across intact. Cited from the volume's contents as reported in the secondary literature; the volume itself was not opened, so the chapter title and pagination are unverified here.
  • Sandra T. Barnes (ed.), Africa's Ogun: Old World and New (Bloomington: Indiana University Press; second, expanded edition 1997), 1989Barnes's argument that his endurance rests on the multiplicity of his meanings rather than on a fixed domain — the source of this entry's thesis that a god held to a material never acquires a closed list of trades — and the transatlantic tracking from Yorubaland to Haitian Ogou and Brazilian Ogum.
  • Leslie G. Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 1992That lwa-saint correspondences are regional and unstable — the reason no single Catholic double for Ògún is printed here as a fixed key.
  • J. Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton University Press), 2005That the African and American forms co-produced each other through continuous nineteenth- and twentieth-century Atlantic traffic, so 'survival' is the wrong model for Ogou and Ogum.

Where this claim originates

  • Wole Soyinka, 'The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of Yoruba Tragedy', in D. W. Jefferson (ed.), The Morality of Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 1969, Appendix, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge University Press, 1976)Ògún as the archetype of the tragic actor who crosses the abyss of transition, god of the forge and the blade at once. This is Soyinka's own construction and the route by which he entered world literary criticism — cite it for his reading, not as Yoruba doctrine. Located in the 1976 reprint because the page range within the 1969 volume could not be verified.

Linked entries

  • Set againstThe Trial of Anders PoulsenAttested

    Two indigenous religions meeting a European-derived court from opposite ends: Poulsen's drum was seized as evidence against him, whereas Nigeria's Oaths Act admits an oath sworn by custom instead of on the Bible.

  • Set againstPerunAttested

    Ogun is carried by living practice and a memorised oral corpus that can still be consulted. The East Slavic cult was broken in 988 and transmitted nothing, which is why every modern account of Perun is reconstruction rather than testimony.

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