Essay / Ketu Correspondence
The Mask Still Watches the Market
A morning with Gelede carvers shows how satire, reverence, and public memory keep changing without losing their center.
Before the first drum sounded in Ketu, I watched Baba Sanya turn a block of iroko toward the door so the grain could catch the morning. He was carving a trader with two baskets and a phone tucked beneath her wrapper, the sort of detail that makes a public joke land before it becomes a lesson.
Satire Is a Form of Care
The workshop kept no hard border between devotion and gossip. A motorcycle taxi, a council notice, and the stern face of a great mother all entered the same crown because Gelede has never treated daily life as separate from ancestral power.
The headdress does not freeze the past; it carries the village into the square and asks everyone to look carefully.