Container for Ritual Healing (Ngwarkandangra)

The lower Gongola River valley, a ruggedly hilly region that lies west of the confluence wit the Benue River in northeast Nigeria, is home to diverse communities that share historical and at times cultural and linguistic ties. Here elaborately formed and embellished pottery is often used to facilitate interactions with spirits for veneration and healing, with neighbors influencing each other’s styles and practices. Among the region’s Adamawa-language speakers, the making of such pottery for curative rituals is particularly highly developed, and pots for this purpose are made in a seemingly endless variety. With their swollen bulges, jagged scales, scabby patches, and sharp points, ritual healing containers, like this one, give graphic form to the pain and discomfort of disease.
Among the Bëna, who live east of the Gongola River in the Ga’anda Hills, pots such as this one are made to contain the spirit called Ngwarkandangra, who is appealed to in rituals to heal skin diseases. These pots have a globular base and a crooked neck that is enveloped in spiky projections, a powerful image of the symptoms that will be eased when the disease is successfully cured. [See also 2005.269, 2005.280, and 2005.281].