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Whenhen an African art enthusiast, curator and dealer received a set of Yorùbá carved twin figures – ère ìbejì – in 2022 as a reward for a successful business transaction, it signaled the beginning of a fresh obsession. While he had previously encountered a few of ìbejì carvings in his relative’s collection of African traditional art, the present struck a chord with him, being a twin.

“I have constantly been aware of ìbejì but I will say my dedicated investigation was definitely a recent development.”

“I’ve been collecting them since then,” says he, who studied as a legal professional in the UK. “I buy back from foreign auctions and also whenever I find someone in Nigeria who owns them and wants to part with them or dispose of them, I take them.”

These Cultural Significance of Ère Ìbejì

The ère ìbejì are a material representation of a unique sacred, cultural and artistic tradition among Yorùbá communities, who possess among the globe's top twinning rates of twin births and are significantly more likely to bear twins than Europeans.

The average twin rate of the Yorùbá community of Igbo-Ora in the nation's Oyo state, is 45 twins per 1,000 births, versus a worldwide mean of about a much lower figure.

“In Yorùbá culture, twins occupy a position of deep sacred and communal significance,” explains a scholar who has studied ère ìbejì.

“This community are known to have an elevated rate of twin births in the globe, and this occurrence is interpreted not merely as a natural event but as a indication of heavenly blessing.

“Twins are seen as bearers of good fortune, wealth and protection for their families and communities,” he says.

The Tradition of Venerating Twin Spirits

“If a twin passes away, sculpted representations [ère ìbejì] are crafted to accommodate the spirit of the departed child, guaranteeing ongoing veneration and safeguarding the welfare of the surviving sibling and the wider kin.”

The statuettes, which are additionally sculpted for living twin pairs, were treated like real infants: bathed, anointed, breastfed, dressed (in the identical garments as the siblings, if alive), adorned with beads, chanted and prayed to, and carried on female backsides.

“I'm attracted to artists who interact with what twinhood represents: dual nature, absence, partnership, permanence.”

They were carved with artistic features – with protruding eyeballs, their cheeks often marked, and given adult traits such as genitalia and breasts. Most importantly, their heads are large and immensely coiffed to represent each sibling's spirit, creation and fate, or orí.

A Revival Effort: This Ìbejì Initiative

This tradition, however, has been almost entirely forgotten. The ìbejì sculptures are scattered in overseas museums all over the world, with the newest dating from the 1950s era.

So, in February 2023, the collector initiated the Ibeji Initiative to revitalise the lived heritage of the custom.

“This initiative is an educational and awareness program that introduces heritage artifacts to modern audiences,” he explains. “Twinship is global, but the Yoruba reaction – carving ère ìbejì as containers for spirits – is distinctive and should be kept alive as a ongoing conversation rather than frozen in museums abroad.”

In October 2024, he organized an ìbejì-focused show in partnership with a London gallery.

The initiative involves gathering original ère ìbejì, displaying them and pairing them with curated contemporary artworks that extends the tradition by exploring the concepts of twinness. “I am attracted to artists who deeply interact with the meaning of twinship embodies: duality, loss, fellowship, continuity,” he says.

He thinks curating modern artistic pieces – such as three-dimensional works, artistic setups, paintings or photos – that share artistic and conceptual parallels with ère ìbejì repositions the age-old tradition in the current era. “[This project] is a platform where contemporary creators create their personal responses, carrying the dialogue into the present,” he adds.

“I'm very satisfied when people who previously dismissed traditional art start to collect it because of the initiative,” says the collector.

Future Goals and Global Impact

Next, he hopes to release a publication “to make the ìbejì tradition accessible to scholars and the broader public”.

He says: “Though rooted in Yorùbá tradition, the initiative is for the world. Similarly to how we examine other cultures, people should study our heritage with the same dedication.

“The aspiration is that they will not be seen as museum oddities, but as part of a living, breathing traditional legacy.”