Headdresses are very significant among the Yoruba people of Nigeria and are used as status symbols and motifs to denote, identify or show differentiation
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among ethnic affinities and associations, most especially among cults groups. A headdress denotes the status and powers held by each individual in a particular community. In reality, they sometimes serve as protection. Head wears, worn by cults in the form of ori-inu (the inner head) and those worn for daily activities or on special occasion are important features of how Yoruba art straddles the functional and aesthetic spheres.
Such headdresses among the coastal Yoruba people also expresses normative idea of what it means to be modern and how people are identified based on class or status. They express shared and deeply held cultural beliefs and social values.
Similarly, among the Awori of coastal Yoruba in Lagos State, ritual headdresses display individual uniqueness and are worn by traditional priests, by Obas and different categories of local chiefs in rituals that are designed to evoke spiritual protection for farmers and the community during harvesting seasons.
The motifs, patterns, colours and shapes chosen for the headdresses depict the class, status, and section of each of the leading functionaries in rituals. The signs, symbols and motifs in this research serve as a vehicle for expressing the arts of the Yoruba people. Their importance underscores why and how they are useful and are used or considered to communicate specific cultural values, a common feature of indigenous arts all over the world. The decoration of hair among the Yoruba with ornaments is very common with all other ethnic groups of Nigeria.
However, their degree of distinctiveness is very crucial and is determined by the difference in shared values from one society to another, and associated with the aesthetic goals and particular functions they serve. The approach to how the head, cap, or scarves are used helps to endow an artist’s creations with their distinguishing features; they usually depict individualistic tendencies by artists since all art is an individual expression of culture.
Whilst culture differs from place to place, so also does each art and craft product or expressions look unique and different from others? For instance in Africa the link between hairdo and physical cum spiritual beauty is of great importance. That is why the hairstyles are distinctive and symbolically designed to communicate the importance, personality and status of the wearers. Hairstyles however, denote social relations, healthcare and spiritual well-being and wholesomeness among the Yoruba. This is a common practice across Africa; among the Chokwe society of Angola for example, specified hairstyles (complete with design patterns and materials), are prescribed and won exclusively by chiefs and certain high-ranking personalities. Interestingly, the sort of stylistic aesthetics in Chokwe in Angola abound in other traditions on the African continent.
Some high-chiefs are in Chokwe are specially (colourfully) decorated and adorned with a horned hairstyle. Sometimes the horns are held in high esteem, they are stylistically shaped with braided or bundled hair, which protrude from the side or top of the head in a straight or slightly curved manner. Another striking example of hair as status symbol is the hairstyle and skull elongation practised among the Mangbetu of North-eastern Congo. They devote a lot of time and talent to body ornamentation and a variety of hairstyles. In this community, the wives of chiefs and wealthy individuals display their high ranks defined by elaborate spherical hairstyles, while other women spot the elongated basket-like hairstyle with a halo at the crown. Hair elongation is a status symbol among the Mangbetu ruling class, now it has extended into a common ideal of beauty among other African nations such as Ghana and Cameroon (Palmenaer, 2002).
So far, the conclusion drawn here is that the several lots of coastal Yoruba words, physical arts and patterns portray a fascinating, wide-ranging and various expressions of coastal Yoruba and Nigerian/African art modernity. Although, it
appears as and expropriation of western modes of artistic practice and its art history, its expression as a cultural referent overwrites the dominating schemata of the West. The intrinsic limitations and costs of practice led me to a consideration of the miniature as a format, but as a researcher, I was conscious that part of my aim is to reflect antecedent forms in new order. Suffice to say that, this section further interpretation and coding of some crafts/words, patterns and motifs regarded as a brand of "traditional art" that sustain modes of practices known as
"souvenir art”. Cornelius Adepegba (1995) has in addition, provided a categorization of modern tendencies in the visual arts of Nigeria, which brings together a vast variety of contemporaneous representations and engagements by artists in Nigeria. For Adepegba, then, whereas modern coastal Yoruba and perhaps African visual arts may be defined as beginning from the point of contact with the West, it also incorporates "survivals of traditional past" and neo-traditionai manifestations in the contemporary. This chapter analyses and presents new interpretations of coastal Yoruba art forms in Western contexts such as the dialectical structure enshrined in the art history of the coastal Yoruba. In the subsections on art works, the first stands for realistic art; the second stands for extensions of the arts of pre-colonial era adapted for new reading; especially those inspired by workshops steered by missionaries or enthusiasts from the West, whose ideas are often driven by fundamentalist obsessions to preserve the purity of practice in African visual arts.
The third and fourth categorizations reveal iconographies created out of curiosities and the exquisite drawing of coastal Yoruba words revealed in new templates designed to capture coastal Yoruba lineal trajectory, via ancient, middle and modern periods. According to Adepegba, the above reflection may be referred to as neo-traditional art; and are mainly new local forms that portray
Western conventions whilst revealing some of the characteristics learned in training centres. However, the new inversions created in this research may help to refute prejudices and renunciations of cultural modernism in coastal Yoruba art history as a practice that is located within the framework of Euro-American rationalization.