What they were
The large plates are called ọgba. They were worn in pairs, one on each ankle, twelve to fourteen inches across, and one anklet weighs about one and a half kilos. They were heavy and awkward, and that was the point.
They weren’t the only kind. Girls wore nja, spiral rings of brass wire that climbed from the foot to the knee, on special occasions before marriage, and a girl in a well-off family got a small ọgba first and a full-sized one when she was grown. Echi, in chased copper, doubled as money. Titled women in Onitsha and Awka wore ọdụ, ivory, on wrist and ankle. Metal on the leg is old in Igboland: copper anklets were among the Igbo-Ukwu finds from a thousand years ago.
Made and fitted by Awka smiths
They were forged from solid brass bars by the Awka blacksmiths, the metal town of Igboland, whose smiths worked iron, brass, bronze and copper and made ornaments with great skill. The same smiths attached them to the leg, and when the time came they took them off by burning them.
Awka smiths worked on the road. A master smith travelled with his apprentices, who carried the loads, and their itinerant trade covered south-eastern Nigeria and beyond.
Once on they stayed on, day and night for years. Fabric was bound round the ankle first, against the sores the metal would otherwise rub.
What they said about a household
Brass was wealth, and wealthy women wore heavy ornaments to show it. A woman wearing ọgba raised her own standing and that of her husband and her father.
The clearest picture of what the ornaments meant is the mkpu at Awka, the coming-out of a girl of good family before her marriage. She spent the season in seclusion, fed well and doing no work, and then walked through Nkwo market, slowly, with the spiral rings on her legs and ivory on her arms, so that the town could see her. The weight was the point: this was a family that could afford it.
What they cost to wear
Walking meant swinging each leg wide and clear of the other, partly to carry the weight and partly so one foot didn’t trip over the other anklet. A wearer needed care lying down, walking or running, for the rest of her life.
European visitors who photographed the anklets a century ago mostly wrote about them with contempt. The women they photographed had chosen the thing being described, and the towns that made them counted it as an honour.
Where they went
The plates were still in fashion until the 1930s, and then they weren’t. Colonial trade in imported metal goods pushed the whole industry into decline. They still appear on dancers: maiden-spirit masqueraders were wearing them in the 1940s, and ivory ọdụ is still taken as a title by women in Onitsha today.
The pairs that survive are mostly in museums in Britain and the United States, carried out of Igboland in the colonial years along with much else. If you’ve seen a pair behind glass and wondered how anyone got them on, the answer is that a smith fitted them, and that was the point.