ESIE

Esie Soapstone images

Esie is an Igbomina Yoruba town south-east of Ilorin near Offa where Leo Frobenius collected some stone figures in 1911.
It appears that Frobenius did not get to Esie itself where more than 800 broken pieces of similar sculptures were piled up in a horse-shoe fashion encircled by sacred peregun trees (a species of dracaena) at a spot overgrown with grass outside Esie town. 
The sacred nature of the spot was further indicated by the fact that several curtains of palm fronds were hung at intervals across the path to it, a common indication of sacred places among most southern Nigerian peoples.