Egbere

Samuel Ajayi Crowther was captured by slave raiders at the age of twelve, sold at a Lagos market, loaded onto a Portuguese slave ship, and liberated by the British Royal Navy off the coast of Africa. He became the first African ordained by the Church of England and the first African Anglican bishop. In 1852, he published A Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language, the first systematic dictionary of his mother tongue. One of the entries: egbere, defined as “fairy or goblin.”

The Church Missionary Society’s Dictionary of the Yoruba Language (1913), later adopted by Oxford University Press, kept the same definition. But dictionaries are thin. The oral tradition that Crowther and his successors were compressing into print had far more to say about this particular goblin.

The Creature

The Egbere is small, ugly, and always crying.

It wanders the deep forest at night, stooped as if bearing an invisible weight. Its appearance is unkempt, disheveled, resembling someone who has gone mad. It avoids human contact, slinking through foliage, heard before it is seen. The sound is what marks it: a high, thin wailing that carries through the trees after dark, somewhere between an infant’s cry and the shriek of the galago, the nocturnal primate that Nigerians call the bush baby.

The Egbere belongs to the iwin category in Yoruba cosmology: forest spirits, earth-bound, lower in the spiritual hierarchy than the orishas and the ancestral egungun. No priest serves the Egbere. No shrine is dedicated to it. No festival marks its season. It is not worshipped. It is encountered.

One source from 1898, the Methodist missionary bishop William Taylor, placed the Egbere in graves rather than forests, claiming they “delight in riding sheep” and “bring disease to sheep.” This variant is unique to his account and may reflect a different regional tradition or a colonial observer conflating spirit types. The forest version is dominant in oral tradition.

The Mat

The Egbere carries a mat. This is the reason anyone cares about the Egbere at all.

It is a woven mat, called eni Egbere in Yoruba, tattered and aged, yellowing, smelling faintly of smoke and river reeds. Some accounts say the Egbere carved or wove it over months or years and considers it unique, irreplaceable. The creature clutches it under its arm or drags it behind. The mat is why anyone cares about the Egbere at all.

If you steal the mat, you become rich.

The transaction follows a fixed structure across every version of the story. You encounter the Egbere in the forest. You seize the mat. The Egbere follows you, wailing, for six or seven days. During this period, you experience nightmares, hallucinations, and a psychological torment that borders on or crosses into madness. The crying does not stop. The creature does not stop following.

If you endure the full period without returning the mat, without breaking, the torment ends. Wealth arrives. The accounts describe it as enormous, sudden, and transformative: gold, money, business success, the kind of fortune that has no visible origin.

If you cannot endure, if you return the mat or crack under the pressure, the consequences are worse than poverty. Permanent madness. Death. Destitution. The Egbere reclaims its mat and you are left with nothing but the memory of seven days of screaming.

The Silence

The wealth comes with a condition that never expires.

You must never tell anyone how you became rich. Not your wife, not your closest friend, not your children. If you reveal the source, you lose everything: the wealth, your sanity, or your life. The secrecy is permanent and absolute.

This is the moral weight of the story. The Egbere does not give wealth freely. It sells wealth at the price of honesty. A person who takes the mat becomes permanently isolated from their community in one specific way: they can never tell the truth about the foundation of their prosperity. They carry the secret alone, surrounded by people who wonder where the money came from.

In Yoruba culture, the broader term for supernatural wealth acquisition is oogun owo (“money ritual”). The concept covers any supernatural means of gaining money, and none of them are morally neutral. The Egbere’s mat is a folk narrative version of this anxiety. When someone becomes suddenly, inexplicably wealthy, the question remains culturally available: did they take the mat?

The Parallel

The Egbere’s closest relative in world folklore is the Irish leprechaun: a small creature in a remote place who possesses hidden treasure, catchable by the quick and bold, but whose wealth comes with conditions. The difference is instructive. The leprechaun’s gold often turns to leaves at dawn. The Egbere’s wealth is real. It stays. The price is not that the gold disappears but that the possessor must lie about it forever.

European fairy gold across Celtic and Germanic traditions follows the same pattern: supernatural wealth is never free, and its cost is always hidden in the terms. The Egbere variant is sharper than most. The cost is not physical transformation, not the firstborn child, not a soul. It is silence. You get to keep everything except the ability to be honest about how you got it.

The Faustian bargain operates nearby. Wealth or knowledge in exchange for something essential. Faust trades his soul. The mat-thief trades their capacity for truthfulness. Both discover that the price is higher than it sounded.

What Survives

The Egbere is alive in Nigerian popular culture, particularly in the oral tradition of boarding schools. For decades, senior students have told juniors the story of the small crying creature that wanders the school grounds at night, carrying a mat. If you accept the mat, you are cursed. The tale has been simplified and moralized for a school setting, but the core elements, small weeping creature, mat, wealth, madness, secrecy, remain intact.

TikTok and YouTube creators produce Egbere content for Nigerian and diaspora audiences. Pamela Okpala published EGBERE: Keeping the Mat in 2018, adapting the creature for a modern setting. The figure feeds into contemporary Nigerian anxieties about “yahoo boys” (internet fraudsters) and money rituals, providing a folk framework for asking uncomfortable questions about wealth that appears from nowhere.

D.O. Fagunwa, who wrote the first full-length novel in the Yoruba language in 1938, populated his Forest of a Thousand Daemons with small, weeping, trickster spirits drawn from the same tradition. Wole Soyinka translated the novel into English in 1968, rendering Fagunwa’s forest spirits as “ghommids” and “daemons.” The forest they inhabit is the Egbere’s forest: dense, dark, full of creatures that offer something you want at a price you will regret.

The galago, the nocturnal primate whose infant-like cry cuts through West African forests after dark, continues to provide the soundtrack. Somewhere in the trees, something small is weeping. It might be an animal. It might be carrying a mat.