Vigilant Things

Winner of the 2012 Melville J. Herskovits award (African Studies Association) Throughout southwestern Nigeria, Yoruba men and women create objects called aale to protect their properties—farms, gardens, market goods, firewood—from the ravages of thieves. Aale are objects of such unassuming appearance that a non-Yoruba viewer might not register their important presence in the Yoruba visual landscape: a dried seedpod tied with palm fronds to the trunk of a fruit tree, a burnt corncob suspended on