Duein fubara (ancestral commemorative screen)

Duein fubara — literally 'forehead of the dead' in Kalabari — is the most architecturally distinctive art form produced by the Kalabari Ijo of the Eastern Niger Delta. Each screen was commissioned by a wari (trading house) to commemorate a founding or prominent deceased member, and was permanently installed against the rear wall of the ancestral meeting room. The central element is a carved portrait head, rendered frontally with individualising details; flanking it in lower relief are figures representing attendants, warriors, or dependants who accompanied the ancestor in life or in death. The planks are joined horizontally and the composition reads as a unified frontal plane rather than a three-dimensional sculpture.

Robin Horton's Kalabari Sculpture (1965) established the foundational typology and documented the ritual context in which the screens received periodic libations and food offerings. Because duein fubara were embedded fixtures of named, still-active lineages, many examples that entered Western collections before the mid-twentieth century raise unresolved questions of licit alienation. No formally or functionally equivalent object type has been documented among neighbouring Niger Delta peoples, making the duein fubara one of the most reliably attributable forms in the regional corpus.