Ohafia is a group of Igbo speaking villages in the north of Abia State in southeastern Nigeria, historically organised around a reputation as warriors and around matrilineal descent, which is unusual among the Igbo. The war dance, iri agha, belongs to that history directly. It is performed by men in age grade formation, advancing and wheeling in ranks to a battery of drums and the wooden slit gong, in a red cap and a wrapper, moving with a swagger that is part of the form rather than an addition to it.
Its religious content is ancestral. The dance calls the names of warrior ancestors of the village and of individual lineages, and it belongs within the funerary honour due to a man of standing, who is seen off by the community he was held to have defended. Ohafia religious practice, like Igbo practice generally, treats the ancestors as continuing participants in the affairs of the living rather than as figures of memory, and a dance that names them at a funeral is addressed to them and not only about them.
Dancers historically carried a carved wooden head, standing for the taking of a head in war, which once conferred the title of ogbu isi and the right to certain marks and privileges. The practice ended long ago and the carried head is now an emblem of an old honour, not a claim about anyone alive.