Majesty, serenity and suffering from Ife’s golden age

By Tosin Sulaiman
March 15, 2010 05:30PM

Brass head, found in Wunmonije Compound, Ife. Early 14th century. PHOTO: Karin L. Willis.

When the German explorer Leo Frobenius went on an expedition to West Africa 100 years ago and discovered beautiful terracotta sculptures and brass heads from Ife, he thought he had found Plato’s lost city of Atlantis.

Frobenius, later described by Wole Soyinka as “a notorious plunderer, one of a long line of European archaeological raiders,” did not believe that the masterpieces he had seen could have been the work of Africans. Instead, the explorer was convinced that objects of such classical beauty, many of which he took back to Germany, could only have been the handiwork of a more sophisticated people who had settled in Africa.

Similarly, in the late 1930s, when 17 more metal sculptures were unearthed by workmen digging foundations for a house in the Wunmonije Compund in Ife, Western archaeologists were forced to re-examine their beliefs about African art. Their astonishment at the high quality and naturalism of the objects was summed up in the following headline in the Illustrated London News in 1948, when the sculptures were put on display at the British Museum: “Mysterious Ife Bronze Heads: African art worthy to rank with the finest works of Italy and Greece.”

The bronze heads are now back at the British Museum, along with many other terracotta, stone and metal sculptures from Ife. Kingdom Ife: Sculptures from West Africa, showcases objects dating from the ninth to the 15th centuries which are now considered to be among the finest works of art produced anywhere in the world.

High art

According to Hassan Arero, a curator at the British Museum, Westerners were initially sceptical about the origins of the Ife sculptures because the African art they knew was made from wood, not the terracotta or metal more common in Europe.

“That’s high art,” Arero said. “That is Greece, that is Italy. Africa didn’t do that and if Africa does that, then Africa is Greece, Africa is Italy. It completely collapsed the myth they had created about civilisation. It was confusing. It was disturbing.”

The exhibition, more than two years in the making, was organised by the Museum for African Art in New York and the Fundación Marcelino Botín in Santander, Spain, in collaboration with Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments. It is the first time many of the objects have been seen outside Nigeria.

“As far as we know, it is the definitive exhibition,” Arero said. “This is as comprehensive as you can get.”

Most of the nearly 100 objects are on loan from museums in Lagos and Ife. Before they were shipped to the UK, the British Museum, which has a partnership with the National Commission, sent a team to Nigeria to train local museum staff in packing objects for loans, installing exhibitions and conservation.

The variety of artefacts on display is certainly impressive and the collection captures the complexity and mystery of the kingdom of Ife, a powerful and wealthy West African city-state in what is now the south-western region of Nigeria.

Ife society

Ife, which is today considered to be the spiritual heartland of the Yoruba people, first emerged around AD 800 and flourished as a trading centre from the 12th to the 15th centuries. Its decline can be traced to the emergence of other city-states such as Benin and the development of new trade routes.

The sculptures that have come out of Ife bear witness to the diversity of the society. As well as depicting kings and queens, they portray foreigners, warriors, slaves and the infirm.

“You get a cross-section of Ife society in the art that you see, said Julie Hudson, co-curator of the exhibition. “That’s what makes it very unusual and very appealing to people.”

A number of the terracotta heads have facial striations, or markings, representing different groups outside Ife. There are also sculptures of people with deformities, including a man suffering from elephantiasis of the testicles, which may have been an attempt by artists to portray sick people who had come to Ife for healing.

“One possibility is that they were commissioned by people suffering similar diseases or medical conditions and placed on shrines in the hope of a cure,” said Hudson, who also noted that they may be representations of people with special powers in the community. “Some people believe that people with particular diseases or afflictions have special powers and thereby become invested with a power that allows them to communicate with the gods.”

Other memorable pieces include terracotta and bronze staff heads depicting slaves about to face execution, who have been gagged to prevent them from uttering curses. Elsewhere, two bronze male figures, among the largest objects in the exhibition, provide clues about Ife’s interaction with other cultures. The first wears a headdress bearing the image of a “snake-winged bird,” a motif that is also seen in the villages of Jebba and Tada, while the second figure’s headdress features a horned head with snakes emerging from its nostrils, a motif that reappears in Owo and Benin.

“This seems to suggest there was some kind of cultural interaction between these city states at the time,” Hudson said. “We just don’t know what the political relationship was or if there was any formal relationship. It’s a great mystery still.”

While there are fascinating stories behind many of the objects on display, it is the strikingly beautiful brass and copper heads, mainly representing Ife royalty, which dominate the exhibition and are likely to leave a lasting impression on visitors.

Ori Olokun

Perhaps the most famous and controversial is the ‘Ori Olokun,’ (Olokun’s head), associated with the eponymous goddess of the sea. Although Frobenius claimed to have discovered it in one of Ife’s sacred groves in 1910, he was prevented from taking it out of Nigeria. Mysteriously, when the object was sent to the British Museum in 1948, a number of experts who tested it said it was not the original.

The 17 metal heads which were discovered between 1938 and 1939 showcase the technical prowess of their sculptors, who used a technique known as lost wax casting to cast in copper and brass. This skill, according to Hudson, was unknown among the other cultures in the lower Niger region.

Among the heads is the 5kg copper mask of Obalufon II, one of Ife’s kings, which has slits below the eyes allowing the wearer to see the outside world and holes around the mouth that may have held hair, raffia or beads. The mask is eerily realistic and, though imposing, is far from remote. Many of the other faces have vertical striations running down them and the heads are decorated with elaborate crowns or head-dresses. The expressions connote strength and dignity, but each face has its own unique characteristics.

Ori – the head

For Arero, the emphasis on heads in early Ife art is related to the city’s mythology and the belief “that a person’s character is in the head.

“I think these were rooted in the cosmology, in the importance of the head as a signifier of fortune, of character,” he said. “What is clear is the faces were highly detailed. No two heads were the same. They were different identities. The aim was to get the head right.”

Scholars believe the heads may have been used in coronation ceremonies or to adorn altars. Many of the objects in the exhibition appear to have been used in a religious context and some were found in Ife’s numerous shrines and sacred groves.

Although this eye-opening exhibition helps to remove some of the mystery surrounding ancient Ife, there are still many unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable, questions. For example, how much of Ife’s art has actually been seen? Are there more masterpieces yet to be discovered? Arero believes so.

“I think there’s more Ife underground than above the ground,” he said. “There are sites which have not been excavated. There are sites where the kings have stopped people from going further because they were burial sites of the kings.”

One final mystery concerns the identity of the artists behind the sculptures, who would have produced their artwork before the European Renaissance. These men or women remain anonymous and scholars can only speculate about where they came from.

“We don’t know anything because they never signed anything,” Arero said. “We also don’t know who they were. Were they people from Ife, were they just nomadic artists, because what happened to them after 1400? They just disappeared and we never saw this kind of work produced anywhere else. There’s just silence. What happened to these artists?”

Kingdom of Ife is at the British Museum, Great Russell Street, London WC1B – until June 6.