where black africans savages prior to colonization

A head of their time; Rachel Campbell-Johnston is stunned by head sculptures so sophisticated that our ancestors said they couldn't be African.(Features).

The Times (London, England) (March 3, 2010): p37. (813 words)

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London Times

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COPYRIGHT 2010 The Times

Byline: Rachel Campbell- Johnston

Kingdom of Ife British Museum, WC1 ****

Ahundred years ago, a maverick German adventurer named Captain Leo Frobenius visited the jungles of West Africa. He had heard of the region's wealth, of a marvellous sculpted bronze head and astonishing terracotta figures and, as an anthropological expert crossed with a plundering charlatan, he wanted to take a look for himself.

Three weeks spent digging in forest groves around the city of Ife (pronounced "ee-fay") were richly rewarded. He returned to Europe with a bag of cultural swag. Archaeologists were astounded by what he had to reveal. How could such sophisticated objects have come out of the Dark Continent? Many experts deemed it to be impossible.

These sculptures were not of African origin, they decided: they were evidence of the lost Atlantis of the Greeks. Incredulous archaeologists, however, were forced to rethink, not least when, in 1938, more treasures were turned up. Workmen found a cache of spectacularly beautiful bronze heads, the first in a series of discoveries that were to overturn prior assumptions about African art, forcing patronising imperialists to reconsider their notions of the "primitive". Wrought with extraordinary skill and astonishingly lifelike, these works expressed a socially complex, aesthetically subtle and technically sophisticated culture. The "Donatellos of Medieval Africa" was how an amazed Illustrated London News described them when in 1948 they came to Britain to be conserved and shown for the first time at the British Museum.

The kingdom of Ife, the spiritual heartland of the Yoruba people, flourished from the 12th to the 15th centuries in the lush forests of the lower Niger in West Africa in what is today the southwestern region of Nigeria. Visitors to this show are welcomed by its king - the Ooni of Ife - in the form of a portly copper alloy figure which, dressed in coronation regalia, stands at the entrance to Kingdom of Ife: Sculptures of West Africa.

Precious little is known of this culture. Its stories and traditions are essentially passed down orally. But many guesses and assumptions can be made from its artistic legacy, of which some 100 terracotta and metalwork pieces now go on show. Ife, this show suggests, though far smaller than neighbouring kingdoms, came to prominence because it had an iron-working industry. This provided not only weapons but also agricultural tools. With access to the Niger river leading to Timbuctoo and from there to the Saharan trade routes, surplus food could be traded for other commodities. No doubt Ife had constantly to jostle for power, but it also appears to have had strong relationships with neighbouring tribal regions: a recurrent motif of a snake curling from human nostrils is to be found not just on the carvings from Ife, but also those of nearby Owo and Benin.

To move through the museum's exhibition, a maze-like construction that winds through the Round Reading Room gallery, is to move closer and closer to the heart of this mysterious culture whose monarchy counts among the longest surviving in the world, whose current ruler still sits in state and whose people still worship in the forest groves from which their ancestral relics were dug up.

This is the culture that Kingdom of Ife explores. It was a cosmopolitan society, the exhibition suggests, for its legacy is richly various and its women, judging by the numerous depictions of them, played a strong and valued role. Its metalworkers were superlative craftsman. Its people probably also knew how to make glass - crucibles have been discovered in the forest and figures are elaborately adorned with beads - that would have given the kingdom a powerful trading role.

But it is the sculpted heads that will strike the visitor to this show. Spotlit amid the slightly gloomy mazes are visages of such extraordinary individuality that one is pulled up short. They capture a spirit of individual identity that survives the passing centuries, impelling the spectator to ponder the secrets that are only now being unlocked. Many of these secrets were dark and frightening, as terrible sculptures of gagged victims and human-headed clubs (perhaps used for sacrificial killings) suggest. It is the attentiveness of observation that compels. Here is a queen moulded in terracotta, her pouting face beneath her headdress so extraordinarily rendered that her flesh seems almost soft. There an old man, his slack lips and cavedin face so accurately depicted that his breath seems to hover about his parted mouth.

Ife is in one sense a highly specialised area of study. Here is a small and as yet mostly unexplained fragment of our shared past. It hardly promises to be widely popular. And yet, in its mysteries lies a profoundly felt apprehension of the mystery that is common to all human life.

Kingdom of Ife: Sculptures from West Africa is at the British Museum (020-7323 8838) from tomorrow to June 6

Source Citation

"A head of their time; Rachel Campbell-Johnston is stunned by head sculptures so sophisticated that our ancestors said they couldn't be African." Times [London, England] 3 Mar. 2010: 37. Academic OneFile. Web. 2 Sept. 2010.

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