Nigerian treasure - the "bronze" heads of Ifẹ̀

 

In 1938, eighteen "bronze" sculptures were unearthed at Ifẹ̀ in south-western Nigeria, the religious and former royal center of the Yoruba people. Like most West African "bronzes" the pieces are actually made of copper alloyed with other metals, described by the British Museum as "heavily leaded zinc-brass." Made using the lost wax technique, most are approximately three-quarters life-size, and probably date from the fourteenth-fifteenth century AD.

The sculptural heads and the upper half of a brass figure were found by accident at the Wunmonije Compound, Ifẹ̀, during house-building. Most of the objects found in the compound and neighboring areas ended up in the National Museum of Ifẹ̀, but a few pieces were taken out of Nigeria and still remain in the collections of foreign museums. The export of these pieces spurred the colonial authorities - Nigeria was ruled by Great Britain from 1885, officially, until 1960 - to enact legislation that same year, meant to control exportation.

These efforts were largely promoted by Leo Frobenius, a German self-taught ethnologist and archaeologist, a major figure in German ethnography, and one of the first European scholars to take a serious interest in African art, especially that of the Yoruba. When these and other similar works were discovered, it undermined the existing Western understanding of African civilization; experts did not want to believe that Africa had ever had cultures capable of creating artefacts of this quality, technical expertise, and sophistication.

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Attempting to explain the creation of these sculptures, work then thought to be extremely anomalous, Frobenius concocted a theory stating these must have been cast by a colony of ancient Greeks who had established themselves in the area in the thirteenth century BC. The claim - which was widely circulated in the press - he further expanded to hypothesize that this ancient Greek colony could very well be the origin of the legend of the lost civilization of Atlantis.

It's now recognized that these statues represent an indigenous African tradition, one that attained a very high level of realism and refinement, and the Ifẹ̀ sculptures are considered one of the greatest achievements of African culture. The naturalistic features of the Ifẹ̀ heads are unique, though, and the stylistic similarities of these works suggest that they were made by an individual artist or in a single workshop.

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