Review of the British Museum Exhibition Kingdom of Ife: Sculptures from West Africa

This major British Museum exhibition displayed a fascinating range of brass, copper, terracotta and stone artefacts from the West African city-state of Ife (in present-day Nigeria) deriving mainly from the eleventh–fourteenth centuries. Perhaps the most striking and well-known artefacts on display were the figures and heads cast in brass and copper. While such sculptures were known and used as part of religious shrines in Nigeria into the last century, when they first came to the attention of European observers they caused a stir. Their naturalistic aesthetic and technical complexity caused them to be attributed variously to ancient Greek, Egyptian and even Italian Renaissance artists. What so surprised Western observers in the early 1900s was the naturalism of the brass, copper and terracotta sculptures. Many of the figures and heads on display in the exhibition are thought to be portraits of rulers and ancestral figures made in the image of living models. Rather than being stylized types, they have individual traits and features.

Moreover, as brass and copper were not locally extracted but obtained through trade, it was speculated that outsiders, if not a foreign culture altogether, might have been responsible for the production of the sculptures. Subsequent archaeological finds confirmed to the West that these were indeed African masterpieces, and it is now believed that the artists who created the Benin bronzes learned their craft from Ife. Today this material heritage is recognized as a centrepiece in the cultural legacy of the Yoruba people.

The exhibition emphasizes the significance of Ife to the Yoruba people as the site of mythic creation and cultural origin. As the catalogue stresses, 'Today, the rulers, divinities, deified ancestors, and even some of the animals depicted in Ife art are still actively celebrated among Yoruba-speaking people in modern Nigeria and in the Yoruba diaspora' (Drewal and Schildkrout 2010: 3). The authors posit a cultural and artistic continuity from the Ile-Ife of the turn of the first millennium to the present. As examples of this continuity, it is noted that the current ruler, the Ooni of Ife, when he sits in state like his forebears, wears a beaded crown and holds a royal sceptre and whisk 'similar to that worn by the two copper-alloy figures of an Ooni in the exhibition' (ibid.: 3). Similarly, '[i]n Ife today, people worship at shrines dedicated to the same deities that are referred to in the ancient city-state's art' (ibid.: 3).

The Ife of the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries is thought to have been a cosmopolitan and thriving city-state. Many of the terracotta heads found show different styles of facial scarification, the variety of which is understood as an indicator of the different peoples who inhabited or had contact with the city-state. Situated close to the River Niger, Ife was an important trade and cultural centre in the region and its concomitant wealth is partly inferred from the artefacts. The use of glass and carnelian beads, and the depiction of the adornment of figures with cowry shells indicates trade connections and wealth. Moreover, the presence of an artistic tradition of producing cast brass and copper sculptures in itself suggests trade, exchanges and dialogue with wider North and West African artistic and crafts traditions.

Information on techniques in pottery and 'lost wax casting' represent a compelling inclusion in the exhibition. For instance, video footage shows craftspeople forming the inner clay core of a head, defining a face in wax, covering this with further clay and finally pouring in the molten bronze, thereby melting the wax and casting the metal in the shape of the outer clay layer. The footage is recent and, we are told, lost wax casting is still practised today.

The archaeologist John Picton provides another interesting inclusion in the form of an audio guide telling the story of how a group of Ife artefacts were collected in the 1960s. At the time of the civil war, these were being...