Inside the Kingdom of Ife at the British Museum

We're in the Ife exhibition, which is a lone exhibition from Nigeria, from the National Commission for Museums and Monuments. Almost everything comes from Nigeria. It's the most extraordinary lone exhibition because they've lent almost everything from this wonderful find from 1938 of 17 brass copper alloy heads excavated at the compound of Wominji at Ife. I have to apologize for my throat, but if you can listen to a whisper, I will do it. I would like to see, John, the iconic piece that's here. That's kind of the game-changing piece. The game-changing piece. Well, one of the great, great things is this coronation figure, which was excavated in 1957 just outside Ife and was one of a number of figures found at that time. What's important about these ones is they're full-standing figures. They show the orni, or the king of Ife, at the moment of coronation. So he's wearing a crown, he's holding a horn with medicine in his hand, and he has a staff in the other hand, and he has this regalia of red parrot feathers on his chest. Why are these images so important? They're so important because they're equivalent to the medieval sculptures in cathedrals today. So if you look for the image of Henry VII or of Richard II, these are the same date, and yet they have much more detail, they have much more humanity, and they have much more individuality than the sculptures being done in Gothic and early modern Britain. This object over here was the first object from Ife to enter a museum collection. It came to the British Museum. It's one of two objects from the British Museum in the exhibition, and it came here in 1896, and it is a quartz or quartzite stool or throne, and it shows an enormous elephant trunk, and on it would have sat the orni or the king. With his legs astride the elephant trunk and his feet on a stool, because of course, if he was king, he mustn't touch the ground. Ife antiquities first really came to light in 1910. What happened was that a German adventurer and anthropologist called Leo Frobenius had heard about the mythic kingdom of Ife, and he decided in 1908 to go there. He went there in 1910. He took a man called Marshalus with him. They spent three weeks there. They got a team of Africans. They burrowed into the sacred grove underneath the ground. They found terracottas. For the first time, you have here a cast of a terracotta head found in 1910, the original in Berlin, back together with the original headdress, which is still in Nigeria. Now what Frobenius did was he met the keeper of this head. It's called the Olokun head. It represents the king of the sea. It was so beautiful and so wonderful that Frobenius didn't think it could have been made by an African. He thought it was of Greek or ancient European origin. He identified it with Poseidon, the god of the sea. He identified the kingdom of Ife with the lost kingdom of Atlantis. He wrote all of this up, and indeed it was published in the Illustrated London News over there in 1910. What happened in order to disprove all of this was over there where those people are, are two small brasses excavated in 1939 by Thurston Shaw, one is of an elephant head, and those are about a thousand years old, and they proved that this was an autonomous African tradition. For me, it's always very difficult to speak about them because they are at once, as John had said, I don't want to use the word proof because they have nothing to prove, but that they are arguably some of the highest human expression in these forms that they're made in, that if you want to think of it in a kind of pedantic way. At the time, many of these sculptures were being made. Go to our cathedrals and look at early medieval art. See how two-dimensional it was? See how stilted it was? And then look at this, so you can see that the advance of human beings on the African continent at that time was massive, and that makes me sad in a way when you think of the catastrophe of slavery because it intruded, so we don't even know what could have been going further if that catastrophe hadn't happened, but it's a great sort of joy to see this work because it reinforces not only this continuity among people of African descent, and as one of the curators said, there's no such thing as African art. It's art made by African people, and here it is.