Lost history · Nok culture c. 1000 BC to AD 500; finds from 1928
No matching image yet, so this page uses a plain title card instead of a photo.
One of the most famous clay heads in African art spent part of its modern life on a pole in a farm, scaring birds. What happened to the rest of Nok is worse.
Long before Nigeria, long before the Hausa states, people lived on the plateau of central Nigeria who smelted iron and made figures out of baked clay. They were there from about 1000 BC to around AD 500. Today we call them the Nok culture, after a small village in southern Kaduna. They did not call themselves that. The name came from the place where their work first turned up in modern times.
It turned up by accident. In 1928, men working a tin mine near the village of Nok dug out terracotta pieces. Nobody was looking for art. They were looking for tin. The pieces were sent to a museum in Jos, which was then housed inside the headquarters of the Department of Mines.
Then, in 1943, came the story that gives this page its title. More figures came out of tin workings near Nok. One of them, a head, had already found a new job. Someone was using it as the head of a scarecrow, stuck up to keep birds off the crops. That head is now known as the Jemaa Head, and it is one of the most famous pieces of ancient African sculpture there is. The director of the mine bought it and took it to a British archaeologist in Jos named Bernard Fagg.
Fagg had a hunch. If miners were digging these up, how many more were they finding and throwing away? He asked them to keep an eye out and bring him what they found. In 1952 a national museum opened in Jos to hold the Nok pieces that had been gathered. In the 1960s, proper digs at a Nok site called Taruga gave the culture radiocarbon dates for the first time.
The figures are striking. They show people and animals in all sorts of poses. The human ones often have detailed hairstyles and modelled jewellery, and some show what look like illnesses or physical conditions. Similar terracottas linked to Nok have also come from the Katsina and Sokoto areas.
That beauty became the problem. A little theft and illegal export was reported in the 1960s. In the 1970s there was a surge, both of real pieces leaving the country and of fakes. So many fakes hit the market that buyers turned to a lab test called thermoluminescence dating to check whether a piece was really old.
One American testing firm, Bortolot Daybreak, later claimed that before 1993 most "Nok" pieces on sale were fake, and the real ones were mostly battered fragments. Then, it said, a group of European dealers organised systematic looting of the Nok area, and the market was suddenly flooded with genuine heads.
An archaeologist named Patrick Darling, asked by the World Heritage Committee to report in 1995, backed that up. He found large-scale looting had started in mid-1994. By 1995 two main local traders were each employing about 1,000 diggers. At its worst, around ten terracottas a day were coming out of the ground. Most were broken, but some were nearly whole, and those sold well. The routes ran through Togo and Benin, then on to Brussels, Paris and other European cities. By the early 2000s, Nok pieces of doubtful origin were on sale in New York galleries and online.
Nigeria had already made this illegal. A 1979 decree set up the National Commission for Museums and Monuments and banned anyone without permission from buying, selling or exporting antiquities. In 2000 the International Council of Museums put Nok terracottas on its Red List of objects at risk of looting and asked museums and dealers to stop buying them. It also noted something painful: Nigerian museums did not own a single complete Nok figure, while complete ones were easy to find on the market.
The same year, France's President Jacques Chirac, who was building a new museum of non-Western art in Paris, put two Nok terracottas on show at the Louvre. They had been bought in 1998 from a Brussels dealer for 2.5 million francs. Nigeria's culture minister approved the purchase after the fact, in February 2000, after Chirac spoke to the Nigerian president himself. The Nigerian embassy in Paris said the approval was invalid. In 2002 the two sides settled: Nigeria would "lend" the pieces to France for 25 years, a period later reportedly extended to 37. The Nigerian lawyer Folarin Shyllon called the deal a "smuggler's charter".
There were small wins. In 2010 US officials at JFK airport seized ten Nok terracottas declared as handicrafts, and they went back to Nigeria in July 2012. But the cost cannot be undone. Most Nok figures were ripped out of the ground with no record of where they lay. That is why, nearly a century after the miners at Nok first saw them, nobody can say what these figures were for.
