Lost history · 1300s–1400s, found 1938
No matching image yet, so this page uses a plain title card instead of a photo.
In January 1938 builders in Ife dug into a compound and hit metal. What came out was a set of royal faces so lifelike that Europe refused to believe Africans had made them.
In January 1938 a group of workmen in Ife were doing the most ordinary job there is. Somebody in Wunmonije Compound was putting up a house, and the men were clearing away the topsoil for the foundations. Then a spade struck metal.
It was not a pot or an old hoe. It was a human head, cast in metal, about three-quarters the size of a real one. And it was not alone. As the digging went on, the compound gave up head after head. In the end the Wunmonije find, with pieces from the neighbouring ground, came to around seventeen heads in brass and copper and the broken upper half of a figure of a king. Nobody had planned an excavation. Nobody had come looking. The art of a medieval kingdom had simply been lying under someone's yard.
Today those heads are dated to roughly 1300 to 1450. That puts them in the years when Ife was at its strongest. The city had been growing since around 800 AD, and between about 1100 and 1400 it was a rich trading centre, linked to the commerce that moved along the Niger. It was also, as it still is, the sacred heart of the Yoruba world, the place where Yoruba tradition says the gods made people, ruled by an Ooni regarded as a descendant of those first gods.
The heads look like that world's rulers. Take the most famous one, now in London. Its face is calm and full, covered in fine vertical lines, with the lips left smooth. On top sits a tall crown made of layers of tube beads and tassels, finished with a crest, a rosette and a plume that has bent slightly to one side over the centuries. If you look closely you can still find traces of red and black paint on that crown. It weighs just over five kilograms and stands 35 centimetres high. Experts think the whole group came from one artist or one workshop, because they are so alike in style.
Photographs of the Wunmonije finds were published in 1938 and 1939, and they caused a stir in Europe and America. The reaction tells you more about the people looking than about the heads.
The faces were so realistic, so finely made, that many Western observers simply would not accept that African artists had made them. They compared them to the sculpture of ancient Greece and Rome, as if that were the only possible explanation for such skill. This was not new. Years earlier the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius had come across a similar head in Ife, and he had gone further than anyone. He suggested a colony of ancient Greeks must have settled there long ago and cast it. He even told the press that Ife might be the lost city of Atlantis that Plato wrote about. The newspapers loved it. In 1911 the New York Times ran the headline "German Discovers Atlantis in Africa".
None of it held up. The copper in the heads is now thought to come from Nigerian ores, though earlier scholars guessed it came from Central Europe, Mauritania, Byzantium or Morocco. The style grows out of an older tradition of terracotta heads made in Ife itself, and sits in a wider West African line of sculpture that may go back to Nok. The realism that so confused people in 1938 was Ife's own.
Many scholars link the heads to the reign of a king called Obalufon Alayemore, whose famous life-size copper face mask shares the same features. Among the Yoruba today, Obalufon is honoured as the patron god of brass casters. But exactly whom each head shows, and what they did in Ife's ceremonies, is still argued over. They clearly portray people of high rank and authority, most likely Ooni. Beyond that, the honest answer is that we do not fully know.
Most of what came out of Wunmonije stayed at home and is now in the National Museum in Ife. But not all of it.
Before anyone in authority moved to stop it, a few heads left the country. One went to America, then another. The best-known of all, the crowned head described above, was taken out of Nigeria by Henry Maclear Bate, the editor of the Daily Times of Nigeria. It travelled to London by way of Paris. Bate probably sold it to the National Art Collections Fund, a British charity that helps museums buy art, and in 1939 the fund passed it to the British Museum. It is still there, catalogued as Af1939,34.1.
That leak is part of why the find matters beyond art. The Wunmonije discovery pushed the colonial government to do something about the export of antiquities from Nigeria, and legislation to control it was brought in, prompted partly by worry stirred up by Frobenius. In other words, a builder's accident in one Ife compound helped start the long, still unfinished argument over who owns Nigeria's past and where it should live.
The head itself has had quite a life since. It became the emblem of the 1973 All-Africa Games in Lagos. It turns up in the logos of Nigerian companies and schools, including Obafemi Awolowo University in Ife. In 2010 it was the star of a big Kingdom of Ife exhibition put together with Nigeria's museums commission for the 50th anniversary of independence, and the BBC later chose it as one of its 100 objects that tell the history of the world.
So here is a face that was buried under a house for five hundred years, mistaken for Greek, linked to Atlantis, smuggled out through Paris, and finally turned into a national symbol. And the people who made it are still, frustratingly, nameless.
