Debating Ideas reflects the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarly, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It offers debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books. It is edited and managed by the International African Institute, hosted at SOAS University of London, the owners of the book series of the same name.
In recent years, calls for the repatriation of cultural heritage from Western nations back to Africa have reintensified, stimulating increased efforts to investigate histories of collections exploitatively acquired during the era of European colonial rule. Understandably, it has typically been the most explosive episodes of looting - those that accompanied late 19th century colonial invasions - that have tended to attract the most attention. Infamous examples include the arts seized by the British from Benin City, Maqdala, and Kumasi during military expeditions in the 19th century. Important efforts have been made to trace these looted objects across museum and private collections across the world, investigate their histories, and to generate, and contribute to, restitution discussions. Meanwhile, histories of smaller-scale, more insidious events of expropriation in the later (early and mid 20th century) colonial period have generally not received as much attention, despite their potential to shed light on the continued influence of colonial legacies upon current issues of cultural heritage patrimony. Here I summarise on the basis of my recently published article, new findings made pertaining to the complex colonial history of the Ifẹ̀ Bronzes, a magnificent collection of copper alloy objects, several of which were secretly taken and exported from their place of origin in Nigeria in the 1930s, two of these eventually being returned in an unusual case of colonial-era repatriation.
In 1938, in the Yorùbá city of in southwest Nigeria, a spectacular find was made by construction workers while digging new house foundations at near the ààfin, the palace of the Ọ̀ọ̀ni (sacred king) of Ifẹ̀. Several highly naturalistic copper alloy portrait heads were recovered, each one depicting a different individual. Adesọji Aderẹmi, the Ọ̀ọ̀ni of Ifẹ̀ and a known patron and custodian of the city's arts, was careful to ensure that these objects were moved to the ààfin for safekeeping. This was critical at a time when the cultural heritage of the city was vulnerable to theft, before any kind of laws for the protection of antiquities had been implemented by the British colonial state.
The newly unearthed heads rapidly gained widespread international attention. , director of the National Gallery, London considered them 'one of the most important antiquarian finds of the present century'. Leading curators lauded them as work comparable to the best Greek sculptures, and in Nigeria the heads became important symbols of Yorùbá history, identity, and ingenuity. Believed to date to between the 13th and 15th centuries AD, these objects speak to the rich history of Ifẹ̀, and scholars have interpreted them as representations of past kings and/or other officials, perhaps used as focal points of important ancestral shrines. At least 17 of these heads exist, and today most remain in Nigerian museum collections.
However, despite the significant scholarly attention that these heads have received, the history of the controversial events that followed their excavation has remained little studied. Most notably, it was in 1938 and 1939 that at least three examples were secretly exported abroad to Western countries. One of these heads - - is now located at the Sainsbury Africa Galleries of the British Museum. Another two were taken by American anthropologist during his doctoral fieldwork at Ifẹ̀ in 1938, exported to the US, and eventually repatriated in 1950. Several unanswered questions remained as to the circumstances of the acquisition and export of these heads by Bascom and others, and whether other such acts of expropriation had occurred in this period. These concerns led me to visit the archives of several leading figures involved in the story of these heads following their recovery in 1938. Most notable were Bascom's archive at the University of California, Berkeley, and the archive of Edward Harland Duckworth, the British Inspector of Education in Nigeria - who took an interest in the preservation and protection of Nigerian cultural heritage - now located at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
These archives revealed the history of a series of several exploitative interventions made by foreigners who endeavoured to take ownership of these artefacts. One of these figures was a British journalist based in Lagos named Henry Maclear Bate. Not long before the beginning of World War II, Bate was reportedly beset by creditors as well as the Nigerian Criminal Investigation Department due to his purported fascist sympathies, and connections with the German community in Lagos. In 1939, Bate secretly purchased one of these heads from a local man in Ifẹ̀ who had managed to keep several concealed from the Ọ̀ọ̀ni. Bate bought this for a meagre £5 and fled the country, travelling across the Sahara and eventually arriving in London where he sold it for £100; it was subsequently gifted to the British Museum. Prior to this in 1938, Bascom purchased two heads - for the similarly low price of £7 and 10 shillings each - apparently from the same individual who would later sell to Bate. Bascom covertly exported these despite his awareness of the Ọ̀ọ̀ni's efforts to collect and preserve them. The prices paid by Bascom and Bate to obtain these outstanding examples of Yorùbá patrimony would be equivalent to a few hundred pounds in today's money, which pales in comparison to the millions that they are now valued at.
Bascom's letters reveal that he knew his actions to be controversial, but he was ambitious to permanently house the heads at a US museum, where he claimed they would be better protected and available to a wider audience. Under pressure from the Ọ̀ọ̀ni as well as certain officials such as Duckworth, Bascom eventually repatriated the two heads, with a ceremony held in Ilé-Ifẹ̀ in 1950 honouring the occasion. The return of these objects to the Ọ̀ọ̀ni - who was involved in the development of a new museum by the palace - without compensation to Bascom, was an unusual case in the late colonial era. Repatriation in this period usually involved compensation of foreigners in possession of expropriated objects, and the housing of these in newly created Nigerian museums far from their locations of origin, and divorced from their local contexts. No such repatriation of the only other known head in a museum abroad has occurred - the one sold by Bate that remains at the British Museum to this day. Rumours also abounded in 1938 of more of these heads having been exported behind the backs of the authorities - purportedly by the German export company G. L. Gaiser, based in Hamburg. These, however, were never seen by the British officials who documented these rumours, and if they ever existed, no trace has yet been found of them.
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Each of these examples is testament to the history of insidious expropriation of Ilé-Ifẹ̀'s globally significant cultural heritage that has occurred throughout the last century, and the importance of future scholarship that seeks to expose these histories, and help generate and contribute to ongoing restitution conversations. The case of Ifẹ̀, and other examples like it, reveal the more quiet, covert ways in which the African continent was callously stripped of so much of its cultural heritage, beyond that which was looted during earlier colonial invasions.
Tomos Llywelyn Evans is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at the College of William & Mary, Virginia, and a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. He studies the archaeology and arts of urbanism and monumentality in West Africa, as well as colonial histories of collecting, looting, and museology in Nigeria and the UK.
