Ile-ife, the capital of the Kingdom of Ife is an ancient city in southeastern Nigeria. At its height, between the 12th and 15th century, it covered over 30 sq km and had a population of over 130,000. The city’s wide streets were paved with potsherds; its houses and temples filled with elaborate art; and it served as the sacred centre of Yoruba religion. It became wealthy through extensive trade with the Mali empire and trade routes to the near east.

The city featured a unique craft, specialising in locally manufactured silk and cotton textiles, copper, brass and terracotta artwork and locally invented glass – the first invention of its kind on the continent and the third independent invention of glass in human history.

Ife’s wealth, ritual primacy, mystery and the inventiveness of its inhabitants earned it a mention among many medieval explorers and travellers beginning with Ibn Batutta in the 14th century. He described it thus: “south-west of the Mâlli (Mali) Kingdom lies a country called Yoûfi that is one of the “most considerable countries of the Soudan governed by a sovereign who is one of the greatest kings. No white man can enter … because the negros will kill him before he arrives”.

The description of Ife as one of the Soudan’s most considerable kingdoms indicated that Ife was an important polity in the 14th century; the date coinciding with its golden age. The inclusion that no “white” man would enter the city for he would be killed (‘white’ in this case is a translation of the word ‘bidan’ which categorised Arabs and at-times Maghrebians like Batutta himself) meant that Ife’s ritual primacy was intentionally shielded – with the threat of death – from the outside world despite the city’s direct connection to the same through trade. The famous 1375 Spanish Catalan map that shows the wealthy Mali emperor Mansa Musa holding a gold nugget also indicates Ife under the name “rey de Organa” (King of Organa), which was the title of the first dynasty Ife rulers ie; Ogane. This implies that the European cartographers knew not just of the kingdom’s location but also its royal dynasties. Another reference to the same Ogane title comes from the Portuguese in the 1480s, by sea-fairer João Afonso de Aveiro who describes an inland king that played a central role in Benin’s royal enthronements by providing a brass crown, staff and cross in acknowledgement of the new king’s legitimacy.

Ife in Yoruba tradition

Ile-ife “house of Ife” is identified in Yoruba traditions as the site of not only human origins but the creation of gods themselves. It is the house from which humanity, civilization, divine kingship spread to other places. According to Ife’s origin myth; “The sky god Obatala was sent to create the Earth by the high god, Oludumare. When he got tired along the way, the elderly Obatala stopped for a drink of palm wine and fell asleep. Odudua, his younger brother, was sent forth next, and seeing the sleeping Obatala he took his brother’s soil-filled leaf and other necessities given by Olodumare for this task. When Odududa arrived at the site of what would become Earth, he poured the soil into a mound on the water’s surface and placed a five-toed chicken on this same earthen pile. This fowl, using its feet, scattered the soil in the four directions to form the Earth. The spot where this took place became Ile-Ife”. “After the invasion of the Ife Kingdom by the Oranmiyan (a historic Yoruba king and military leader that features prominently in ancien t Yoruba history and warfare of the 13th century) this same story is recounted but replaces Odududa with Oranmiyan.” The wars, struggle for power and eventual peace between Oranmiyan and Obalufon II (who was the last of first dynasty kings and after retaking the throne from Oranmiyan became the first of the second dynasty kings) was at the centre of not just the city’s artistic masterpieces but its identity, planning and ritual primacy.

Obalufon, who is considered to be the patron of the arts, textiles, regalia and peace in Ife, is said to have negotiated a truce with his invaders which included strategic marriages and a new city plan with a large, high walled palace at its centre, positioning the previously feuding lineages around the palace perimeters as key chiefs. This palace and much of the city was destroyed when the city was attacked during the 19th century but it is architecturally similar to the Benin palace in spatial design and construction.

Ife’s “discovery”, its supposed links to Atlantis and the Greeks, and dismissal of the Olokun brass head’s authenticity.

In 1910, the German archaeologist and ethnologist Leo Frobenius while at sea learned of the sacred city of Ife where the Yoruba worshipped among others, the sea god Olokun, a powerful and wealthy fish-tailed deity whom Frobenius immediately drew an equivalent to the ancient Roman and Greek god Ne ptune/Poseidon. In November of the same year, Frobenius arrived in Ife and set about finding this revered god. He bribed several people for the image of this god that was usually hidden in the ground under the foot of a tree at Ebolokun and only dug out during festivals. When he finally got it, he was awed by the mastery of its design and beauty and described it thus: “Before us stood a head of marvellous beauty, wonderfully cast in antique bronze, true to life, encrusted with a patina of glorious dark green”. Later in the same account he described it as “measuring 35.5 cm and cast… à cire perdue… very finely chased, indeed like the finest Roman examples”.

At the time of his “find”, the European colonial empires were at their height and scientific racism was prevalent among all academic disciplines. There were two contradictory “schools of thought” about the history of Africa and Africans (outsid e north Africa) in which they either lacked civilization and arts or the “few” that was to be found was of European influence through a “mixed race” known as Hamites. Frobenius – who was a strong proponent of the Atlantean theory of the origin of civilization (where all civilisation was thought to have been spread to the world from a mythical but lost Greek city of Atlantis) believed that indigenous Africans at the time of his writing had lost the civilisation they possessed, which had been given to them by the ancient Atlantian Greeks. He had this to say about that era in which the Greeks supposedly contacted the Yoruba of Ife; “even the Poseidon of Atlantic Africa, the holy lord of Olokun’s grove, rose out of his isolation and showed himself to those who called him…’. He later added in reference to their supposed decline that “..they climbed down from the heights of humanity. A lovely ideal of humanity was forced down into the depths”.

Frobenius then attempted to smuggle out the so-called Olokun head (which was actually a head of an Ife royal), but since he was a German in a British colony and tensions between the two were rising back home, he was apparently prevented from doing so. Decades later in 1946, H. J. Braunholtz, Keeper of Ethnography at the British Museum suggested to the Ooni of Ife (Traditional Leader of Ife) that works from Ife, including the Olokun head, should come to England for study, conservation and temporary exhibition. In 1949 however, art historians William Fagg and Leon Underwood dismissed the Oukun head as a fake of a lost original. This fake was apparently made using sand casting and it wasn’t until close to a century later in 2013, in a study led by Paul T. Craddock, that it conclusively determined that the leaded brass head was in-fact the original cast and not a copy.

The Identity of Ife’ artwork and artists

The artists of Ife created some of the best west-Africa’s masterpieces of African art in a relatively short period of time during which Ife was at its height – between 1250-1350 AD. This is the period that falls under what Ife historians refer to as its ‘fluorescence era’ – a theory supported by both thermoluminescence tests of these metal works and the oral tradition’s king lists on the reign era of Obalufon II. This is the period in which dozens of naturalistic copper, copper-alloy, quartz stone and terracotta sculptures were made depicting the main figures of the two warring factions, among others.

Ife’s artwork was a local invention produced by autochthonous artists at its centre. It was commissioned by the city’s second dynasty rulers, mostly Obalufon, to represent the key players in the truce after Ife’s civil war. The heads were hung up on a “metal tree” in front of the palace, similar to that found in Benin, and were richly decorated. This was the case until the 19th century, when the city came under attack, that these were all buried and were unearthed a few decades later.

Ife’s artistic accomplishments

Art historian Suzanne Blier writes: “Ife’s sublimely beautiful sculptures draw their visual power and salience in part from tragedy…” and that “…repeatedly, Ife artists were willing to take sizeable technical, material and personal risks in the creation of their arts”.

The first of the major Ife’s accomplishments was the independent invention of glass and the manufacture of Ife’s typical blue glass-beads, at the Igbo-Olokun site. More than 12,000 blue glass beads were found with high lime and high alumina content. They were made by drawing a long tube of glass and cutting it into beads. This makes Ife the third centre of independent glass invention in world history behind western Asia and China and the first of its kind in Africa (including North-Afr ica).

The study also found no early glass beads predating the Ife glass beads indicating that this independent invention wasn’t an imitation.

It was previously thought that the Ife glass beads were part of the imports reworked locally and had been brought from the near-eastern regions through cities like Gao (in Mali). With this new study, historians have now reversed the interpretation of the flow of glass trade from earlier misconceptions that Ife imported the glass beads from West-Africa and to the recognition that Ife exported the glass beads to the wider West-African region including the region of Igbo-Ukwu (where a similar but older naturalistic art tradition also flourished), the west African cities of Essouk (the city in the Mali empire that exported the empire’s highly refined gold, a process that required glass), Gao (which was an important trading city and later capital of the Songhay empire) and Kumbi Saleh (which was the capital of the Ghana empire). This attests to Ife’s importance in the trade works of West-Africa and the need to maintain its secrecy. The Igbo Olokun site is less than 2km from the main palace at Ile-ife which was close enough to ensure this unique invention was protected from competing polities that may have sought to upend Ife’s prominence.

The second major accomplishment of Ife’s artists was working with pure (unalloyed) copper – an artistic feat only archived by few of the ancient societies with a scale similar only to the ‘Himalayan bronzes’. Works like the Obalufon mask, the Tada figures (of a priest, baby elephant and war commander and others) were fashioned in pure copper, a metal that has a high melting point and solidifies quickly rendering it unsuitable for casting. It was no surprise that even the ancient Greeks and Chinese never archived this feat. Only a few ancient Egyptian pure copper artworks have been found from the old kingdom. Ife artists would then export much of their work through southern Nigeria and the “western Soudan” region. These included the territories then occupied by the Mali empire. Trade between the two states of Mali and Ife reached its high point in the 13th and 14th centuries and when the traveller Ibn Batuta visited the Mali court twice.

The third major accomplishment of Ife artists was their life-size naturalistic copper, brass and terracotta sculptures that included a “throne group” consisting of a human-size terracotta statue of a seated royal figure with attendants. This statue is now in pieces. Another larger than human size terracotta artwork, also in pieces, is now housed at the British museum. There exists dozens of life-size copper and brass heads and masks, 3-4ft tall depictions of priests, royals and other figures cast in pure copper, and hundreds of life-size terracotta heads of horses, hippos and other animals richly adorned with royal regalia.

The fourth most notable achievements were Ife’s wide, straight streets completely paved with neatly laid potsherds – a tradition said to have been commissioned by Queen Lúwo Gbàgìdá in the 10th century. They covered the entire city and many are still visible today. The chronology of laying the potsherds known as ‘apaadi’ is currently the sequence by which occupational levels are determined by Ife historians. The tradition spread throughout West-Africa along the same routes that Ife’s glass and brass artworks travelled. The pavements, most likely started at Ife, have been found in ancient West-African cities; Benin, Jenne-Jenno, Daima, and in parts of southern Chad and Togo.

Ife art personifies historical figures of varying status including royals, servants, court officials, artisans, warriors, healers and hunters. Over 50% of the corpus whose gender could be identified were women attesting to the high status of women in Yoruba society. Especially notable in the truce was the queen of Ita Yemoo named Moremi who was married to both the leaders of the two warring factions; Obalufon and Oranmiyan at different times and played an important role in the truce between the warring lineages through her strategic marriage to Obalufon. The Ita-Yemoo site also contains the largest of the plain faced copper and brass heads versus the linear-marked faces found in most digs around Ife which when associated with Moremi as one of the “outsiders” that arrived with Oranmiyan meant that, for among other reasons, the plain faced sculptures depicted Ife’s new dynasty while those with markings belonged to the old dynasty.

Ife’s decline

The city, its kingdom and its art went into decline rapidly after the 15th century for various reasons. One reason could have been the decline of the Mali empire which ceded control of much of the western Soudan to the Songhay empire by the end of the 15th century following decades of war between several contenders for the region’s dominance including the Mossi and Tuaregs of Air. The other fact was the rise of the Kingdoms of Benin and later Oyo which overshadowed and challenged Ife’s position as the most powerful Yoruba Kingdom; Benin was entering its golden age after its King Oba Ewuare’s consolidation of power and its industrious textile, ivory and brass production, including its spice trade with the Europeans at the coast made it the dominant Yoruba state at the time. Other reasons may have been the power struggle among the kings that succeeded Oblufon; long after the death of Obalufon his immediate successor Àwórókọ̀lọ̀kín killed the court artists who specialised in making these sculptures after one of these artists deceived him by wearing Obalufon’s mask (to prolong his deceased predecessor’ reign). What was probably an act of mocking the then reigning king effectively ended Ife’s naturalism and glass making tradition. Its glass making tradition was transferred to the city of Osogbo in the 17th century and its art legacy (which had existed concurrently with Benin) was carried on by the Bini of Benin albeit less naturalistic but more ceremonial.

Ife presents itself as one of several ancient African civilizations whose art, inventiveness trade and ritual primacy developed with little foreign influence. Its religion, cultures and wealth were guarded jealously by its inhabitants to the point of death. Its influence in textile, brass and cultural exports stand in contrast to the common misconception where the Muslim empires of West-Africa like Mali were seen as the transmitters of high culture into the southerly regions. The mastery of Ife’s artists was one that compares favourably with the best of the ancient civilization’s artists in Egypt, Rome, Greece and China – a mastery that’s recognised by both contemporary art historians and one that was echoed under the racist denials of its African-ness by colonial era anthropologists and archae ologists.

Ife was however just one in a crowd of several ancient southern Niger ian art centres that include the much older Igbo Ukwu (from which Ife historians propose originated some of the autochthonous Igbo artists that were active at Ife). Benin (whose art, despite being traditionally attributed to Ife by the edo themselves, developed around the same period as ife’s) plus Oyo and Nupe both of whom had long interacted with Ife. Ife is also not the oldest art tradition in the region as the Nok neolithic culture (1500-1 BC) predates it by over a millennia. Southern and central Nigeria and west Africa in general was thus home to several ancient artistic centres which exchanged artistic techniques, motifs, stylistic designs and traditions over several millennia on a scale comparable to the most famous of the world’s ancient artistic centres.

Sources and further reading;

Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba Ife History, Power, and Identity, c. 1300

Suzanne Preston Blier

Art in Ancient Ife, Birthplace of the Yoruba

Suzanne Preston Blier

Historic Cities: Issues in Urban Conservation

Jeff Cody, Francesco Siravo

VOYAGES D’IBN BATOUTAH: TEXT ARABE, ACCOMPAG

Ibn Batuta, Charles Defrémery

European Traditions in the Study of Religion in Africa

Frieder Ludwig, Afeosemime Unuose Adogame, Ulrich Berner, Christoph Bochinger

The Discourse Strategies of Imperialist Writing: The German Colonial Idea and Africa, 1848-1945

Felicity Rash

Masterpieces of Nigerian Art

Ekpo Eyo

The Olokun head reconsidered

Paul T. Craddock,

Chemical analysis of glass beads from Igbo Olokun, Ile-Ife (SW Nigeria): New light on raw materials, production, and interregional interactions

Abidemi Babatunde Babalolaa, Laure Dussubieux, Susan Keech McIntosha, Thilo Rehrencd

Mobility and archeology along the eastern arc of Niger: pavements and impactors

Anne Haour

