Ife head

A History of the World in 100 Objects

BBC

History

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2010

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

The history of humanity as told through one hundred objects from the British Museum is back in Africa. This week Neil MacGregor is exploring high status objects from across the world around 700 years ago. Today he has chosen a sculpture widely considered as one of the highest achievements of world art. It comes from Ife, a city now in South-Western Nigeria. It's a slightly less than life sized representation of a human head, made in brass at a time when metal casting had become a hugely sophisticated art. The head, with its deeply naturalistic features, was probably that of a great king or leader although its exact function remains uncertain. The head leads Neil to consider the political, economic and spiritual life of the Yoruba city state that produced it. The writer Ben Okri responds to the mood of the sculpture while the art historian Babatunde Lawal considers what role it might have played in traditional tribal life. Producer: Anthony Denselow

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects
0:07.8	from BBC Radio 4.
0:11.8	So far in this history of the world through things, we've encountered all kinds of objects,
0:19.0	all eloquent, but not all particularly valuable or attractive. But today's object is in any view a great cast in brass. It's quite clearly the portrait of a person, but we don't know who. It's without question by a very great artist, but we don't
0:46.9	know who. And it must have been made for a ceremony, but we don't know what. What is certain is that the head is African, its royal, and it
0:57.9	epitomises the great medieval civilizations of West Africa of about 700 years ago. It was one of a group of heads discovered in
1:06.1	1938 in the grounds of a palace in Ifei Nigeria and they astonished the world
1:11.8	with their beauty.
1:13.0	They were immediately recognised as supreme documents of a culture that had left no written record
1:19.0	and they embodied the history of an African kingdom that was one of the most advanced and urbanised of its day.
1:25.2	The sculptures of Ifei exploded European notions of the history of art and they forced
1:30.7	Europeans to rethink Africa's place in the cultural history of the world.
1:35.0	Today, they play a key part in how Africans read their own narrative.
1:41.0	We still don't know much about the African past. What we know right now is a
1:47.2	fraction of what is yet to be discovered. Personally, I look at it and I'm struck by its tranquility, its upward gaze.
1:59.0	It's not just a tranquility of power, it's a tranquility of being in an inner sanctum almost.
2:07.0	A history of the world in a hundred objects. Ifei Head, a bronze statue from Nigeria, probably 15th century.
2:40.0	I'm in the Africa Gallery looking at the IFA head, or rather he is looking at me.
2:47.0	His head is a little smaller than life size and made of brass which is now darkened with age.
2:53.2	The shape of the face is an elegant oval,
2:56.0	covered with finely incised vertical lines,
2:59.3	but it's a facial scarring so perfectly symmetrical that it contains rather than disturbs the features.
	...

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