Frobenius, Willett and Ife

Abstract

In view of the numerous articles by Frank Willett about the Ife problem published in Man, Odh and elsewhere, his first book is by no means a surprise. It is also probably the best possible synthesis and generalization of his archaeological field work in Southern Nigeria, especially, of course, at Ife. The book is rich in detailed descriptions not only of his findings but also of those made by other scholars. It contains a bibliography of 228 titles, out of which 158 are actually quoted in the text. Moreover, the skill of an art historian and Professor Willett's fine sense for detail, both technical and aesthetic, make it certainly one of the few good books on African art ever written. The title is misleading in a way, for the book deals not only with the art of Ife but with almost all the artistic manifestations of Nigeria, old and new; for instance, it contains probably the best description and discussion of the art of Nok to have been published so far. (A rather strange thing about the Nok findings is that from I943, the year of their first important discovery, there have only been three or four short studies by Bernard and William Fagg, and out of several hundred Nok terracotta sculptures stored in the Jos Museum, the same photographs of a mere handful of them have been published with painful regularity.) According to Willett, 'so many features of the Nok culture, particularly of its art, are found in later cultures elsewhere in West Africa, that it is difficult not to believe that the Nok culture as we know it represents the ancestral stock from which much of the sculptural tradition of West Africa derives' (p. II7). 'There are many details in both Nok and Ife arts which are unlikely to be similar by chance' (p. I20). The problem of the Ife-Benin relationship is also successfully dealt with in various places in the book, so also the Lower Niger art complex, old Yoruba art outside Ife and even recent Yoruba sculpture, because they are, as Willett's book clearly shows, more or less artistically connected with Ife and the Nok culture.