Excerpt From "The Bronzes of Igbo Ukwo"

The Bronzes of Igbo Ukwo

One day in 1939, just before the outbreak of the second world war, Isaiah Anozie was digging a cistern beside his house in Igbo-Ukwu, a small Ibo town twenty five miles south east of Onitsha, when, no more than eighteen inches below the surface, his hoe hit something hard and metallic. He dug around the object and pulled out an elaborately decorated bronze bowl, green with age except for the bright yellow indentation where the hoe had struck it. Leaning it against the wall of his house, he continued digging, and to his astonishment soon unearthed a variety of other strange bronze objects which his neighbours came in droves to look at. In the belief that ‘they would make good medicine’ Anozie gave a number of pieces away to his friends.

Twenty years later Bernard Fagg, the head of the Nigerian Department of Antiquities, invited a young archaeologist, Thurston Shaw, to Nigeria to excavate Isaiah's compound, and those of his family neighbours, Richard and Jonah Anozie. The three locations, known as Igbo-Isaiah, Igbo-Richard and Igbo-Jonah were to become one of the most famous archaeological sites in the whole of Africa. Isaiah Anozie had hit upon what can only have been an ancient royal burial of major importance.

Thurston Shaw's subsequent excavations revealed a magnificent assemblage of pottery, textile fragments, items of ivory and wood, about twenty five receptacles in cast bronze, scabbards, knives, and dozens of other small copper and bronze items for personal wear or practical use. The larger pieces included human figures; two beautifully decorated bronze shells about a foot long; a 'ritual calabash' and lid with low-relief geometric patterns; a pot with a strange bronze 'net' floating freely around it; a pectoral plate; strings of beads; a bead-studded head-dress surmounted by a copper crown; a pair of bead wristlets; what is described as a 'bronze alter stand' shaped like a large cotton reel nearly a foot high, elaborately decorated with low relief designs; and bronze bells.

    Some of these displayed very sophisticated technical expertise described by Thurston Shaw thus:

  "There are two castings ... made up from more than one piece that use an adaptation of the   casting technique to join the pieces together. Fresh molten metal was poured, or 'burnt in' between two pieces already cast, a technique not in use north of the Sahara." ....

Over and above this marvelous horde, Thurston Shaw and his gang unearthed an enormous quantity of glass beads (of which more later), and some of carnelian which he thought could have come from as far away as India. Such exotic material in this obviously important site made him think that it might have had a connection not just with the Nri, described in the Igbo origin myth in the previous chapter, but with the burial of an eze Nri, one of the most powerful members of the sect.

The origin of these treasures mystified the archaeological fraternity. At the time it was thought that the nearest available sources of copper were either in the mountains of Air, 1000 miles north of Igbo-Ukwu; or in the Congo, even further away to the south. At that time no copper deposits were known anywhere in Nigeria. However it soon transpired that colonial geological surveys had only been interested in metal deposits of ‘industrial’ proportions.

They had disregarded those of ‘no apparent commercial value’, and it was only later that small deposits of copper were found near the village of Abakaliki, seventy five miles east of Igbo-Ukwu, from where it was subsequently confirmed by isotope analysis that 90% of the copper used in the Igbo bronzes was mined.

The three Igbo sites were reliably radiocarbon dated to ± 900 A.D., some 300-400 years earlier than the more famous 'bronzes' of Ife, and 650 years earlier than the even better known sculptures and plaques that adorned the palace of the Oba of Benin. They also differed from their more famous counterparts in other ways. The metal works of Igbo are true bronzes; whereas the better known works of Ife and Benin are mostly brass, containing a fair proportion of zinc. It seems that a special effort had been made to blend the Igbo copper with at least 5% of tin, mined separately in a location far removed from the copper, showing surprisingly sophisticated metallurgical technology and knowledge.

Not only was the source of copper initially a mystery, but also the very high level of technical proficiency of the artisans who made them. In 1997, in a joint paper by seven scholars - Paul Craddock, a metals expert at the British Museum, Thurston Shaw, a Canadian and three Nigerian professors - the superb workmanship was described thus:

"To give but one example, the bronzes include several hemispherical bowls of about 30-40 cm diameter but with the metal no more than l or 2 mm thick. The usual method of making such an item would be to hammer out sheet bronze to the appropriate shape and thickness and then to attach the separately made handles by soldering or riveting. Here, however, the bowls and handles are just one casting, a tour de force of casting skill, but which no craftsman elsewhere would have attempted."

The question inevitably arose: could they have been made over a thousand years ago by the Igbo people themselves? A commonly held orthodox view of the Igbo, based on oral histories, language and other evidence, is one of an ‘acephalous society’ that has remained in its present location unchanged for many centuries. Since their first contact with Europeans, though their skill as iron-smiths has long been recognised, the Igbo were looked by upon by outsiders as being singularly 'un-innovative', and there was general incredulity that earlier generations of their people could have made such amazing treasures as those of Igbo Ukwu. In fact the authors of the paper quoted above wrote:

"There was a very real, if unarticulated feeling, that the native population must have had outside help to produce work of the quality abundantly displayed in the bronzes".

They then went on to draw up a list of possible origins for the work, considering the following options:¬

a) The bronzes discovered at Igbo-Ukwu were imports, conceived and made somewhere outside Africa.

b ) The bronzes were of local design but made by foreign craftsmen using their own supplies of metal.

c ) They were of local design and manufacture, but used imported metal,
and probably some outside inspiration, at least for the technique of lost-wax casting.

d) The bronzes were completely indigenous in design, manufacture, and materials with minimal or no influence from beyond West Africa."

Finally, having delved deeply into every aspect of the Igbo bronzes and satisfactorily established the nearby sources of the copper, lead and tin through radio-isotope analysis, the authors concluded a summary of their findings with the following mind-blowing non-sequitur:-

“These results support arguments previously advanced that the metal used to make the bronzes was local, thereby confirming their indigenous design and technology".(My italics)

A curious thing about this extraordinary conclusion is that, in part, it seems to have been justified by the fact that the craftsmen were too clever by half!

What the authors of the paper were saying in effect is that no sensible bronze smith, however expert, would consider casting bowls only one or two millimetres thick, in one piece with their handles. Even an experienced caster would have considered it a folly almost bound to fail. Therefore they must have been made by a local novice who had no idea what he was doing … yet was a natural genius! Charming though it might be, this view is completely untenable.

It is no insult to the Igbo of 1000 years ago – if, indeed, it was Igbo people who made these things - to suggest that:

• to create designs of such sophistication as the bell shown here, with low-relief repoussé guilloche decoration;

… that all this cannot possibly have been the result of a sudden burst of ‘independent invention’ deep in the Niger forests. To say that it must have required some outside help is not an insult. It is common sense.