African sculpture

Nok: the first known sculptors

In the 1940s the archaeologist Bernard Fagg identified a culture in central Nigeria from terracotta heads found by tin miners near the village of Nok. The Nok sculptors, active in the first millennium BCE and into the first centuries CE, made human figures with elaborate hairstyles, pierced eyes and calm, stylised faces — the oldest large body of figurative sculpture known south of the Sahara.

Nok terracottas have been heavily looted from unexcavated sites. They appear on the International Council of Museums' Red List of objects at risk, and Nigeria forbids their export without a permit.

Metal: Igbo-Ukwu, Ife and Benin

At Igbo-Ukwu, in south-eastern Nigeria, a man digging a cistern in 1938 found bronze objects; the archaeologist Thurstan Shaw excavated the site from 1959. The vessels and ornaments, dating to around the ninth and tenth centuries, are cast in astonishing detail by the lost-wax method.

Ife, the sacred city of the Yoruba, produced naturalistic heads in copper alloy and terracotta between about the twelfth and fifteenth centuries — calm, idealised portraits, many with fine vertical lines across the face, that stunned European scholars when a group was unearthed in 1938.

Benin, the Edo kingdom in southern Nigeria, created brass heads, plaques and figures for its royal court for centuries. Their history, their looting in 1897 and their return are told in our article on the Benin Bronzes.

Wood: the great carving traditions

Most African sculpture was carved in wood, and most of what survives is less than two centuries old, because wood decays. A few of the best-known forms:

• Kongo nkisi nkondi (DR Congo, Republic of the Congo, Angola): power figures into which nails and blades were driven to seal oaths, settle disputes or call on their force.
• Fang byeri (Gabon, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea): guardian figures set on bark boxes holding the bones of ancestors. The Kota of Gabon covered their reliquary figures in sheets of brass and copper.
• Baule figures (Côte d'Ivoire): finely finished figures of "spirit spouses" from the other world, and of nature spirits.
• Luba stools and staffs (DR Congo): royal seats supported by kneeling female figures, and lukasa memory boards used by court historians.
• Yoruba ibeji (Nigeria, Benin): small figures carved for twins who died, cared for by their mothers. Twins are unusually common among the Yoruba.

Most carvers were not recorded by name, because colonial collectors noted a "tribe" rather than an artist. Scholars now identify individual masters by style, and a few are well documented, such as the Yoruba carver Olowe of Ise (c. 1873–1938), whose palace doors and veranda posts are among the masterpieces of African sculpture.

Stone

Soapstone birds carved at Great Zimbabwe between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries are now the national emblem of Zimbabwe. At Esie in Nigeria, around a thousand soapstone figures of unknown origin were found. In the twentieth century, Zimbabwe developed a modern movement of stone sculpture.

Modern and contemporary sculpture

Ben Enwonwu's bronze Anyanwu (1954–55) became a symbol of Nigerian independence. Ousmane Sow built larger-than-life figures that drew three million visitors in Paris. The Moroccan-born Bruno Catalano cuts away the bodies of his bronze travellers, so that the street shows through them. El Anatsui moved from carved wood to vast metal hangings. Sokari Douglas Camp welds steel sculpture inspired by Kalabari masquerade, and in East Africa the Makonde carvers created a modern sculpture of their own.

Related

Many sculptures were made to be worn: see African masks. For clay vessels and figures, see African pottery. To see the great collections, use our guide to where to see African art, and for the long view, our short history of African art. For modern and contemporary sculptors, see our list of African sculptors.