Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley

Th e fi rst thing that impresses one about Central Nigeria Unmasked is its sheer materiality. Weighing in at over fi ve-and-a-half pounds, the paperback volume measures more than an inch-and-a-half thick, nine inches wide, and stands twelve inches high on the bookshelf. Like a cult artifact, the volume serves in part as a monument to the work and inspirational teachings of a revered ancestor, Arnold Rubin (1937–1988), to whose memory the book is dedicated. Scholarship, like much else, is a social activity and this book acknowledges and pays homage to it own cultural hero. It was Rubin who initially came up with the idea for the exhibition at the Fowler Museum UCLA that accompanied the publication of this book and Rubin’s archive, accumulated during extensive fi eldwork throughout the Benue River Valley in the 1960s and early 1970s, is referenced in many of the essays by the book’s seventeen contributors. Central Nigeria Unmasked is a monumental work that sets itself the complex task of attempting to survey the art history of the entire Benue River Valley region from its lower reaches, beginning at its confl uence with the Niger River, to the Benue-Gongola valley in the extreme east of central Nigeria. Th is is an area of great historical complexity that has been impacted over the last few hundred years by trade and cultural exchange as well as by repeated episodes of warfare, slave raiding, colonization, migration and religious conversion. As a consequence of having to face new social circumstances, the peoples of the Benue River Valley were frequently faced with the need for cultural reinvention. It is perhaps no coincidence, therefore, that the region has been a proving ground for researchers, including contributors to this volume, who developed critiques of atavistic notions that equated monolithic sculptural styles with discrete, a-historically conceived ethnic categories (see, e.g., Kasfi r 1984). It is part of the editors’ purpose to continue this tradition by advancing more sophisticated models for the way Benue River artworks may relate to more fl uid, and historically understood, identities and geographies. Th is is a task made diffi cult by a dearth of historical records and by a legacy of voracious collecting for European and North American markets, which, along with regional forces of cultural change and dispossession, stripped the Benue River Valley of much of its material cultural heritage by the 1970s. Th e book is divided into three themed, geographical parts, introduced in turn by each of the three editors. Th e three editors are also the principal authors of the chapters in the book. Another fourteen authors contribute chapters on the arts of specifi c groups or on topics relevant to particular genres or creative practices. Nine “interleaves” are distributed between the full chapters and focus more narrowly on particular artists or groupings of objects. Th e three editors will be recognized by most readers of this journal as distinguished scholars with considerable fi eldwork experience in the Benue River Valley. Sidney Littlefi eld Kasfi r introduces the fi rst part of the book, which covers the Lower Benue Valley. Drawing heavily on her detailed art historical fi eldwork in the fi rst couple of chapters, she sets out many of the intricate problems that complicate the attempt to establish an art history for the region. Kasfi r characterizes the Lower Benue as a stage of intersecting histories and geographies. With the focus largely on pan-regional shrine sculpture and ancestral masquerades, art historical narratives in this fi rst part of the book are presented as paradigmatic cases illustrating the physical mobility, and changes of meaning, of ritual artefacts in the Lower Benue region. Other narratives are presented as suggested scenarios for complex networks of infl uence and cultural interaction between various groups. As in all sections of the volume, these narratives are partly based on connoisseurial distinctions between stylistic genres or canons and are accompanied by detailed connoisseurial descriptions of the objects in themselves in many instances. In his thought-provoking chapter on the Niger-Benue confl uence, detailing Ebira interactions with neighboring groups, John Picton arrives at the insightful view that each creative practice within a locality requires a diff erent explanation. He inserts a necessary note of refl exivity when he indicates that “engagements between technology, social structure, and ethnicity” produce complex outcomes for which diff erent explanations are possible and, moreover, that an explanation may simply represent a choice privileged by “the tradition of writing about African art” (p. 163).