Asante
Weights at the Hunterian museum they have a collection of Asante
Weights numbering approximately 300.
Captain
James Cook was one of the most famous sailors of his time. He was an
experienced officer who, despite his ordinary roots had risen through the
ranks to become an officer. In the latter half of the 18th Century his exploration
of the South Pacific resulted in the discovery of a great many places,
societies, plants and animals. Because his mission was primarily scientific
he brought back a lot of specimens for study. The history
of how some of those items came to be held by the Hunterian Museum is
somewhat convoluted.
Professor Frank Willet First Director of the Hunterian
died. The leading Africanist of his generation, Frank Willett
greatly advanced
the study of the art of Africa and in particular of West African metal
sculpture traditions. He was an inspiring teacher and writer and an
experienced museum professional who re-energised the Hunterian Museum and
Art Gallery at Glasgow University, where he was the first Director

Frank Willett: 1925-2006.
found at thefreelibrary.com
It was with great sadness that we learned of the death of Professor
Frank Willett on June 15, 2006, a couple of months before his
eighty-first birthday. He had, after all, been a presence on the African
art scene longer than most of us.
There were essentially three parts to Frank. First, he was a gifted
field archaeologist and ethnographer, skills necessary to understanding
the art and antiquities of Ife, in due course proving himself to be an
able teacher and writer and pioneering the application of scientific
techniques to his material. Second, he was a family man, devoted to his
wife, Connie, and their four children; their needs were given firm
precedence over his professional career throughout their lives together.
Third, he was a devout Catholic, attending Mass daily whenever possible
throughout the greater part of his life. Of course, the assessment of
the first of these elements is what is required for African Arts, but it
must never be forgotten that for Frank the other two were part and
parcel of a life truly well lived, and they were the context of his
archaeological research, teaching and publication.
Frank was born on August 18, 1925 at Bolton, Lancashire, UK, and he
received his high school education at Bolton Municipal Secondary School,
where he eventually became "head boy." It was during this
period that he met Connie Hewitt, whom he married in 1950 once he had
found paid employment, and who introduced him to Catholic Christianity
(although he was not formally instructed or received into the church
until his time at Oxford; at that time, one had to have the permission
of one's father to join the church until reaching the age of
twenty-one, and in Frank's case this was not forthcoming).
At the age of eighteen, in 1943, despite having been accepted by
University College, Oxford, to read English Language and Literature, he
was called up for military service in the Royal Air Force. Frank was
sent to the School of Oriental and African Studies of London University
to study Japanese, in order to intercept and translate enemy
communications but, although he was due to be posted to Indonesia for
this purpose, he contracted pneumonia and remained in the UK. In this
context, it is worth noting that throughout his life, Frank enjoyed a
gift for language learning, readily acquiring a command of several
languages, European and, in due course, African. On medical discharge
from military service, Frank went up to Oxford, also participating in
excavations through the university archaeological society. He decided to
make a career in the Anglo-Saxon field. After graduation, he stayed on
at Oxford to take the Diploma in Anthropology, and it was during this
time that his professor, Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard, introduced him to
William Fagg, who was, by this time, responsible for the African
collections of the British Museum. They became firm friends. Frank also
took the opportunity to work at the Musee de l'Homme in Paris as
part of his anthropological studies.
He finally left Oxford at Christmas 1949, taking up employment at
Portsmouth City Museum on New Year's Day 1950 (not to become a
public holiday in the UK for another twenty years), taking up
appointment as Keeper of the Department of Ethnology and General
Archaeology at the Manchester University Museum in November the same
year. The collections for which he was now responsible were
wide-ranging, though his initial intention of making a research career
in Anglo-Saxon archaeology was frustrated by the fact that they did not
include a single Anglo-Saxon artifact. Nevertheless, he was quick to
establish a record of research and publication in regard to the Oceanic
collections. He even applied, unsuccessfully, for a post in New Zealand
in the hope of gaining first-hand experience of his new interest. The
Pacific's loss would prove to be Africa's gain!
Frank's first encounter with the sculpture and antiquities of
Ife were the exhibitions of art from what were then the British
colonies, organized by his friend William Fagg in 1949 and 1951; these
included Ife works then on loan to the British Museum from Nigeria for
cleaning and conservation. They did not yet grab Frank as the basis of
his life's work, but early in 1956 he did apply (this time
successfully) for a six-month post in Nigeria to help prepare the Lagos
museum for its opening the following year. Before going to Nigeria,
however, William introduced Frank to his younger brother Bernard, who
was Government Archaeologist in Nigeria, working with Kenneth Murray in
the Department of Antiquities. When Bernard found that Frank was a field
archaeologist, he arranged for him to work instead with the Yoruba
Historical Research Scheme under the direction of Dr. Saburi Biobaku, to
begin the excavation of Old Oyo. Given that this was a
long-since-deserted site in the wilderness, the museum at Ife provided
Frank with the facilities he needed for the study and writing up of the
season's work. At the end of the six months Bernard tried
persuading Frank to accept employment in Nigeria, but with two young
children, Margaret Mary and Stephen, and satisfying employment in
Manchester, he declined.
In 1957, Bernard Fagg succeeded Murray as Director of Antiquities
in Nigeria and happened to be in Ife in November that year at the time
of the accidental discovery of brass and ceramic sculptures at Ita
Yemoo, on what was then the northeastern outskirts of the city of Ife.
He telephoned Frank and invited him back to Nigeria more or less
immediately for a second season to excavate this particular site, and at
the end of it Bernard finally persuaded him to accept an appointment as
archaeologist with the Department of Antiquities. In 1958, Frank
resigned his Manchester appointment and moved to Ife with his wife and
their three children, the youngest, Pauline, newly born. He was to
continue the archaeological and ethnographic investigation of Ife
building on the previous work of Murray, Bernard Fagg, and John Goodwin,
an archaeologist from South Africa, and to take responsibility for the
Ife Museum of Antiquities. Within a few mouths of their arrival,
however, Pauline contracted polio (at that time immunization was not
available to anyone under two years of age). Connie and the children
returned to the UK and Pauline was hospitalized for year. Connie and the
eldest two children returned to visit Frank only to find themselves
caught in a most horrendous accident on the Ibadan-Ife road occasioned
by an oil slick placed on the tarmac by highway robbers. The details are
too complicated to set out here but the children were safe, though
Connie's neck would certainly have been broken but for a sculpture
by Lamidi Fakeye on the back seat of their motorcar. Frank, however, was
run over by an oncoming vehicle and one of his legs smashed into the
road, so much so that when he looked at what had happened his first
thought was that he might as well pull the lower leg off and throw it
away! Luckily, the leg was repaired at Ibadan University Hospital.
By the time I arrived in Nigeria in June 1961, Frank, Connie, and
the three children were happily reunited in Ife, a never-failing source
of comfort, good humor and hospitality, introducing me to an ideal of
family life as it could be lived. Their fourth child, Jean, was born the
following year. In 1963, however, because of the developing educational
needs of their children, Frank decided not to return to Nigeria,
although his post remained open to him. For a year he was obliged to
take a high-school teaching post in French and English in his home town.
Fortunately, in 1964 he was offered a research fellowship at Nuffield
College, Oxford, where he began work on a number of papers on the art
and archaeology of Ife, as well as drafting the book that would be
published as Ife in the History of West African Sculpture. He revisited
Ife briefly with the help of a Leverhulme grant. Then, in 1966, at the
conclusion of his fellowship, he was appointed to a newly established
post in Art History and African Studies at Northwestern University in
Evanston, Illinois, where he remained until 1976. The work of continuing
the excavation of Ife was taken up by Ekpo Eyo, who had succeeded
Bernard Fagg as Director of Antiquities, and by Paul Ozanne and Peter
Garlake of the University of Ife. It is worth noting that, as far as I
am aware, since their time no serious excavation has taken place. Ife
has become the subject of the illegal trade in antiquities and the
university and museum collections the subject of armed robbery.
Ife in the History of West African Sculpture was published in 1967
and provided an account of all the then known Ife sculptures in cast
brass, pottery ("terracotta"), and stone and of all the
evidence available to place them in a social and art-historical context.
However, not a hint of the evidence from C14 or thermoluminescence was
then available to provide any secure dating. Frank was entirely
dependent on the interpretive framework proposed by William Fagg in
which Ife ceramic sculpture was the distant child of Nok; once the
tradition was transferred into the medium of cast brass, Ife was the
ancestor of the art of Benin City. This placed the art of Ife within the
first half of the second millennium AD, and this has in fact been
confirmed by subsequent scientific evidence, even if the Nok-Ife-Benin
relationship is almost certainly an over-simplification. First, ceramic
sculpture is widespread throughout West Africa and we are still very far
from understanding the interrelationships of the various traditions.
Second, as Vansina effectively suggests in his 1984 Art History in
Africa, there may well have been several city-states in the region to
the west of the lower Niger, each with its art traditions, each
influencing the other. The dynastic myths of Benin City and of the
various kingdoms of contemporary Yorubaland cannot be taken as a
substitute for the archaeological evidence. As yet, however, we only
know of Ife and, through the work of Ekpo Eyo, Owo, together with a
diverse group of unprovenanced copper-alloy castings designated by
William Fagg as the "Lower Niger Bronze Industries." (This
group initially included the castings found at Igbo-Ukwu, but the
excavations by Professor Thurstan Shaw have demonstrated that these
works are the product of a bronze-casting tradition almost certainly of
indigenous innovation, in contrast to the brass castings of Ife, which
technologically probably derive from a trans-Saharan source.)
Collaboration with a wide range of scholars internationally became
the hallmark of Frank's continuing engagement with the art and
archaeology of Ire, pioneering the application of an array of scientific
and statistical methods, including lead isotope analysis, and he
continued to visit Ife as and when circumstances made it possible. In
2004 he published The Art of Ife: A Descriptive Catalogue and Database.
It was by necessity published as a CD-ROM, given that it included more
than 350,000 words and 2,200 illustrations, placing it well beyond the
possibilities of publication in book form. Here, Frank collates all the
evidence now available, including all the excavations carried out in Ife
since his time there, all the known works of art, including those
emerging from illicit activity, and all the relevant scientific data.
Frank has bequeathed to us an authoritative account of an extraordinary
civilization and its legacy of cast brass and ceramic sculpture
flourishing in the forested region to the west of the lower Niger at a
time prior to European coastal trade, a civilization nevertheless in
contact with an international network of trade, a civilization of such
power that (whatever the relationship between myth and real-time events)
the rest of its local world would wish to claim descent from it. For
this he received the Amaury Talbot Prize of the Royal Anthropological
Institute; yet, ever the pioneer, Frank recognized that it was merely a
provisional account. Indeed, in his final months he continued working on
another paper on lead isotopes in west Africa with an American
colleague, Edward Sage, checking the proofs at the very last stage of
his life in this world, and published since his passing.
At Northwestern University, Frank had to teach himself how to be a
historian of art. His graduate students became household names in our
fields of study: they included Kate Ezra, Sharon Patten, and the late
Jeff Donaldson. In addition to completing work on his 1967 Ife book,
Frank wrote African Art: An Introduction (1971, 2d ed. 1993, 3d rev. ed.
2002). This book was the first account of the subject to get away from
the geographical model of tribal sculpture, taking instead a thematic
approach. It was also the first publication of its kind to include,
together with ethnographic and archaeological material from all parts of
the continent, a discussion of everything from southern Africa rock art
and pre-dynastic Egypt to the modernist developments of the twentieth
century. Each edition has been reprinted many times, demonstrating its
continuing usefulness. Indeed, as the general introduction that it sets
out to be, it has not yet been surpassed.
In 1976 Frank returned to Britain as Professor and Director of the
Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow University, an appointment
from which he retired in 1990. William Hunter was an eighteenth-century
anatomist and scientist whose bequest of an eclectic collection of
medical and zoological specimens, historical and ethnographic artifacts,
and works of art had in 1804 provided Scotland with its oldest public
museum. With his customary energy and refusal to take "no" for
an answer, Frank immediately embarked upon the work of transforming the
museum displays. He also saw to the completion and opening of both the
Hunterian Art Gallery, with collections including a large number of the
works of J.M. Whistler and the majority of Charles Rennie
Mackintosh's watercolors, and the reconstruction of
Mackintosh's house.
Frank contributed to the teaching of Glasgow University's
department of archaeology while maintaining his own research interests,
putting together exhibitions on Nigerian art at the Hunterian Museum, as
well as his 1980 collaboration with Ekpo Eyo, Treasures of Ancient
Nigeria. It is, however, one of those sad ironies in a life devoted to
demonstrating the value and worth of the civilizations of Africa that
Frank eventually found himself opposed to the repatriation of cultural
property. There were two reasons. Firstly, if everything were to be
returned to its place of origin, museums would become entirely local in
their vision of the world, and this would be in no-one's interests.
Secondly, Nigeria had manifestly become an unsafe place for its
antiquities. There was ample evidence of widespread illegal excavation,
with the consequent destruction of scientific data, as well as the
widespread and continuing looting, often assisted by armed robbery, of
temples, palaces, and museums.
Frank was possibly the most highly decorated and honored scholar
within the fields of African art studies. He was appointed CBE
(Commander of the British Empire) in 1985. He was vice-chair of the
Scottish Museums Council 1986-89 and took the lead in a project to
record all the ethnographic collections in Scottish museums, a project
completed in 1994. In 1995, together with Robert Farris Thompson, Frank
was presented with the Leadership Award of the Arts Council of the
African Studies Association, the most representative and authoritative
world body of African art scholarship, at its Triennial Conference in
New York. In 1997 he was awarded the bicentenary medal of the Royal
Society of Edinburgh, of which he had been a Fellow since 1979 and Hon
Curator 1992-97.
Frank proved himself to be among the greatest figures within our
fields of study. His research and scholarship were thorough. He set
himself high standards and was no less exacting on others, always to
their benefit, and yet he wore his authority lightly. He was always
generous and encouraging, especially to younger scholars. Throughout his
time in Scotland, for example, Frank was an active member of the Museum
Ethnographers Group (MEG), an association of curators and others
interested in ethnographic collections in British museums. It was
typical of him that when MEG presented him with two prints from Oshogbo
as a token of their thanks for his encouragement he was moved to tears.
He really had little idea of the esteem in which people held him.
I first met Frank a few weeks after my arrival at the Lagos Museum
in June 1961. He was there at the beginning of my professional life and
proved to be a constant friend, tutor, guide, mentor, and critic, a firm
presence in my life such that at his departing it feels as if part of my
own self had been cut off. I am sure that there are many people of my
generation and younger who, having had the good fortune of meeting and
working with him, will feel as I do.
In writing this obituary notice I am grateful for Frank's own
account of how he found his way into African art, "A Chapter of
Accidents: Archaeological Discoveries in Ife," in Arts &
Cultures (Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva, 2006, pp. 144-55), and
especially to Connie Willett for information and insight. The more
personal aspects of this account are published with her permission. They
are, indeed, in her words, "part of what we gave to Nigeria."
JOHN PICTON is an emeritus professor of art and archaeology at the
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and a
consulting editor of African Arts. home@jpicton.demon.co.uk
COPYRIGHT 2007 The Regents of the University of California