expedition of 1897 against the Oba, in which troops entered the city of Great
Benin sacking and burning it to the ground (Coombes 1996). Likewise, Leo
Frobenius argued against local authorship of the Ife statues (Coquet 1998:
55). He argued that they were a product of the Hamitics, a white race of
shepherd people from whom the Egyptians, Ethiopians, Bejas, and Semites
also originated. Similar arguments had already been put forward earlier in the
century for other artistic expressions in the continent, such as South African
rock art, thought to have been created by a white hand (Mitchell 2001: 49).
The statues of both Benin and Ife were bought by the major European
museums, such as the British Museum and the Museum fu ̈rVo ̈lkekunde in
Berlin (Coombes 1994: ch. 1; Penny 2003: 86–7).
In sub-Saharan Africa local elites were not in a position to contest the
European account to the extent that occurred in southern Europe and even to
a certain degree in areas of the Ottoman Empire, Latin America, and South-
east Asia. The process of Westernization was just beginning in the years before
the First World War. Basic schooling only started around the turn of the
century and was limited to basic language and numeracy instruction and the
inculcation of Christian morality. Teaching assumed the locals to be inferior
and subordinate (Natsoulas & Natsoulas 1993; Okoth 1993). No higher
education was organized at this time. In places where the formation of elites
was in process, as in countries such as Nigeria, it has been argued that ‘in spite
of having been subjected to Europeans or because of it, they wished to be like
Europeans’ (Ade Ajayi 1960: 200). Africans educated in the Western fashion
wished to be members of a civilized people. A certain interest in the trad-
itional folklore and customs, especially clothes and dancing, came together
with a greater attention to their own history. Regarding the latter, in the case
of Nigeria, the focus was signiWcantly on their own Great Civilization, the
Yoruba, and not on the ‘uncivilized’ past of tribal groups with rudimentary
tools similar to those found in prehistoric Europe. This was shown by the very
Wrst archaeological collections gathered elsewhere in Africa by a few learned
individuals. Museums with archaeology would only be created much later, in
the mid twentieth century (Andah 1997; Kaplan 1994).
THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION
ABOUT THE UNCIVILIZED’S PASTThe scientiWc knowledge produced about the past of the uncivilized was
inextricably linked with the political and social context in which it was
generated. This does not mean that the body of information produced by
Archaeology of the Primitive 307