Context (References)
For this mask, Mowete is referencing the 16th-century ivory Idia pendant masks, versions of which are in the collections of the British Museum in London and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Af1910-0513-1 [Accessed: 29/01/2021] and www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/318622 [Accessed: 29/01/2021].
Event Date 29/1/2021
Author: Benjamina Dadzie

Context (Field collection)
Commissioned by Professor Paul Basu (SOAS) as part of the Museum Affordances project, for the [Re:]Entanglements exhibitions at SOAS and MAA.

'Victor Chiejine Mowete is a sculptor who works in various metals, including steel and bronze. He trained as an artist at Delta State University and the University of Benin. Like many of the artists collaborating with the [Re:]Entanglements project, Mowete is conscious of the ambivalence surrounding the Northcote Thomas archives. He is interested how over time, photographs and collections that were assembled as part of a colonial project – with all its associations with appropriation, exploitation and violence – have become important resources for present-day populations. As he says, ‘Those things that were collected for exploitative reasons, in later years are also going to be important to us and can be used to our own advantage’.

For his contribution to the project, entitled Ọmwan nọr dia uyi ẹdo yi (meaning ‘Preserver of Edo culture and glory’), Mowete has cast a work in bronze that speaks to one of Benin’s most iconic treasures – the 16th-century ivory Idia pendant mask, versions of which are in the collections of the British Museum in London and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This famous mask was also used as the emblem of FESTAC in 1977, thus becoming an icon of Nigeria and African arts and culture more generally.

In place of the Iyoba – the Queen Mother, Idia – Mowete has used the head of Northcote Thomas wearing his distinctive pith helmet. The top of the original mask is decorated with heads representing the Portuguese, symbolizing Benin’s alliance with and control over Europeans. These have been replaced, in Mowete’s work, with the heads from various ukhure (rattle staffs) that Thomas collected in Benin City, as well two heads taken from a carved shrine figure (ikute) collected by Thomas from Okpe. Thus, the ambiguity remains: the piece is, on the one hand, a celebration of Thomas as the ‘preserver’ of Edo cultural heritage; on the other hand, however, there is the suggestion that this preservation entails the control of the ancestral objects and knowledges that Thomas assembled as a government anthropologist.'
Basu, P. (2019) Benin City: Colonial archives, creative collaborations. [Weblog]. [Re:]Entanglements, Museum Affordances. 23/07/2019. Available from: www.re-entanglements.net/benin-creative-collaborations/ [Accessed: 29/01/2021].
Event Date 29/1/2021
Author: Benjamina Dadzie

Description (Physical description)
Free-standing brass mask, entitled 'Ọmwan nọr dia uyi ẹdo yi' (meaning 'Preserver of Edo culture and glory'), depicting Northcote Whitridge Thomas wearing a pith helmet, topped by seven heads, some wearing a headdress. The pith helmet is decorated with round studs and indentations on the crown and the brim. The lower part of the mask, below Thomas' chin, has a semi-oval shaped form with holes running on the right side and lower left side between Thomas' chin and the form. This runs from underneath Thomas' left ear to underneath his right ear, and it's decorated with wheat-like motifs.
Event Date 29/1/2021
Author: Benjamina Dadzie

Context (Display)
Displayed in the exhibition '[Re:]Entanglements: Colonial Collections in Decolonial Times', 22 June 2021 - 20 April 2022.

'Regarding Northcote Thomas

How should we regard Northcote Thomas today? A representative of British colonialism whose science contributed to the perpetuation of racialised inequalities and injustices? Or a dedicated researcher with a genuine interest in human societies and cultural practices?

Many Nigerian and Sierra Leonean artists we have worked with in the [Re:]Entanglements project have created depictions of Thomas as a way of making sense of him.
Some identify Thomas with his research – the image of the anthropologist inseparable from the images made during his surveys. Others indigenise Thomas, dressing him as a traditional Benin chief.

Andrew Omote Edjobeguo’s mixed metal sculpture shows Thomas supported on ancestral ukhurhe staffs, which, in turn, rest upon a representation of one of Thomas’s anthropological reports.

By contrast, in his painting Ogu Mnwere Onwe (‘Struggle for Freedom’), Chukwunonso Uzoagba restages one of Thomas’s photographs of an Igbo wrestling contest as a fight between the colonised and the coloniser.'

Event Date 3/5/2022
Author: Flo Sutton