Each object also has its own story within the general context. This head was sold by a priest fromNigeria who asked his worshippers to bring him anything pagan from home. He would use it to travel to Lomé to raise money for the renovation of the church.

This is a head of an Oni, king from Ife. According to one theory, these heads were used in this way in ceremonies for the second burial of kings. For the ritual, the head wore the crown of the deceased king and was then kept in a shrine in the palace. A second, increasingly dominant theory assumes that these were idealised memorial heads. In other words, far more profane and outside of ritual embellishments than postulated in ethnological literature, to which many of our earlier texts referred.

For a long time, people puzzled over the origin of bronze casting. Legend has it that a king of the Ife brought the craft to Benin in his retinue in the 14th century. However, as the bronze foundry guild in Benin was founded around the year 1,000 and it can therefore be assumed that casting had been going on for longer than the existence of the guild, it is more plausible to assume that the Ife style was cast in Benin and then ordered bronzes were exported to Ile-Ife. It also seems equally implausible to make a comparison of periods according to better-finished objects. On the basis of modern forgeries

Cf. traditional literature rejected by P.Herrmann::
Frank WILLETT: Ife. Metropole afrikanischer Kunst, Bergisch Gladbach 1967, S. 36.
Barbara PLANKENSTEINER (Hg.): Benin. Könige und Rituale. Höfische Kunst aus Nigeria, Wien 2007, S. 272.