The publication of Professor Robert L. Tignor's article ‘W. R. Bascom and the Ife bronzes' in Africa a few years ago (1990) aroused my interest, as a former student of this anthropologist, as to whether there was any further correspondence beyond what Tignor employed which would illuminate the controversy, as I felt dissatisfied with some of his interpretations. I was fortunate to have had access to Bascom's personal papers, now on file at the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology (formerly the Robert Lowie Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley), through the kind assistance of Bascom's widow, Berta Bascom, and of Frank A. Norick at the museum. The letters in the file present a somewhat different view of the role of Bascom in the matter than Tignor does. His article relies largely on US State Department archives (which do include some Bascom correspondence) and upon some published articles by Bascom, by E. H. Duckworth, then editor of Nigeria Magazine and also Nigerian Inspector of Education, and by others. The whole business of the two Ife heads which Bascom acquired throws light on the history of the gradually evolving Nigerian colonial government policy toward antiquities.
Opening ParagraphIn recent years a new type of association, the improvement union or ‘meeting’, has become common in Southern Nigeria. Associations of this kind may be formed on a lineage, clan, village, village-group, divisional, or tribal basis, and may carry out various economic, educational, political, social, and general improvement activities directly related to changing cultural conditions. The present report is concerned with the development of this kind of association in the Afikpo villagegroup of the Ibo-speaking people. Its growth in this section of Ibo country has been more recent than in the more central Ibo areas, where European contact has been of longer duration, a circumstance that has made it possible to study its initial development in detail.
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