The sacred Yoruba city in southwestern Nigeria, held in Yoruba religion to be the place where the world and humankind began, the spiritual home whose ruler is the Ooni, and the source of an extraordinary tradition of lifelike copper-alloy and terracotta heads made between roughly the twelfth and fifteenth centuries — works so refined that a European explorer in 1910 refused to believe Africans had made them.
In 1910 a German explorer saw a cast metal head from a grove in southwestern Nigeria. Its calm face and fine parallel lines looked, to his eyes, too perfect to be African. So he decided it was Greek, washed ashore from the lost city of Atlantis. He was wrong in a way that mattered. The head was made by Yoruba artists in the city of Ife, centuries before he arrived, in a place those artists already called the birthplace of the world. The mistake was not about skill. It was about who is allowed to be a genius.