This magnificent volume was produced to accompany a major exhibition of the arts of Nigeria's Benue River Valley which opened at the Fowler Museum of the University of California, Los Angeles in February 2011 and then travelled to the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institute and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, before arriving in November 2012 at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. Both exhibition and book serve to extend the long sequence of scholarly projects mounted by the Fowler Museum on the rich artistic heritage of Nigeria, beginning with Black Gods and Kings: Yoruba Art at UCLA in 1971 and last seen in Ways of the River: Arts and Environment of the Niger Delta in 2002. The genesis of Central Nigeria Unmasked itself extends back thirty years or more: it is to be found in the work of Arnold Rubin (1937–1988), a pioneering art historian of the Jukun peoples who first conducted fieldwork in the region in 1964–66 and who in the early 1980s approached the Fowler Museum with a proposal for an exhibition of sculpture from the Benue Valley. Following Rubin's untimely death, the project was taken up by his doctoral student Marla Berns, a specialist on the ceramic arts of the Upper Benue, who was joined by Richard Fardon and Sidney Kasfir, specialists on the cultures of the Middle and the Lower Benue, respectively. The published result is far more than the usual sumptuously produced exhibition catalogue: like the earlier Ways of the River, it represents an important collection of cutting-edge scholarship located at the intersection of African art history, history and anthropology.

The editorial team expertly marshal a sprawling eighteen chapters and nine “interleafed” case-studies written by a total of fifteen scholars – including Arnold Rubin and, sadly, two other recently deceased contributors, John Boston (whose own fieldwork began in the 1950s) and Barbara Frank. The magnitude of the work is one reflection of the historical and cultural complexity of the Benue region, which extends from the homelands of the Idoma, Igala and Ebira peoples around the Niger-Benue confluence east to those of the Tiv, Jukun, Chamba and Mumuye and on to the ethnically fragmented Gongola Valley and Ga'anda Mountains in the far north-east. From this 700 kilometre-long corridor traversing Nigeria's Middle Belt has emerged some of the most stunning plastic art in Africa. Styles and materials range widely, from the textile masquerades and objects cast in copper alloys of the Lower Benue to the ironwork of the Middle Benue and the ceramic spirit vessels typical of the Upper Benue – although the region's paradigmatic form of artistic production is figurative wooden sculpture, in two main categories: masks and shrine statues. At pains to avoid the reductive ethnic attributions that tended to characterize earlier phases of scholarship on African art, the editors have organized the volume in three parts corresponding to these broad geographic zones, and much emphasis is placed throughout on communication, innovation and exchange both within and between – and indeed, beyond – these sub-regions. As Fardon points out in his introduction to part two on the Middle Benue, however, accepting the redundancy of the notion of hermetic “tribal styles” is “not to deny that some style features clustered geographically in ways that corresponded (albeit not neatly or one-to-one) with ethnic distinctions. Moreover, the ethnonyms, or ‘tribal names’, people themselves adopted added an element of self-consciousness to identities that might come to be reflected in their own expectations of what ‘their’ artwork should look like” (p. 223).

This sensible lack of squeamishness about ethnicity certainly facilitates the task of locating often enigmatic artistic production in broader cultural contexts. In seeking to demonstrate that these processes were distinctly historical, the volume's most searching chapters make a valuable contribution to a more fully realized scholarship on material culture in Africa – one which is now taking the “history” part of art history seriously. The defining event in the modern history of the region was the nineteenth-century jihad waged against “pagan” peoples of the Middle Belt by the Hausa-Fulani rulers of the Sokoto Caliphate, which, combined with the concomitant movement of the Tiv and Chamba into the region from the south and west, dramatically reconfigured both the broad social landscape and particular streams of material culture. The impact of jihad was followed by that of colonial conquest on the part of the British in Nigeria and, in parts of the Upper Benue, the Germans in Kamerun. The period between colonial partition and the First World War represented the first concerted phase in the collection of artwork from the region, with officers in Kamerun and, in particular, the assiduous Leo Frobenius acquiring large amounts of sculpture destined for German museums. A second phase occurred in the 1970s following the Nigerian Civil War, which witnessed a further exodus of objects into the international art market via Cameroon-based dealers. The process of collection is shown to be an important part of the “life history” of objects: not only did it determine the formation of the scholarly canon, it extended the biographies of artefacts from the context of local ritual economies to that of international connoisseurship, market value and gallery display. Indeed, part of the challenge of thinking historically about these wonderful objects is to understand that the decline of indigenous religious belief and practice in the second half of the twentieth century has meant that many artefacts – figurative shrine sculptures more than masks – are now as out of context locally as they are in Western galleries and loft apartments. As Fardon notes with regard to Chamba wooden figures, contemplating such sculptures in the rarefied atmosphere of Western museums is a strikingly different experience to that of the dazed and awestruck encounter experienced by young men being initiated into the world of historic Chamba religion – a world now in rapid retreat.

This book is a landmark in the history of African visual and material culture.