Objects from a Colonial War: The Dyer Collection

The objects from southeast Nigeria reflect Dyer's probable movements between Calabar in the south and Obubra in the north, drawing from a range of cultures and subcultures collected over an eight-year span.8 Some objects in it existed widely in Nigeria's southeast, so that without documentation their origin is difficult to determine, while others were associated with only a single cultural group, but their location within is unknown; still others can be linked to both a culture and a place.9 Mirror glass, iron, brass and copper rods, and other metal came from Europe, but there was also indigenous mining and native metallurgy in southeast Nigeria. Dyer probably held popular ideas of the time on human social evolution, viewing his objects as representatives of an earlier stage of social life, wondering, as some colonial officers did whom I met in the southeast in the 1950s, whether Africans could ever "catch up" on the social evolutionary scale.