Benin Bronzes Quotes

The methods by which this Continent has been stolen have been contemptible and dishonest beyond expression. Lying treaties, rivers of rum, murder, assassination, mutilation, rape, and torture have marked the progress of Englishman, German, Frenchman, and Belgian on the dark continent. The only way in which the world has been able to endure the horrible tale is by deliberately stopping its ears and changing the subject of conversation while the deviltry went on. W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘The African Roots of War’, 1915 And what of the museums,

The fourteenth-century court artists of Ife made bronze sculptures using a complicated casting process lost to Europe since antiquity, and which was not rediscovered there until the Renaissance. Ife sculptures are equal to the works of Ghiberti or Donatello. From their precision and formal sumptuousness we can extrapolate the contours of a great monarchy, a network of sophisticated ateliers, and a cosmopolitan world of trade and knowledge. And it was not only Ife. All of West Africa was a cultural ferment. From the egalitarian government of the Igbo to the goldwork of the Ashanti courts, the brass sculpture of Benin, the military achievement of the Mandinka Empire and the musical virtuosi who praised those war heroes, this was a region of the world too deeply invested in art and life to simply be reduced to a caricature of “watching the conquerors arrive.” We know better now. We know it with a stack of corroborating scholarship and we know it implicitly, so that even making a list of the accomplishments feels faintly tedious, and is helpful mainly as a counter to Eurocentrism. There

The foremost items in the British Museum, the first national gallery to open, in 1759 during the Age of Enlightenment, include the Benin Bronzes, seized from Nigeria; the Rosetta stone, smuggled out of Egypt; and the Elgin Marbles, chipped off the Parthenon in Greece.

In an October 2022 interview, Lai Mohammed, Nigeria’s culture minister, said, “These are not just objects of beauty who have aesthetics. These are artefacts that speak to who we are and that speak to our history, our religion, our values and ethics.”17 If that’s the case, the Benin bronzes speak to a set of values and ethics that the government of Nigeria might not want to embrace openly. Whatever one thinks of Britain’s colonial ventures in Africa, there can be no gainsaying the good the empire did in ending the oba’s reign of terror and eradicating the paganism practiced under his rule. The extent of human sacrifice discovered by the British at Benin City was unusual even for pagan, sub-Saharan African peoples at that time.

But Luschan in Germany went further. He saw that the Benin Bronzes had a significance that went beyond the academic and artistic worlds. Their existence was a rebuke to the prevailing values of the time. In 1901, in response to reports of Belgian atrocities in the Congo, he wrote, ‘Human beings which have brought casting to absolute perfection, human beings to whom with almost absolute certainty the discovery of iron-working may be attributed, human beings about whom we now know that they have stood in reciprocal contact with recognized cultured peoples may not be regarded as half-apes.’78 Luschan’s theories were inconsistent; he questioned long-held views on ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ races and his work would later be denounced by the Nazis, but he was also a fierce German nationalist and obsessed with skin colour differentiations.

The use of repeating rifles had already given Europeans the upper hand in colonial wars, but the Maxim was a devastating weapon that no contemporary African force could match. In 1892, in his poem ‘Vitaï Lampada’, Henry Newbolt famously wrote, ‘The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead’. By 1898, however, Hilaire Belloc struck a different tone: Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not.11 The Maxim was portable as well as lethal; Admiral Rawson’s main force on the Ologbo route carried sixteen by hand (Phillips had predicted one would be sufficient to take Benin).

The officers posed for photos, surrounded by their booty. They look tired and dirty, but satisfied, just as a white hunter looks pleased holding up the head of a fallen buffalo, or with his foot on a dead elephant. They sit in their pith helmets amid piles and piles of tusks, rows of brass heads, ivory and brass leopards, with their hands on their hips, or around the shoulders of their friends and colleagues. Already, seeing the amusement in their eyes, one can almost hear the questions which would be asked again and again in the coming years: ‘Who would have thought they had all this fine stuff?’ And, their faces betraying little smiles of incredulity: ‘Surely they didn’t make this themselves?

Benin in the sixteenth century was at the height of its power, the royal court a place of pomp and ritual, and there were limits to Portugal’s influence. The Portuguese offered fine cloths, but Benin already had these in abundance.

The British Museum has about 950 Benin Bronzes that were taken in 1897, but, including the plaques, it only displays around 100.

The British man has spoilt the earth and he has spoilt the skies – he has ruined everything.’ If you walk from the Oba’s palace, it might take you five minutes to reach Igun Street.

João Afonso wanted pepper, as West African spices – the Malagetta (Aframomum melegueta) and Ashanti or Benin pepper (Piper guineense) – were much in demand in Europe, bringing pungent aromas and strong flavours to dull cuisine. But above all, he was looking for slaves. This was not yet for a transatlantic trade, but as part of a barter process along the West African coast; the Portuguese exchanged slaves they bought in the Bight of Benin for gold with the Fante people on the Costa da Mina (what the English called the Gold Coast).1 Indeed, the Niger Delta rivers to the south of Benin were already known as ‘the slave rivers’.

In the meantime, it seems the Portuguese had kept their side of the bargain. In 1515, Oba Esigie was fighting a war of survival against a local rival. The Attah of Idah, ruler of the Igala people, was a formidable enemy to the north, who, perhaps with the assistance of cavalry, forced Benin’s army back to its city walls.11 Disaster was narrowly averted, according to common lore, because the Portuguese stepped in with their guns. It was, Patrick Oronsaye told me, an intervention that ‘changed the course of Benin’s history’. Two white men – Ava and Uti – are said to have fired the weapons, with stunning effect. ‘Noise, smoke, death at a great distance. The Idah army reeled back.

The Obas’ apparent reluctance to sell male slaves in the early years of European contact is indicative of their wealth and confidence. Perhaps, historians suggest, he and his chiefs had more use for them at home. Patrick Oronsaye draws a careful distinction on attitudes in Benin towards slaves: ‘Slave trading was not part of our culture. Slavery was part of our tradition.

For Britain it was another small campaign against a primitive tribe on the frontier of Empire, of little consequence after the brief thrill of victory. It’s perhaps not surprising that the children of those who toppled the Oba and took his treasure should have been oblivious of those events. The winners get to write history. Often that means forgetting its less convenient chapters.

In Africa alone, the British had looted Maqdala and Ashanti before Benin City, just as the French had looted Ségou in 1890 and Abomey in 1892.35 The 1894 British War Office Manual of Military Law, still current in 1897, said the customs of war prohibited pillage, but these customs only applied ‘to warfare between civilized nations’.36 In the same year, a British legal scholar, John Westlake, argued that of ‘uncivilized natives international law takes no account.

The British burnt down villages and took chiefs as hostages, but it wasn’t until 5 August that the Oba gave himself in.50 He walked into Benin City with hundreds of followers, some twenty elegant wives, many chiefs, and musicians. Messengers walked in front, carrying a white flag. He spent two nights at Obaseki’s house, deliberating on his future. On 7 August the Oba walked to the new court building, which stood in front of his palace from which he had fled six months earlier. He was dressed in full red coral regalia, including a headdress, collar, bangles up to his elbows and ankle bracelets. A huge crowd assembled. The Oba hesitated, and then kneeled in front of Roupell. Three times the Oba lowered his forehead to the dirt ground. He had performed the traditional act of obeisance, in full view of his own people. It was a very public surrender, and exactly the humiliation the British sought. Roupell told the Oba that he’d been deposed, and that he and his chiefs would stand trial for the killing of Phillips and the six other white men.

On 3 September he sentenced three of the chiefs – Uso, Obakhavbaye and Ologbosere – to death, and pardoned another on grounds of youth. Uso and Obakhavbaye were shot by firing squad the next morning and Moor threatened reprisals against other chiefs if they did not help the British to catch Ologbosere, who was still at large. Gallwey wrote that the chiefs were ‘executed in the main market place of the city in the presence of an enormous crowd of their awe-stricken countrymen…the prisoners, with jaunty air, occasionally waved their hands to some friend in the crowd, as if they were going to market for quite another reason. They died without flinching’.

Ologbosere was defiant. He did not deny his part in the attack on Phillips’s expedition, but said he’d been sent by the Oba to fight the white men. He poured scorn on those Edo chiefs who had worked with him to defend Benin, but were now part of the court that sat in judgment over him: ‘The day I was selected to go from Benin City to meet the white men all the chiefs here present were in the meeting and now they want to put the whole thing on my shoulders.’7 Ologbosere Irabor was found guilty, and hanged at 8 a.m. on 28 June 1899 outside the court house. There are photographs of him awaiting execution.

The Europeans wanted more ivory than the Edo had hitherto needed, and their guns made it easier to kill elephants. Edo hunters learnt to use Dane guns, firing poisoned darts which penetrated further into the elephant’s hide than arrows or spears. In the late nineteenth century, the British trader Cyril Punch met an Edo man who boasted of killing 200 elephants during his career.64 But West Africa’s ivory trade peaked in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, driven by Dutch, and to a lesser extent, British, demand. Dutch records from that time show it was not unusual for a ship returning from the West African coast to carry 15,000 pounds – about 6,800 kilograms – of ivory.