Benin Quotes

IRONY They invite you to come view artifacts stolen from your ancestors in their museums as their "experts" explain your ancient Benin kingdom

BeninD

Ben de onun gibi bakıp gülümseyebileyim, oturup yürüyebileyim isterdim, öylesine özgür, öylesine saygıdeğer, öylesine gizli, öylesine açıkyürekli, öylesine çocuksu ve gizemli. Doğrusu ancak Ben'in özüne girebilmiş biri böyle bakar ve yürür. Ben de kendi Ben'imin özüne girmeye çalışacağım.

Unutulan her an Ben'in bir bölümünün yıkılışıdır.

Vicdanın talepleriyle Ben’in yetenekleri arasındaki gerilim, ‘suçluluk duygusu’ olarak algılanır. Toplumsal duygular da, diğer duygularla özdeş biçimde Ben-ülküsü temeline dayanırlar.” Sigmund Freud, ‘Ben ve O’, sayfa 67

Normal, bilinçli suçluluk duygusunun (vicdan) yorumunda herhangi bir zorluk yoktur. Ben ile Ben ülküsü arasındaki gerilime dayanır, Ben’in kendi eleştirel yanınca yargılanışının ifadesidir.” Sigmund Freud, ‘Ben ve O’, sayfa 89

felaketlerimiz üzerinde durmak, dikkatimizi fizik ve manevî yaralarımıza teksif etmek bizi köstebeklerle aynı seviyeye indirir. entelektüel teşhircilik cinsel teşhircilik kadar tiksindirici. bütün gayretlerimizin ortak bir hedefi olmalı: kendimizi 'ben'in diktatörlüğünden kurtarmak. sevmek zenginleşmektir, çoğalmaktır. bir başkasını düşünmek, zindanımızın kapısını aralamak demektir. sakatlıkların en kötü yanı, kanatlarımızı kırarak, bizi, 'ben'imize zincirlemektir; çaresizliğimiz bir kâbus gibi sarar etrafımızı, bizi toplumla bağdaşamaz hâle getirir, bu çaresizlik yüzünden çabuk hiddetleniriz, egoist oluruz. lüzumsuzluğumuzu hissederiz. gereksiz biriyizdir. acımız kısırdır... ama Thierry'nin de gözü görmüyordu...

Annemin dün akşam alışveriş için markete gideceğini biliyordum, bu sayede ondan önce eve vardım. Banyo yapıp saçımı yıkadım. Giydiğim kotu ve kazağı çöpe attım. Yokluklarını fark edecek mi, bilmiyorum. Kazağı fark etmeyecektir. Bir sürü kazağım var ama annem çekmecelerimi kurcalamaya başlamadan yeni bir kot almalıyım." Parasını bu kadar gereksiz bir şeye harcama düşüncesi, Ben'in somurtmasına yol açtı.

Born in Benin, Nigeria, Onyi Nwabineli grew up in Glasgow, the Isle of Man and Newcastle and now lives in London. An English and creative writing graduate, Onyi works in technology and project management. She is cofounder of Surviving Out Loud, a fund that provides survivors of sexual assault with legal assistance, therapy and temporary relocation. Someday, Maybe is Onyi’s debut and she is currently at work on her second novel.

Even correcting for socioeconomic status, the rate of parental maltreatment of children is robustly at eight per thousand. Most of those victims are between newborn and three years old. Someplace with a million children—Warsaw, Benin City, Auberon—would expect eight thousand abused, neglected, or maltreated children. That’s a good-sized lower university just of kids whose parents were mistreating them. Sure, humans love their children. They kill them too. Regular as clockwork.

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,

Ben’in işlevsel önemi, devinim üzerindeki kontrolün normal olarak onun payına düşmesinde ifadesini bulur. Ben’in, O ile ilişkisi atın coşkun gücünü dizginlemesi gereken binici gibidir, bir farkla; binici bunu kendi gücüyle yapmayı denerken, Ben ödünç aldığı güçlerle yapmaya çalışır. Bu benzetme bizi biraz daha ileriye götürür. Tıpkı attan düşmek istemediği için başka çaresi kalmayan ve atın onu kendi istediği yere götürmesine rıza gösteren binici gibi, Ben de O’nun isteklerini, kendi istekleriymiş gibi eyleme geçirmeye çalışır.” Sigmund Freud, ‘Ben ve O’, sayfa 49

THE SEA QUEEN Hmm, he exclaim "I do not know grace can so be found in the rumour of the great Sea Queen" Those were my words when I met the Great Lynda of Ariaposa Sea. Your grace is without boundaries. Oh daughter who who ensnare the sons of men with grace, devouring every soul that stands her way. The Queen of Ariaposa, land of the Great Votite King. The Queen without which mercy is flaws. Great daughter of the Benin Empire. The daughter of the Red Sand Kingdom, across the forest of the Yorubas and Waters of Deltas. May your beautiful convey mercy. Poem by Victor Vote for Lynda Akhigbe Okoeguale ©️2021 by VVF

...Fakat bir kez daha hissediyorum ki, bir ara vermeliyim, çünkü tek bir sözcüğün bile ne kadar çok anlama gelebileceğini, nasıl zıt yönlere çekilebileceğini fark edince korkuyorum. Şimdi, ilk kez bütünlük içinde bir şeyler anlatmaya kalktığımda, hareket halindeki yaşayan bir şeyi derli toplu bir halde saptamanın ne kadar zor olduğunu ancak fark ediyorum. Az önce ben, 7 haziran 1913 günü öğle saatlerinde bir fayton kiraladığımı yazdım. fakat bunda bile şimdiden bir belirsizlik var, çünkü üzerinden henüz 4 ay geçmiş olmasına rağmen ben epeydir o 7 haziran günündeki ben değilim artık, oysa hala o zamanki "bana" ait olan yazı masasının başında oturuyorum, o benin kalemiyle ve onun eliyle yazıyorum. O zamanki "ben"den, tam da bu olay nedeniyle tamamen koptum; artık ona dışarıdan, soğuk ve yabancı bir tavırla bakıyorum ve onu, hakkında pek çok esaslı şey bildiğim, ama yine de benim dışımda kalan bir yol arkadaşı, bir iş arkadaşı, bir dost olarak tasvir edebilirim. Bir zamanlarki "ben" olduğunu hiçbir şekilde hissetmeden onun hakkında konuşabilirim, onu eleştirebilirim veya yargılayabilirim.

Bazıları, hiçleşme arzusunun insanı eziyetten hoşlanmaya (mazoşizme) götürdüğünü öne sürmüşlerdir. Ancak daha önce de söylediğim gibi, eziyetseverlik ancak "kendimi, başkasının gözündeki nesnelliğimle büyülemeye” çalıştığım zaman söz konusu olabilir, yani öznenin bilinci ben’e doğru dönüp onu aşağılanmış durumda yakalamaya çalıştığı zaman. Oysa, sevdalı kadın, kendi ben’i içinde yabancılaşmış, kendine hayran biri aracılığı ile kendi dar sınırlarını aşmak, sınırsız olmak için yanar tutuştur. Kendini kurtarmak için teslim olur aşk’a; ancak putlaştırıcı aşkın aykırılığı şuradadır ki, sevdalı kadın, kendisini kurtarmak isterken bir de bakarsınız ki kendi varlığını bütünüyle yadsımış. Duygusu sofuca(gizemci) bir boyut kazanır; tanrıdan artık kendisine hayran olmasını, kendisini onaylamasını beklemez; onun varlığında erimek, onun kollarında kendinden geçmek ister. “Bir aşk ermişi olmak isterdim, diyor Madam D’agoult. Böyle çileci coşkunluk ve çılgınlık anlarında, kendini dine adamış insanları kıskanıyorum.” Bu sözlerde ortaya çıkan şey, sevgiliyle seveni ayıran sınırların yıkılması, ben’in kökünden yok edilmesi arzusudur; bu bir eziyetseverlik değil, coşku içinde birleşme, bir olma düşüdür: “O çağda, gelip bu dünyadaki en büyük arzunuz nedir deseler, hiç çekinmeden: onun ruhunu besleyen kaynak, içini ısıtan alev olmak, derdim.

In May 2003, a bill aimed at requiring the Alabama Historical Commission to provide a current inventory of landmarks in the site eligible for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places could thus state: The history of Africatown, USA originated in Ghana, West Africa, near the present city of Tamale in 1859. The tribes of Africa were engaged in civil war, and the prevailing tribes sold the members of the conquered tribes into slavery. The village of the Tarkbar tribe near the city of Tamale was raided by Dahomey warriors, and the survivors of the raid were taken to Whydah, now the People’s Republic of Benin, and put up for sale. The captured tribesmen were sold for $100 each at Whydah. They were taken to the United States on board the schooner Clotilde, under the command of Maine Capt. William Foster who had been hired by Capt. Timothy Meaher, a wealthy Mobile shipper and shipyard owner who had built the schooner Clotilde in Mobile in 1856.15 This is the official version of the story, also found in a piece emanating from the office of former representative Herbert “Sonny” Callahan, created in 2000 for the Local Legacies Project of the Library of Congress.16 The Africatown Community Mobilization Project uses it on its brochure. In addition to the offensive misuse of “tribe,” almost everything in this text is historically inaccurate and unwittingly derogatory. The project’s brochure contains further mistakes that come from a 1993 article produced by the Alabama State Council on the Arts.17

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European maps proudly depicted Africa’s Atlantic coast as bristling with Danish, Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish forts, garrisons, and trading posts. But most of the stars on the maps had fewer than ten expatriate residents and many had fewer than five. The principality of Whydah, in today’s Benin, exported 400,000 people in the first quarter of the eighteenth century—it was the most important depot in the Atlantic slave trade in that time. Not one hundred Europeans lived there permanently. The largest groups of foreigners were the slavers who camped on the beach as they waited to fill their ships with human cargo.

İnsan ben'ine bir köpek, bir kedi, bir domuz kızartması, okyanus aşkı ya da soğuk duş katarsa, ekleme yöntemi çok eğlenceli olabilir. Ben'e komünizm aşkı, vatan aşkı, Mussolini aşkı, Katolik Kilisesi aşkı, ateizm aşkı, faşizm ya da antifaşizm aşkı eklemeye kalkıldığında ise durum o kadar iç açıcı olmaktan çıkar. Her iki halde de yöntem tamamen aynı kalır: Kedilerin diğer hayvanlardan üstün olduğunu inatla savunan kişi, Mussolini'yi İtalya'nın tek kurtarıcısı olarak ilan eden kişiyle özünde aynı şeyi yapmaktadır: Kendi ben'inin simgesini övmekte ve bu simgenin (bir kedi ya da Mussolini) kendi çevresi tarafından kabul edilip sevilmesi için her yola başvurmaktadır. Ben'lerini geliştirmek için ekleme yöntemine başvuran herkesin içine düştüğü garip paradoks işte budur: taklit edilemeyecek biriciklikte bir ben yaratmak için ekleme yapmaya çabalarlar ama bu arada, eklenen bu simgelerin propagandacısı haline geldiklerinden olabildiği kadar çok insanın kendilerine benzemesi için her şeyi yaparlar; o zaman da ben'lerinin (canla başla fethedilen) biricikliği derhal silinip gider.

Olaudah Equiano, born sometime around 1745 in a rural community somewhere within the confines of the Kingdom of Benin. Kidnapped from his home at the age of eleven, Equiano was eventually sold to British slavers operating in the Bight of Biafra, from whence he was conveyed first to Barbados, then to a plantation in colonial Virginia. Equiano’s further adventures—and there were many—are narrated in his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, published in 1789. After spending much of the Seven Years’ War hauling gunpowder on a British frigate, he was promised his freedom, denied his freedom, sold to several owners—who regularly lied to him, promising his freedom, and then broke their word—until he passed into the hands of a Quaker merchant in Pennsylvania, who eventually allowed him to purchase his liberty. Over the course of his later years he was to become a successful merchant in his own right, a best-selling author, an Arctic explorer, and eventually, one of the leading voices of English Abolitionism. His eloquence and the power of his life story played significant parts in the movement that led to the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807.

Ernest Eguasa graduated from the University of Benin with an accounting degree before continuing his education at Lagos Business School, completing their Senior Management Program. He holds multiple financial certificates as well. Mr. Eguasa has over 12 years of experience in financial management and specializes in e-commerce and e-payments for retail and pharmaceutical companies. He is a Green Belt in Lean6Sigma and the CFO for HealthPlus Limited.

The sale of its own citizens into slavery and the importation of firearms undermined the productive capacity of Benin and hastened its decline during the eighteenth century.

Lagos–Benin Expressway.

Africa had free markets and a thriving entrepreneurial culture and tradition centuries before these became the animating ideas of the United States or Western Europe. Timbuktu, the legendary city in northern Mali, was a famous trading post and marketplace as far back as the twelfth century, as vital to the commerce of North and West Africa as ports on the Mediterranean were to Europe and the Levant. In Africa Unchained, George Ayittey offers myriad examples of industrial activity in precolonial Africa, from the indigo-dye cloth trade of fourteenth-century Kano, Nigeria, to the flourishing glass industry of precolonial Benin to the palm oil businesses of southern Nigeria to the Kente cotton trade of the Asante of Ghana in the 1800s: “Profit was never an alien concept to Africa. Throughout its history there have been numerous entrepreneurs. The aim of traders and numerous brokers or middlemen was profit and wealth.”2 The tragedy is what happened next. These skills and traditions were destroyed, damaged, eroded or forced underground, first during centuries of slave wars and colonialism and, later, through decades of corrupt postindependence rule, usually in service to foreign ideologies of socialism or communism. No postcolonial leader in Africa who fought for independence has ever adequately explained why liberation from colonial rule necessarily meant following the ideas and philosophies of Karl Marx, a gray-bearded nineteenth-century German academic who worked out of the British Library and never set foot in Africa. At the same time, neither should we have ever allowed ourselves to become beholden to paternalistic aid organizations that were sending their representatives to build our wells and plant our food for us. Nor, for that matter, should we have relied on the bureaucrats of the Western world telling us how to be proper capitalists or—as is happening now—to Party officials in Beijing telling us what they want in exchange for this or that project. It was this outside influence—starting with colonialism but later from our own terrible and corrupt policies and leaderships—that the stereotype of the lazy, helpless, unimaginative and dependent African developed. The point is that we Africans have to take charge of our own destiny, and to do this we can call on our own unique culture and traditions of innovation, free enterprise and free trade. We are a continent of entrepreneurs.

The West African state of Benin had its entire air force destroyed in 1988 by a single errant golf shot. Metthieu Boya, a ground technician and keen golfer, was practising on the airfield during a lunchtime break when he sliced a drive. The ball struck the windscreen of a jet fighter that was preparing to take off, causing it to career into the country’s other four jets neatly lined up by the runway.

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

By and large, only behind the most obscure doors of high academe can one unearth a mention of the great African empires and polities of antiquity like Kush, Benin, Meroe, Djenne, Ghana, and Songhay.

I haven’t often encountered problems related to my origins. It’s happened once or twice for housing, for example. My boyfriend at the time was from Benin, so we had two foreign-sounding names. Once we didn’t get an apartment we wanted. I think that if they had seen me, it would have been different.

Kendi olmaya cesaret etmek aslında bir bireyi, şunu veya bunu değil, Tanrı karşısında çabasının ve sorumluluğunun devasalığı içinde yalnız bir bireyi gerçekleştirmeye cesaret etmektedir." Varoluş serüveni ben'in kendi olma serüvenidir. Bu bir ben olarak Tanrı'nın, yaratıcısının karşısına çıkma cesaretidir.

When the time came for us to leave Benin City, his library was one of the things I felt bad about leaving.

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.

The Vikings of Trelleborg, the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan, and the Benin of West Africa are separated by great expanses of time and geography. They share almost nothing in common except a particularly bloody form of paganism—a willingness to sacrifice fellow human beings, even children, not just to appease their gods but also to maintain a social order through the control of anxiety and the deployment of ritual violence. But they also had this in common: their encounters with Christianity eventually brought an end to their pagan religions, and in this they were not unique.

Benin shows us, at any rate, that there is nothing inherent in human nature that inclines away from paganism and much that inclines toward it, and there is nothing inherent about the development of human societies and cultures that mitigates against even the worst and most violent forms of pagan ritual. The passage of time, even the advent of modernity and the Industrial Revolution, is no cure for the shaman’s bloody altar, no guarantee against the impulse to spill innocent blood for protection or propitiation. Neither is technology or “progress.” Indeed, some of the most technologically advanced pre-Christian pagan empires were among the most brutal, from the Aztecs to the Carthaginians, and even the Romans.

wrote G. K. Chesterton, who could have been describing Benin’s horrifying descent into devilry. “A man loves Nature in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall, if he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty. He washes at dawn in clear water as did the Wise Man of the Stoics, yet, somehow at the dark end of the day, he is bathing in hot bull’s blood, as did Julian the Apostate.”22

Crucifixion, mutilation, and ritual slaughter of every conceivable kind were at the center of their religion, which they practiced right to the bitter, horrifying end. What the British found in Benin at the close of the nineteenth century, in other words, was like something transported forward from ancient Phoenicia thousands of years into the modern industrial era: an entire social order based on ritual human sacrifice for the appeasement of a pantheon of cruel and depraved gods. It was perhaps even worse than what one might have encountered in Tyre and Sidon at the height of Phoenician depravity.

Benin paganism and all its attendant horrors were put down, at long last, by the British Empire, whose officers and representatives hailed from a civilization that had been Christian for some thirteen centuries and could recognize abject pagan barbarity when they saw it. Like Cortés, they had no tolerance for such evil, so that when, finally, the paganism of Benin was set against a Christian power, it was wiped out.

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.

The people of Benin, however, were not won over in the same way. Whatever the quality of the seventeenth-century Portuguese mission to Benin City, it was not enough, in duration or influence or effect, to overcome the indigenous pagan culture and the political and demonic powers that surrounded it. When paganism returned to Benin, its people were reduced to the outright worship of devils in forms and rituals that mocked the Catholic faith they had once received.

the entire Benin calendar going back many generations was ordered around a pagan cycle of human and animal sacrifices intended to ward off sickness and famine, protect the city from intruders, and ensure prosperity.

There have been three major slave revolts in human history. The first, led by the Thracian gladiator Spartacus against the Romans, occurred in 73 BC. The third was in the 1790s when the great black revolutionary Touissant L'Ouverture and his slave army wrested control of Santo Domingo from the French, only to be defeated by Napoleon in 1802. But the second fell halfway between these two, in the middle of the 9th century AD, and is less documented than either. We do know that the insurgents were black; that the Muslim 'Abbasid caliphs of Iraq had brought them from East Africa to work, in the thousands, in the salt marshes of the delta of the Tigris. These black rebels beat back the Arabs for nearly ten years. Like the escaped maroons in Brazil centuries later, they set up their own strongholds in the marshland. They seemed unconquerable and they were not, in fact, crushed by the Muslims until 883. They were known as the Zanj, and they bequeathed their name to the island of Zanzibar in the East Africa - which, by no coincidence, would become and remain the market center for slaves in the Arab world until the last quarter of the 19th century. The revolt of the Zanj eleven hundred years ago should remind us of the utter falsity of the now fashionable line of argument which tries to suggest that the enslavement of African blacks was the invention of European whites. It is true that slavery had been written into the basis of the classical world; Periclean Athens was a slave state, and so was Augustan Rome. Most of their slaves were Caucasian whites, and "In antiquity, bondage had nothing to do with physiognomy or skin color". The word "slave" meant a person of Slavic origin. By the 13th century it spread to other Caucasian peoples subjugated by armies from central Asia: Russians, Georgians, Circassians, Albanians, Armenians, all of whom found ready buyers from Venice to Sicily to Barcelona, and throughout the Muslim world. But the African slave trade as such, the black traffic, was a Muslim invention, developed by Arab traders with the enthusiastic collaboration of black African ones, institutionalized with the most unrelenting brutality centuries before the white man appeared on the African continent, and continuing long after the slave market in North America was finally crushed. Historically, this traffic between the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa begins with the very civilization that Afrocentrists are so anxious to claim as black - ancient Egypt. African slavery was well in force long before that: but by the first millennium BC Pharaoh Rameses II boasts of providing the temples with more than 100,000 slaves, and indeed it is inconceivable that the monumental culture of Egypt could have been raised outside a slave economy. For the next two thousand years the basic economies of sub-Saharan Africa would be tied into the catching, use and sale of slaves. The sculptures of medieval life show slaves bound and gagged for sacrifice, and the first Portuguese explorers of Africa around 1480 found a large slave trade set up from the Congo to Benin. There were large slave plantations in the Mali empire in the 13th-14th centuries and every abuse and cruelty visited on slaves in the antebellum South, including the practice of breeding children for sale like cattle, was practised by the black rulers of those towns which the Afrocentrists now hold up as sanitized examples of high civilization, such as Timbuktu and Songhay.

When people talk about slavery, they think they are talking about Africa,” said Nathalie Blanc Chekete, with Benin’s National Agency for the Promotion of Heritage and the Development of Tourism. “But slavery was something that happened once they reached America or Brazil. What happened in Africa was deportation, where Africans took other Africans away from their lands and families and sent them away forever.

Bu korkunç değişikliğin tek nedeni, kendine inanmayı bırakıp başkalarına inanmaya başlamasıydı. Kendine inanmaktan vazgeçmiş, başkalarına inanmaya başlamıştı, çünkü kendine inanarak yaşamak çok zordu: Kendine inandığında sorunlarını kolay sevinçler arayan hayvansal “ben”in yararına değil, neredeyse her zaman bu hayvansal “ben”e karşı koyarak çözümlemesi gerekiyordu; oysa başkalarına inandığında ortada çözümlenecek bir sorun olmuyordu. Her şey zaten çoktan çözümlenmişti, hem de ruhsal “ben”e karşı, hayvansal “ben”in yararına çözümlenmişti. Ayrıca kendine inandığı sürece hep insanlar tarafından ayıplanmışken, başkalarına inandığında çevresindeki insanların övgüsünü kazanıyordu.

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.

Take the ‘historians’ that claimed that Africans, unlike the rest of humanity, had no history, and thus when they found evidence of this supposedly absent history from ‘pre-colonial’ Africa – from the ruins of great Zimbabwe, to the manuscripts of Timbuktu, to the sublime metal art of Ile Ife and Benin – set about trying to look for a non-African source for these works. In some cases, scholars were more willing to entertain the idea that aliens were responsible for African history than Africans!

It was the development of the sugar plantation colonies of the Caribbean beginning in the early seventeenth century that led to a dramatic escalation of the international slave trade and to an unprecedented increase in the importance of slavery within Africa itself. In the sixteenth century, probably about 300,000 slaves were traded in the Atlantic. They came mostly from Central Africa, with heavy involvement of Kongo and the Portuguese based farther south in Luanda, now the capital of Angola. During this time, the trans-Saharan slave trade was still larger, with probably about 550,000 Africans moving north as slaves. In the seventeenth century, the situation reversed. About 1,350,000 Africans were sold as slaves in the Atlantic trade, the majority now being shipped to the Americas. The numbers involved in the Saharan trade were relatively unchanged. The eighteenth century saw another dramatic increase, with about 6,000,000 slaves being shipped across the Atlantic and maybe 700,000 across the Sahara. Adding the figures up over periods and parts of Africa, well over 10,000,000 Africans were shipped out of the continent as slaves. Map 15 (this page) gives some sense of the scale of the slave trade. Using modern country boundaries, it depicts estimates of the cumulative extent of slavery between 1400 and 1900 as a percent of population in 1400. Darker colors show more intense slavery. For example, in Angola, Benin, Ghana, and Togo, total cumulative slave exports amounted to more than the entire population of the country in 1400. The sudden appearance of Europeans all around the coast of Western and Central Africa eager to buy slaves could not but have a transformative impact on African societies. Most slaves who were shipped to the Americas were war captives subsequently transported to the coast. The increase in warfare was fueled by huge imports of guns and ammunition, which the Europeans exchanged for slaves. By 1730 about 180,000 guns were being imported every year just along the West African coast, and between 1750 and the early nineteenth century, the British alone sold between 283,000 and 394,000 guns

there are plenty of Caucasians who have lips quite as thick and noses quite as broad as any of us. As a matter of fact there has been considerable exaggeration about the contrast between Caucasian and Negro features. The cartoonists and minstrel men have been responsible for it very largely. Some Negroes like the Somalis, Filanis, Egyptians, Hausas and Abyssinians have very thin lips and nostrils. So also have the Malagasys of Madagascar. Only in certain small sections of Africa do the Negroes possess extremely pendulous lips and very broad nostrils. On the other hand, many so-called Caucasians, particularly the Latins, Jews and South Irish, and frequently the most Nordic of peoples like the Swedes, show almost Negroid lips and noses. Black up some white folks and they could deceive a resident of Benin. Then when you consider that less than twenty per cent of our Negroes are without Caucasian ancestry and that close to thirty per cent have American Indian ancestry, it is readily seen that there cannot

there are plenty of Caucasians who have lips quite as thick and noses quite as broad as any of us. As a matter of fact there has been considerable exaggeration about the contrast between Caucasian and Negro features. The cartoonists and minstrel men have been responsible for it very largely. Some Negroes like the Somalis, Filanis, Egyptians, Hausas and Abyssinians have very thin lips and nostrils. So also have the Malagasys of Madagascar. Only in certain small sections of Africa do the Negroes possess extremely pendulous lips and very broad nostrils. On the other hand, many so-called Caucasians, particularly the Latins, Jews and South Irish, and frequently the most Nordic of peoples like the Swedes, show almost Negroid lips and noses. Black up some white folks and they could deceive a resident of Benin. Then when you consider that less than twenty per cent of our Negroes are without Caucasian ancestry and that close to thirty per cent have American Indian ancestry, it is readily seen that there cannot be the wide difference in Caucasian and Afro-American facial characteristics that most people imagine.

If you would have all Nigerians penalised for a crime committed by a Benin man, then you would have all Europeans penalised for a crime committed by a German man. Nigeria has ideological differences, judge not all at a time.

In the precolonial period, however, Ouidah was the principal commercial centre in the region and the second town of the Dahomey kingdom, exceeded in size only by the capital Abomey, 100 km inland. In particular, it served as a major outlet for the export of slaves for the trans-Atlantic trade. The section of the African coast on which Ouidah is situated, in geographical terms the Bight (or Gulf) of Benin, was known to Europeans between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries as the ‘Slave Coast’, from its prominence as a source of supply for the Atlantic slave trade; and within this region Ouidah was by far the most important point of embarkation for slaves, far outshadowing its nearest rival, Lagos, 150 km to the east (in modern Nigeria). Ouidah was a leading slaving port for almost two centuries, from the 1670s to the 1860s. During this period, the Bight of Benin is thought to have accounted for around 22 per cent of all slaves exported to the Americas, and Ouidah for around 51 per cent of exports from the Bight.3 Given the current consensual estimate of between 10 and 11 million slaves exported from Africa in this period, this suggests that Ouidah supplied well over a million slaves, making it the second most important point of embarkation of slaves in the whole of Africa (behind only Luanda, in Angola).

Rilke görmeyi yaralanma olarak tasvir eder. Görme, 'Ben'in bilinmeyen mıntıkasına giren şeylere kendisini tamamen maruz bırakır. Görmeyi öğrenmek, dolayısıyla aktif, bilinçli bir süreçten başka bir şey değildir. Daha ziyade meydana gelmeye-bırakmak veya meydana gelmeye-maruz kalmaktır: 'Görmeyi öğreniyorum. Sebebini bilmiyorum fakat her şey bana daha derinden giriyor ve her kaman vardıkları noktada artık kalamıyorlar. Hakkında hiçbir şey bilmediğim bir iç tarafım var. Her şey Soraya doğru gidiyor. Orada neyin meydana geldiğini bilmiyorum.

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.

Çift katlı otobüslerden biri önümde yavaşladı. Pencereleri tozlu. Durdu galiba. O mu, kaldırım mı? Hep aynı hizadayız. Düz mantık gereği ne o, ne kaldırım öyleyse. Arka sıralardan bir pencerenin camı açık. Bu ‘ben’ miyim? Biri kürek kemiklerimin arasına sokulu anahtarı çevirmeye başladı, sol kolum –belki de sağ– kırık kırık kalkıyor. ‘Ben’ de beni görmüş olmalı, başını çıkardı pencereden– dev balyozlar pamuk yığınlarına dalıp çıkıyor, çıt yok, dudaklarının kıpırdanışını izliyorum ‘ben’in, ‘buluşalım’ demeye mi getiriyor? Sanırım. Ama nasıl, nerede, kaç yüzyıl sonra? İçimdeki gramofon –His Master’s Voice– habire baştan çalıyor cızırtılı plağı: Saçmalama. Benimle mi ilgili bu uyarı? Sinirlenmemeliyim, oysa unutmuş olmalıyım öfkeyi. ‘Ben’ konuşmayı sürdürüyor gibi. Sözcüklerin tek tek karşılıklarını bilmenin anlamsızlığını, birleştirildiklerinde bile anlam kazanmayabileceklerini anlamaktan uzağım. Zorla belleğini, anımsa kendini! Sabredin, buluşabilirsiniz. Hiç de inandırıcı değil artık, umut yok. Belki bir an duraklarsa itici güç, o andan yararlanabilirsek, yineleyebiliriz kesintiye uğrayan zamanı. Zaman kesintiye uğramaz, yinelenmez.” (sayfa 7-8)

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