A KINGDOM CAST IN BRONZE
As debates rage over the return of the Benin Bronzes to Africa, Bronwen Everill delves into the history of these exquisite artworks and their creators, exploring the flowering of a mighty kingdom – and its ruinous defeat by the British
A as he fled Benin City in February 1897, Oba Ovonramwen looked back to see his royal palace in smouldering ruins. Hundreds of intricate plaques, showing the royal lineage stretching back to the 12th century, had been prised off the palace walls and lay in piles, together with thousands of other precious decorative artefacts that had made his capital a wonder to foreign visitors.
This hoard of treasures – today known as the Benin Bronzes, though including plaques and sculptures made from brass and ivory as well as bronze – was then packed up and taken away by British soldiers. They seized intricately carved elephant tusks, brass castings of the heads of monarchs at least 500 years old, and ivory leopards later given to Queen Victoria, all described by previous visitors as displaying truly “artistic workmanship”.
Six months later, after his kingdom had been absorbed into the British empire, Oba Ovonramwen returned to surrender. He found Benin City unrecognisable, its palaces and holy places destroyed and replaced with British administration buildings and a new golf course.
Back to Benin
The Benin Bronzes taken by the British, later held in museums in London and elsewhere in Europe, as well as America, have long been the subject of great controversy, spawning a proliferation of books, news reports and public enquiries. Pressure to return them to Nigeria, building for decades, recently reached a tipping point. In early 2021, the its inʚuence between the 1 th and 17th centuries
At its height, Benin was a tributary empire and the major trading power along the Nigerian coast return of Germany’s collections of Benin artefacts – numbering more than 1,000 – was announced, beginning next year. Several museums in Britain subsequently stated their intention to return items taken in the 1897 attack. The return of these items from a variety of collections around the world is gaining momentum (see the box on page 75).
While this debate continues to rage, though, the history of the kingdom that produced these exquisite artworks has remained relatively obscure outside the region. Yet it’s a fascinating story, which began perhaps seven centuries before the British attack.
Ovonramwen was the 36th in a long line of obas, or rulers, of the kingdom (or empire) of Benin in what’s now southern Nigeria, east of Lagos; the modern country of Benin, to the west, is unrelated. According to oral history, in the late 12th century, elders of the Edo people turned to the great-grandson of the land’s previous ruler to found a new dynasty. Around the end of the 12th and beginning of the 13th century, this new oba, Eweka I, established Ibinu (later translated as Benin by the Portuguese) as his capital
For several centuries, Benin City was governed by an elected oba along with a council of elders. Then, in the 15th century, a prince wrested the throne from his brother, curtailed the power of the elders and renamed the capital Edo. The new oba took the royal name Ewuare, meaning “the trouble has ceased”. His reign as Ewuare I (1440–73) augured the start of a period of artistic flourishing and state reform, as well as the consolidation of the power of the oba.
The oba’s enhanced role now included sole
authority to mete out capital punishment. As the anthropologist RE Bradbury commented, within the oba’s realm, “No one could be put to death without his consent, and any person accused of a capital offence had to be brought before his court.” The epithets attached to the oba reflected this role: “Child of the Sky whom we pray not to fall and cover us, Child of the Earth whom we implore not to swallow us up.”
Ewuare I launched military campaigns that expanded his realm and the reach of his judicial and fiscal authority, marking the start of a golden age for the kingdom. At its height in the 16th and 17th centuries, Benin was a tributary empire ruling over the western Igbo, eastern Yoruba and coastal Itsekiri, among other peoples, and the major trading power along the Nigerian coast.
European travellers were duly impressed by the flourishing kingdom and its capital. Dutch reports from the 16th and 17th centuries described Edo (Benin City) as “the same size as the city of Haarlem” in the Netherlands. That same account, published in Amsterdam in 1668, said of the royal palace: “Every roof is adorned with a small spired tower on which casted copper birds are standing, being very artfully sculpted.”
The art of crafts
As an important centre of culture, the city was home to skilled craftsmen who created the ceremonial heads and plaques that honoured the past divine obas and iyobas (queen mothers). Among the artistic techniques cultivated and perfected there was the lost-wax process of casting metal. This involved first making a wax model of a sculpture, then creating a clay mould around it and melting the wax inside. Molten metal was then poured into the clay mould, filling the space left by the melted wax, before the mould was removed to reveal the cast sculpture.
This multi-stage process had been used in neighbouring Igboland and Yorubaland for several centuries before the golden age of production in Benin. It’s likely, then, that an existing supply chain of producers and trained artisans – copper and zinc miners, smelters, sculptors and blacksmiths, to name a few – already existed, and could be mobilised to meet the kingdom’s increasing demand for the production of such crafts. Royal guilds of woodworkers, leather workers, weavers and potters were also established, making possible the largescale production of art for the royal court, including the Benin Bronzes.
The increased demand for such works relied not just on skilled craftspeople but also on the availability of wood fuel, clay and wax, which were gathered locally, traded or paid in taxes. As the capital, Edo had the resources to pay for the supplies and labour that made both monumental architecture and fine artistry possible. Such resources included large elephant tusks. Henry Galway, vice-consul of the nearby British Oil Rivers Protectorate, wrote in 1892 that “the king of Benin claims half the ivory obtained in his dominion; when an elephant is killed, one tusk always goes to the king”.
Trade with Europeans, beginning with the Portuguese in 1472, provided Ewuare I
Major exports from Benin included pepper, ivory, palm oil, blue coral and leopard hides
and his successors with access to more metals, as well as weapons that helped them defend their tributary subjects. Benin’s traders purchased manillas – brass or copper ingots in the shape of bracelets – from the Portuguese for use in casting, and used that copper to create bronze figures of the Portuguese who’d supplied the metal.
Regional conflict
As Atlantic commerce expanded, the oba controlled trade, permitting transactions only by royally approved associations of merchants. Major exports traded to European merchants included pepper, ivory, palm oil, blue coral and leopard hides gathered within the expanding territory. Benin also occasionally sold people captured during its expansionary wars. The Portuguese then sold these enslaved people in the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) in exchange for gold, which they took back to Europe.
The centralised control of trade was not always popular in the region, despite the protections offered by the oba. The Itsekiri kingdom of Warri, established in the 15th century by a prince from Benin, became increasingly independent and by the 18th century it was established as a trading rival to Benin, specialising in slaves, salt and pottery.
Over time, conflict erupted between various of the groups that fell under Benin’s sway, and the kingdom launched military campaigns to retain control over Yoruba and Igbo groups who sought their own trading relationships or new alliances. Olaudah Equiano, the renowned British abolitionist born in Igbo territory in the mid-18th century, noted that, though his place of birth was technically a province of the kingdom of Benin, the “subjection to the king of Benin was little more than nominal”.
With the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade in the late 17th and 18th centuries, other coastal kingdoms began to overtake Benin, which experienced a slow, sporadic decline in its ability to command the region