1. One of the thousands of brass plaques looted from the royal palace of Benin in 1897. This plaque, now in the British Museum, shows the Oba (king) with four of his attendants.
In September 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, hundreds of carved ivory statues and brass plaques were put on display at the British Museum. Alongside the statues and plaques were ceremonial heads and animal figures, all intricately cast in a copper-rich brass alloy. Together they were exhibited in a room normally reserved for public lectures. Although makeshift and temporary, the exhibition was hugely popular, in large part because it allowed the Victorian public an opportunity to encounter the greatest treasures of an ancient and once mighty civilisation that had recently been the focus of a huge amount of press attention. The faces depicted in the plaques and sculptures were those of its kings and queens, and around them were arrayed images of soldiers, traders and hunters, along with the symbols of a complex pagan faith.
To educated Europeans of the late nineteenth century, steeped in classical learning, antique sculptures and reliefs such as these, the artistic fruits of a highly sophisticated casting technique, were hallmarks of a true civilisation. However, what instantly troubled the public who came to view these treasures, and the reporters who were dispatched to the British Museum from both national and local newspapers, was that these stupendous works of art had been generated by an African civilisation, and in the late nineteenth century almost everyone in Europe believed that Africans lacked both the cultural sophistication to appreciate great art and the technical skills required to create it.
The Benin Bronzes, as they became known – despite being made from brass – arrived in London as the booty of war. Eight months earlier, a British military force, 1,200-strong, had invaded the ancient west African kingdom of Benin, home of the Edo people, and besieged then sacked their capital, Benin City. Ostensibly, the invasion had been launched to avenge the lives of British soldiers and officials who had been killed during an ambush of an earlier expedition. In reality this was merely the pretext. Underlying the decision to attack Benin were British ambitions to control the trade in palm oil and other commodities as London extended control over what was then the British Niger Coast Protectorate, part of modern-day Nigeria. After the fall of Benin City, the expeditionary force – which was largely made up of troops from the Royal Marines – looted the royal palace. Later, the palace, other public buildings and a great many private homes were destroyed by a fire that may or may not have been started accidentally. Also lost to the flames were sections of Benin City’s once imposing defensive walls. Oba Ovonramwen, the king of Benin, whose predecessors are the central subjects of the Benin Bronzes, was deposed and arrested.
2. Oba Ovonramwen in chains on the deck of the British ship HMS Ivy. He was never to return to his kingdom, dying in exile in 1914.
Photographed on the deck of a British warship, the Oba casts a steadfast gaze, his look of steely defiance sadly undermined by the chains and manacles that can be seen coiled around royal ankles. Oba Ovonramwen was held responsible for the deaths of the Britons killed in the earlier expedition and put on trial by the British colonial authorities. Although he was (rather inconveniently) found innocent, Ovonramwen was nonetheless sent into exile, like so many African leaders who confronted European powers during the so-called ‘Scramble for Africa’. Indeed, the deposing of Ovonramwen and the British raid on the kingdom of Benin were unexceptional events in the late nineteenth century. Numerous African city states whose leaders had rejected the overtures of encroaching European powers had also been subjected to similar attacks: ‘punitive expeditions’, in the terminology of the time. What was exceptional about the 1897 Benin expedition was not the level of violence used against the Edo people, or the wholesale destruction of their ancient capital, but the fact that quite by accident the expedition delivered some of west Africa’s greatest cultural treasures into the hands of Europeans. This had never been an objective of the expedition, and yet it is the reason the Benin expedition, of all Britain’s ‘small wars’ from the age of empire, is still remembered today.
The looting that followed was not wild or inchoate but systematic and deliberate. Over a number of days the treasures of the royal palace were removed. Ceremonial heads were taken from around thirty royal shrines, dedicated to Obas of the past, and thousands of brass plaques were ripped from the walls and roofs. In all there were around 4,000 ‘bronzes’, as well as hundreds of ivory tusks and carvings, many of which was piled up in the courtyards of the now ruined royal palace. There, photographs were taken of British officers posing among the loot, which they dismissed in their correspondence as ‘Benin curios’.1 Amid the booty, with crossed arms and fixed expressions, their gaze is every bit as defiant as that of Oba Ovonramwen.
The plaques, statues and ivories were then packed up and transported to the coast on the heads of the thousands of indigenous carriers hired by the British. At the port, the fruits of several centuries of cultural output by the craftsmen of the Edo people were loaded into holds and shipped to Britain. To defray the costs of the raid, the bronzes were to be auctioned off in London, sold to collectors and museums across Europe. It was in advance of this colonial fire sale that the temporary makeshift exhibition at the British Museum was organised. The objects presented to the public that autumn were thus not the property of the British Museum but merely on loan to the institution from the Admiralty, who had taken possession of the artefacts on their arrival. Other bronzes and ivories personally looted by the British officers who had taken part in the punitive expedition were regarded as their share of the spoils and excluded from the auction.
3. Troops from the British Punitive Expedition posing in the grounds of the Oba’s palace amidst the loot; piles of ivory, brass plaques and cast brass figures can be seen.
4. Today the vast majority of the art treasures of Benin are held by museums in Britain, Germany and the United States. The collection at London’s British Museum is the largest in the world.
When the exhibition at the British Museum opened, it was an immediate sensation. Memories of the first expedition against Benin earlier in the year were still fresh in the public mind. Then the newspapers had exhaustively reported on the supposed ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism’ of the Edo people. The Illustrated London News had published a special supplement, and one writer had dubbed Benin the ‘city of blood’. Nine months later, the same publications were equally keen to report on the art captured during the successful British expedition. It was at this juncture, however, that both the popular press and the more learned journals encountered a difficulty, as they struggled to reconcile the dazzling art on display with the image of Benin as the kingdom of ‘horrors’ and ‘savagery’ that they themselves had helped create. Charles Hercules Read, the curator who persuaded the Admiralty to loan the bronzes to the museum for the exhibition, spelt out the contradiction when he wrote:
It need scarcely be said that at the first sight of these remarkable works of art we were at once astounded at such an unexpected find, and puzzled to account for so highly developed an art among a race so entirely barbarous.2
The German anthropologist Felix von Luschan, assistant to the director of the Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, lavished similar praise upon the bronzes and effusively compared the metal-casters of Benin to one of the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance. Writing in 1901, he suggested that
These works from Benin are equal to the very finest examples of European casting technique. Benvenuto Cellini could not have cast them better, nor anyone else before or after him, even up to the present day. Technically, these bronzes represent the very highest possible achievement.3
Yet in the late Victorian imagination the people of the so-called ‘Dark Continent’ were thought to be incapable of creating true works of art or of incubating that thing called ‘civilisation’. According to the prevailing theories, Africa was one of those regions of the world unconnected to the ‘golden thread’ of western civilisation, which stretched, supposedly unbroken, from classical antiquity through the early Church, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, linking the cultures and societies of contemporary Europe to ancient Greece and Rome. Adrift, outside of that tradition, Africans were, in the minds of many, not only an uncivilised race but a people without a history. In Africa, it was said, time had passed, but, as progress had not been made, there had been no true history to record. Yet in 1897 the thousands of plaques and statues gathered together in the centre of London were not only evidence of a sophisticated civilisation but were in themselves a form of historical record. The brass plaques from the palace walls had been cast in order to memorialise the reigns and great military victories of the past. They recorded the rituals that punctuated each year and the festivals in which the power and grandeur of the Obas was put on public and ceremonial display. The Obas were depicted at the physical centres of many plaques and were central to the concept of Edo cultural life. Larger than those around them, they were surrounded by their retinues, the symbols of their gods and the symbolism of their own god-like powers. Similar historical narratives had been carved in the ivory tusks that were also captured.
The art of Benin was so challenging, so sophisticated and complex that many people, in both academic circles and the popular press, were unable to accept that the treasures could have been produced by Africans. They confected theories to explain how it was that highly ornate, intricately cast brass plaques in high relief and perfectly proportioned sculptures of the human form could have been found in a forest empire of west Africa.4 One suggestion was that the Portuguese, the first Europeans to have traded with the Edo people starting in the late fifteenth century, must have either taught local craftsmen how to produce this art or had themselves cast the bronzes for the Obas of Benin. Another theory suggested that some unknown white civilisation could have produced the bronzes that had later been merely inherited by the people of Benin – this, despite the fact the faces depicted were clearly those of west Africans. Others suggested that this art form must have been transmitted to Benin from ancient Egypt.5 A later theory had it that somewhere in west Africa or off her coast was the site of the lost Greek city of Atlantis, and that a band of wandering Greek artists had created the art. But there were experts, including Augustus Pitt Rivers, one of the fathers of archaeology, who rejected all such conjecture and snobbery, and concluded that the Benin bronzes were indigenous masterpieces of African origin. But that position was far from universal.
What was largely overlooked in the newspaper reports of 1897, although not in the scholarly debates, was that the people of late Victorian London and the men who had attacked and destroyed Benin City were not the first Europeans or even the first Britons to lay eyes on Benin’s artistic treasures.
In the early decades of the European Age of Discovery, adventurers from Portugal and Tudor England had seen the same plaques, in situ, on the walls of the Oba’s palace. The first of those English expeditions, led by the merchant Thomas Wyndham in 1553, had included among its crew the young Martin Frobisher, who would later lead his fellow countrymen into battle against the Spanish Armada alongside Francis Drake. Wyndham and his crewmen had travelled inland and been highly impressed by the architecture of Benin City. They were further astonished to discover that the Oba ‘could speake the Portugall tongue, which he had learned of a child’. Other accounts by European traders who visited Benin were similarly awed by this west African super-state – highly organised, centralised and militarised, a kingdom confident of its own power and determined to trade with Europeans as an equal partner. In 1668, a century after Wyndham's expedition, the Dutch writer Olfert Dapper penned a description of Benin City and the palace in his compendium travel narrative Naukeurige beschrijvinge der Afrikaensche Eylanden (Accurate Descriptions of the African Regions):
The king’s palace or court is a square and is as large as the town of Haarlem and entirely surrounded by a special wall, like that which encircles the town. It is divided into many magnificent palaces, houses, and apartments of the courtiers, and comprises beautiful and long square galleries, about as large as the Exchange at Amsterdam, but one larger than another, resting on wooden pillars, from top to bottom covered with cast copper, on which are engraved the pictures of their war exploits and battles.6
When Thomas Wyndham set sail on his journey to Benin in 1553, the site on which the British Museum would later stand was open pasture north of London, near the village of Tottenham Court, so named after a local manor house, Toten Hall. The notion then that the treasures of any great African kingdom might one day be housed there, on the rural fringes of the English capital, would have been unimaginable. Adventurers, traders and merchants of the Age of Discovery set off not on missions of colonial conquest but in the hope of trade with peoples of distant lands. Only in southern America and on tiny Asian islands did the prospect of conquest present itself. African and Asian spices, some of which were literally worth more than their weight in gold, yielded astronomical profits in the markets of Europe and justified the extreme dangers of long-distance missions; indeed, Thomas Wyndham and many of his crew succumbed to fatal tropical fevers while trading with Benin in the 1550s. Three centuries before the punitive expedition of 1897, neither the Portuguese traders nor the English adventurers had had any difficulty in understanding what their nineteenth-century descendants struggled to accept – that Benin was a complex and sophisticated civilisation capable of creating wondrous art.
Not only had those fifteenth- and sixteenth-century encounters been profoundly different from that which took place in 1897, but evidence of that earlier contact can be found in the Benin Bronzes themselves. In the collection at the British Museum – a small fraction of the thousands of pieces auctioned by the Admiralty – is a small brass statue of a Portuguese soldier, quite possibly a mercenary in the service of the Obas. He has his musket raised to his eye and wears European armour. Other pieces show the faces of Portuguese traders, their European features rendered exaggeratedly long and thin, with long noses and beards, marking them as incomers. But their place within the art of Benin speaks of their place within the royal court, and the culture and power politics of Benin in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: Europeans had been the suppliers of the precious raw material required for their creation. In a number of the Benin plaques Portuguese traders are shown holding manillas, the curved bars of solid brass that were the unit in which the metal was traded. These manillas themselves eventually became a form of currency and a symbol of Benin’s trading links with the growing Atlantic world.
5. This intricately detailed brass figure of a Portuguese soldier, with his musket raised, was cast by the metal craftsmen of Benin in the seventeenth century.
6. One of two near-identical sixteenth-century ivory masks of a Benin queen mother known as Idia. She has become one of the cultural emblems of modern Nigeria. Note the Portuguese sailors carved into her headdress.
In what is perhaps the most stunning of all Benin’s art treasures, the two pectoral masks believed to show the face of a sixteenth-century queen mother known as Idia, further evidence of Benin’s relationship with its Portuguese trading partners can be seen. Believed to have been the work of the same artist, the two surviving near-identical masks depict the queen mother with a highly naturalistic expression of effortless authority.7 Idia had been a powerful political figure who had emerged following a period of civil war. The peak of Queen Idia’s ivory crown consists of a row of tiny bearded faces, those of Portuguese merchants, partners in trade and further evidence of Benin’s fruitful relationship with Europeans, heralding the age of globalism.