Kingdom of Benin

A slave buried near the king

formationDrafted from Roth, Great Benin: Its Customs, Art and Horrors (1903)

The founding tradition Roth collected from Captain Roupell's court informants at Benin runs like this: the people of the country sent to Ife, the holy Yoruba city, for a king, and Eweka came to them with a few men. He advanced through the land slowly, fighting whoever resisted and talking cunningly with whoever proved too strong to fight, and his men took local wives as they went; when they had children they sent for their families and settled where Eweka had chosen to rule. When Eweka arrived at what became Benin City he found only a small town, a scattering of houses. He bought a slave named Ubini, and when the man died Eweka buried him nearby and decreed that anyone asking the name of the country should be told Ubini, or Aiye - the name, in one form or another, the kingdom carried for the rest of its history.

A dynasty, not a single date

Roth is candid that no reliable date attaches to any of this. The tradition that the Bini kings came from the west runs against other accounts of the migration, and the sheer length of the king list - his informants named twenty-three rulers before the last king's own deposition, not counting several minor kings who reigned only briefly

• makes any confident count of years next to impossible. Comparing that list to other dynasties' own average reign lengths, from the kings of England to the Askia rulers of Songhai, Roth judges the Benin tradition likely to have dropped rulers rather than exaggerated their individual reigns - a founding story preserved carefully enough to survive centuries of retelling, but never anchored to a single fixed year the way the kingdom's own later contact with Europe would be.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York · Roth, Great Benin: Its Customs, Art and Horrors (1903) · Metropolitan Museum of Art · CC0

A hundred thousand men in a day

expansionDrafted from Roth, Great Benin: Its Customs, Art and Horrors (1903)

Eweka's own slow advance through the country, fighting whoever resisted and talking with whoever proved too strong to fight, did not stop once the kingdom had a capital. Roth's Dutch and Portuguese sources describe a state still actively making war on its neighbours for as long as anyone was writing about it.

The Dutch chronicler Dapper, whose account Roth translates in full, is direct about the scale of it: the king of Benin "wages great wars against the neighbouring kings" to the east and north, conquering their towns and villages for booty of jasper and other goods, and could put twenty thousand armed men in the field in a single day - eighty or a hundred thousand if the occasion demanded it. It was enough, Dapper says, to make Benin "much dreaded by all the surrounding peoples."

The field marshal

Command of that army belonged to a single office, the Owe-Asserry - field marshal, or war captain - who held what Dapper calls supreme power, entitled to act like the king himself for the campaign's duration. Nobles going to war dressed for it deliberately: scarlet cloth bought from the Dutch, collars of elephant tusk strung with leopard teeth, tall red caps trimmed with leopard or civet skin and trailing a horsetail ornament. Common soldiers fought half-naked above the waist. Discipline was strict enough that nobody was permitted to yield a step even facing death, and the field marshal alone took the booty - unless a man managed to keep something back secretly - which did not stop the army from thanking the king for the honour of being sent to fight for him.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York · Roth, Great Benin: Its Customs, Art and Horrors (1903) · Metropolitan Museum of Art · CC0

What conquest did not do

Submission, once made, did not mean confiscation. A conquered people became subject to Benin, but individuals were not enslaved outright, and farmland and other property were not seized by the victors - a distinction Roth's sources draw explicitly, and one that helped a state built substantially on war absorb one neighbour after another without needing to hold each of them down by force afterward.

It was this machinery - a standing capacity for tens of thousands of men, a war captain empowered to act as the king's own equal in the field, and a conquest that left a defeated people its land - that turned Eweka's original slow advance from Ife into a kingdom powerful enough, two centuries later, to be the first thing a Portuguese sailing captain thought worth describing to his own king.

Tailed pepper for Flanders

peakDrafted from Roth, Great Benin: Its Customs, Art and Horrors (1903)

Portugal reached Benin by accident of a coastal survey. King Afonso V had contracted the explorer Fernão Gomes in 1469 to chart a hundred leagues of West African coast a year for five years, and by 1486 João Afonso de Aveiro had gone far enough to give Europe its first real account of the city - reproduced by Roth from Ruy de Pina's own chronicle: "the land of Beny was for the first time discovered beyond the Mine... It was from there that came to these Kingdoms the Guinea Pepper." Aveiro himself died there. What he opened, though, outlasted him: the King of Benin sent his own captain at the port of Gwato back to Portugal as ambassador, "a man of prudence and natural knowledge," who returned laden with gifts, dresses for himself and his wife, and a royal message urging the Benin king to embrace Christianity.

An embassy that kept returning

The relationship proved durable enough to survive Portugal's own disappointment that Benin's pepper and trade never matched the profits of the Indies. A 1516 letter from the trader Duarte Pires to the Portuguese king, quoted at length by Roth, describes missionaries accompanying the Benin king to war for a full year because the "great mystery" - baptism - could only be performed once peace returned; at the war's end, in August, the king had his own son and two of his leading nobles baptised, built a church, and set them to learning to read. The tenth king in the dynasty's own list, Esigie, presided over this era of contact - by the reckoning Roth's informants gave him, the white men arrived 424 years before the last king's own deposition, making Esigie's reign the documented hinge between a purely oral tradition and a kingdom whose affairs Portuguese, and later Dutch and English, chroniclers began recording in real detail.

What the trade actually brought home

The material exchange between the two courts was modest by the scale of Portugal's own Indian Ocean ambitions - a spice prized briefly in Flanders, slaves bought with brass and copper bracelets called manillas, ivory and pepper moving out through the port of Gwato - but it opened a channel that ran for centuries afterward, outlasting every later European power's own disappointment with what Benin actually had to sell. The bronze plaques that would later make the kingdom famous across the world already depict European visitors by this period: soldiers in feathered hats, matchlocks in hand, a record in cast metal of exactly the contact Aveiro's own voyage had opened.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York · Roth, Great Benin: Its Customs, Art and Horrors (1903) · Metropolitan Museum of Art · CC0

A city that shrank inside its own walls

contractionDrafted from Roth, Great Benin: Its Customs, Art and Horrors (1903)

The Dutch traders who followed the Portuguese found a kingdom still worth describing in superlatives. By the time European visitors' accounts thin out in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they describe something smaller.

Roth, Great Benin: Its Customs, Art and Horrors (1903) · Jacob van Meurs · Public domain

Nyendael, a Dutch agent at Benin around 1700, recorded a court capable of executing a man for losing a string of coral he had been granted as a mark of office - five men put to death at once over a single stolen chain "not worth twopence," by his own account, and a Portuguese sailor's killer held in prison for a year awaiting a punishment severe enough to satisfy the next Portuguese ship that came asking for justice. It is a picture of a state that still ruled by fear as thoroughly as ever. It was not, on the same evidence, a state at peace with itself.

The civil war

Lieutenant King, visiting decades later, found a city that had been "depopulated by a civil war" and never fully recovered: walls largely destroyed, and an inhabited circumference of no more than two or three miles where the kingdom's own earlier extent had been far greater. Roth's sources do not give the civil war a date anyone can be confident of, only its result - a capital that had shrunk inside its own perimeter and stayed that size.

Trade that stopped paying

The same decades saw Benin's European trade lose the importance it had held under the Portuguese. Roth notes plainly that the country's own disappointing returns - pepper and ivory that never matched the profits of Portugal's Indian Ocean trade, a market the Dutch found tedious and overregulated even by the standards of the West African coast - meant that European visitors, Portuguese and Dutch alike, did not stay long at a time and eventually withdrew their own permanent presence from the city altogether. Roth reads the fall-off in the bronze plaques' own artistic quality as running in parallel with it: a "quasi-civilization" that had received a real impetus from the Portuguese contact, declined as that trade decayed, had a second partial revival with the Dutch, and declined again once that too faded.

What stayed the same

The kingship itself did not weaken in the way its trade or its territory did. The court Nyendael described still commanded absolute obedience over matters as small as a coral chain; the army Dapper had described a century earlier was still, by every account down to 1897, capable of being called out in force. What contracted was Benin's own reach outward - the city it ruled from, the profit foreigners found in trading with it, the territory its wars had once absorbed - not the authority the king held inside what remained.

Warnings unheeded at Gwato

endDrafted from Roth, Great Benin: Its Customs, Art and Horrors (1903)

Overami, the twenty-third king in Roth's own list, came to the throne in circumstances his account describes as tense from the start. Two of his father Adola's wives were pregnant at the same time; the guardian charged with reporting the birth of Overami's own half- brother Orukotu was slow to send word, while Overami's own birth was announced first, and by the country's own custom the child announced first, not the child born first, was recognized as heir. Orukotu's own supporters tried to overturn the decision when Adola died, and Roth's informant Mr. Punch recalled "awful stories" of the killing that followed - partly funeral sacrifice for the old king, partly the suppression of an open revolt in Orukotu's name. Overami secured the throne, and, aware of how large a faction still opposed him, leaned openly on European support to shore up his own position for the rest of his reign.

Roth, Great Benin: Its Customs, Art and Horrors (1903) · Jonathan Adagogo Green · Public domain

An unarmed mission ignored its own warning

That reign ended over a trade dispute four centuries after Aveiro's first visit. Acting Consul-General James Phillips organized a mission to Benin City in late 1896, deliberately unarmed so as not to alarm the king or his own people; local chiefs, including two Roth names directly, Dore and Dudu, begged Phillips not to proceed. He went anyway. The mission left Sapele on 2 January 1897 and set out from Gwato on the 4th; within hours all but two of the mission's white members, and a large number of their African carriers, were killed. Roth records the toll as seven Europeans dead, the disaster described in full by one of the two survivors, Captain Boisragon, in a book published the same year.

A city captured, then lost to fire

The British government could not let the massacre stand. Admiral Sir Harry Rawson led a Punitive Expedition that captured Benin City by 17 February 1897; the city was afterward destroyed by a fire, Roth notes, "which the soldiery was unable to stem" - an accidental conflagration rather than a deliberate razing, but one that consumed the physical capital of a kingdom whose own bronze plaques and ivories, looted in the expedition's aftermath, would end up scattered through museum collections across Europe. Overami's own reign, and the kingdom's independence with it, ended in the expedition's wake - a dynasty whose founding legend described careful, patient conquest by persuasion and force in equal measure, closed out instead in a matter of weeks by a war neither side had set out, at the start of the year, to fight.

Scattered, then sent back

afterlifeDrafted from Berlin, Return of Benin Bronzes from the Ethnologisches Museum (2022)

The Punitive Expedition's soldiers found the bronzes and ivories the kingdom had spent centuries casting and carving where the palace's own alcoves and walls kept them - Roth's brother Felix, an army surgeon with the expedition, described clay figures on raised steps in every house, strings of cowrie shells around their necks, and a "large part of the loot" embedded directly in the walls themselves, so that soldiers testing for hidden cavities sometimes put their hands into the bodies built into them.

Berlin, Return of Benin Bronzes from the Ethnologisches Museum (2022) · Reginald Granville · Public domain

What happened to that material afterward happened fast. Within six years of the city's capture, the British Museum held enough of it to be illustrated in a paper by Charles Read and Ormonde Dalton for the Anthropological Institute, and Roth's own 1903 book - compiled from museum access the trustees granted him directly - draws on collections already sitting in Liverpool as well as London. A body of art that had been made for one palace was, within a decade of that palace burning, distributed across museum collections in Britain before the rest of the twentieth century carried it further still, into Germany, the United States and elsewhere.

A century of return

The reckoning with that dispersal became, eventually, formal. In July 2022 Germany and Nigeria signed a joint declaration transferring ownership of the Benin material in German public collections, and that August the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin - holder of the largest Benin collection in Europe after the British Museum itself - transferred title to 512 objects outright, keeping roughly a third of them on loan in Berlin for an initial ten years while a new museum was built near the royal palace at Benin City to house the rest. Germany's own account of the transfer calls it the largest return of ownership of museum objects from a colonial context to date. Other institutions holding Benin material have faced the same question since, with answers ranging from full transfer to continued display.

Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin · Berlin, Return of Benin Bronzes from the Ethnologisches Museum (2022) · Bin im Garten · CC BY-SA 3.0

What the palace kept

The kingdom the Punitive Expedition ended did not simply vanish along with its art. The Oba's title survived the conquest as a recognised traditional authority within Nigeria, the same royal line Roth's informants had traced back to Eweka continuing to hold it. A monarchy stripped of its own independence and most of the metal record of its own history in a single week in 1897 nonetheless kept the one thing no soldier could carry off: the throne itself, and the family that has occupied it since before any European ship reached the coast it sits on.