Kingdom of Benin

A West African kingdom whose bronzes forced Europe to revise what it claimed about African art, after Europe had stolen them. Benin, in what is now southern Nigeria and unrelated to the modern republic of that name, was established by the Edo people and ruled by an oba from the thirteenth century. Its capital was surrounded by earthworks that may total more excavated volume than any comparable pre-industrial structure on earth, and Dutch visitors in the seventeenth century compared its broad streets and ordered layout favourably with Amsterdam. Guild workshops produced brass and bronze plaques and heads by lost-wax casting of a technical standard that European experts in 1897 refused to believe was African, proposing Portuguese or even Atlantean origins. That was the year a British punitive expedition burned the city, exiled the oba and removed several thousand objects, which were auctioned to cover the cost of the expedition and are now in museums across Europe and America. Restitution has begun slowly, with Germany transferring title in 2022. The kingdom traded pepper, ivory and enslaved people. Its guilds still work in Benin City. Benin City is now in Edo State in southern Nigeria. The kingdom's earthworks were surveyed in the twentieth century and run for thousands of kilometres in total. The obaship was restored in 1914 and continues today. Around a thousand of the looted objects are held by the British Museum alone. A new museum has been planned in Benin City to receive returns, though the question of who holds title has been contested.

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