[Music] [Music] me [Music] [Music] some of the finest bronze sculpture in the world was made in africa but most of this is now in european museums such as the british museum how did it get here these works were hit in the west african kingdom of benin situated in what is now nigeria the kingdom of benin has ancient origins but began to consolidate and develop with benin city as its center from the 13th century great moats were built around the city and the tradition of casting in copper alloys began to flourish most of the bunion artworks in museums today date from the 16th and 17th centuries although actually casting brass these sculptures made in benin are collectively known as the benin bronzes made using the highly skilled lost wax method these works are exquisitely detailed many of them are in the form of plaques which depict characters and events from benin history they were originally displayed in the royal palace there are also freestanding sculptures including commemorative heads of kings and queens would the ordinary people of benin have known about the benin bronzes we put this question to dr linda buckley a retired open university associate lecturer who has done extensive research on benin art and on how it ended up in europe they would be known to members of the court which would be the chiefs and i i think there must be knowledge in the city that these things existed but um they a lot of them were for um private religious ceremonies rather than being displayed in public um though the um i think bronze casting in benin was a well-known art and i believe that there were more um brass foundries and casters than just the royal ones to find out how the benin bronzes have come to be in europe we need to go back to the 19th century britain had been trading in various commodities with benin as an independent kingdom long before this but in the 19th century although the king or abba of benin maintained tight control on exports the trade relationship developed it was extremely well developed in some ways if you go right back to the 15th century they've been the european trade with portugal but then what was important after that the most important trade after that was probably the slave trade in which britain was very heavily involved um but then after that after the abolition of slavery at the beginning of the 19th century the uh the next stage really was what you could call exploitation of the local natural resources and in particular palm oil which was required in britain for really for the follow-on from the industrial revolution with the need to grease machinery literally keep the oars of industry turning but also used for things like soap and food stuffs as it still is in 1885 a british protectorate had been declared over the coast of nigeria seven years later in 1892 in an effort to improve trade relations with benin captain henry galway the new vice consul for the benin river section of the british protectorate travelled inland to benin city to sign a treaty with the oba in order to bring benin too under british protection what kind of man was galway oh i think he was terribly arrogant um he turned up at the obvious palace and really demanded to see the other now very impatient so i think that's something that comes through from the document that we've got um just impatient arrogant um goes without saying racist feeling superior um he was captain in the british army um which is really quite a low rank and he goes marching up to the obvious palace and demands to see the over no idea of the protocol involved in that keeps calling the chiefs liars and that he's been deceived and kept waiting for far too long and he doesn't come back and talking about far too important for all this and he's really treating with the the oba with contempt put that in context the other was the king of a very large and important kingdom the other was in charge of trade it has always been the obvious prerogative to control the trade so for this um young man i think he was in his 30s at the time just going and talking like that to the other was really quite outrageous in my view but did the obber actually sign this treaty i really don't think that he did um if he did it was great but with great reluctance um the uh document talks about how the his his big men his chiefs were might have signed it on his behalf um but he was reluctant to touch the pen um and if you think about it the whole idea of signing a treaty actually signing something signing a document even having a document you know something on paper is really quite alien to a culture which records its history in different ways um i mean the the bronzes for instance are um historical documents in their own right um but the the modern nigerian sources that i've looked at recently um all say that he almost certainly didn't sign whether the oba of benin signed the treaty or not trade continued to be tightly controlled by him this led to frustration among british traders industrialists and officials and by 1896 some were calling for armed intervention on the 2nd of january 1897 the acting consul general of the protectorate james phillips set off for benin city with a large party of men now the consul general at the time and philip superior was a man called ralph moore ralph moore was the i think he became the consul general in the mid um 1890s which meant that he was the senior government representative in eastern nigeria he was not a gentleman in the victorian sense in that he he entered the royal irish constabulary by exam he didn't have a background of public school um oxbridge educated sandhurst which was the typical background for um colonial administrators at the time um but i think he was probably from a reasonably lowly background and perhaps out of his comfort zone a bit with these um people of a higher social status um he now i think it's interesting that he's got this background in the royal life constabulary because working in ireland an englishman working in ireland in that capacity in the 1880s um in what was really a militaristic police force would have really given him a certain mindset when uh going off to uh to west africa um you can link this in with the stuff that you do on ireland in the course as well um but it's a time of um uh demand for land reform rise of nationalism the um irish republican brotherhood demands for home rule um all of these things are going on they're getting particularly strong by the 1880s um and i think the idea of the um the british constabulary which is really what the ric was at the time was to um really repress these ideas quite brutally at times so with that sort of background and the use of arms um and prejudice against the people that he's supposed to be keeping in control um really um set him up for his time in west africa reports at the time claimed that phillips and his party were unarmed or at least only lightly armed we asked linda if she thought this was true no i don't not really um this is something that i've been thinking about quite recently as well what had happened was that in november of 1896 when moore was actually on leave in london phillips had written to the foreign office requesting permission to uh go to the just to visit the other visit the oba to um remind him of the terms of the treaty that he had or hadn't signed uh earlier with galway um because the oba was increasingly reluctant to trade and that was upsetting the british government it was also upsetting the um particularly the um the big businessmen in liverpool um where the palm oil was taken into and i think there was a bit of a fear that um british industry was going to literally grind to a halt if they couldn't get this palm oil it was such a such an important commodity for them to get anyway phillips had written to um to london and said that she wanted to take an armed expedition uh which included um some cannon a maxim gun which had fairly recently been invented um a rocket apparatus he says um all together 400 soldiers and a fife and drum band which i rather like quite what he wants to do with that i don't know um now he set out on his expedition uh with 400 bearers who might have been thinly disguised as bearers rather than in their full uniform i think that he actually took all these armaments with him even though they were concealed in the baggage philip set out part of the way was um by boat um and then the last bit was trekking through the bush the jungle which is pretty arduous going i don't think that he would have gone without all these armaments if he would then have to come back collect them and then go back and have an armed raid so i think that his plan was to approach um ostensibly unarmed um and then um if any attacks occurred on him to rip out these all these these guns and whatever and bring out the dangerous weapon of the wife and drum band um and gone and dethroned the oba which was his clearly stated purpose of this expedition um he was uh asked by one particular group of chiefs not to approach benin at that particular time because the oba was involved in um important ritual religious services and whatever so he was asked to wait but he didn't he went on and a group of many soldiers then attacked the the the expedition this i think there were eight white men and 400 africans with them and they were attacked i think phillips might have been quite naive he was doing this without the authority of london um he seems to have had something of a brainstorm to just go ahead and and think that he could approach like this and um so he was killed all all the white men were killed except two who managed to um get back to the the coast get back to the uh headquarters of the um of the british um the african soldiers i think probably some of them were killed um i expect just a lot of them just melted away into the bush which would have been much easier for africans to do being used to the climate the territory and uh all the rest of it and they could easily have just sort of dissipated into the bush um so that was the end of phillips and the people that were with him but that was by no means the end of the matter the british authorities responded very quickly and dispatched a force of 1200 marines which began an advance on benin city on the 10th of february this was called the punitive expedition did the benin people also referred to as the bini stand much of a chance against this british force no there's a hilare balak poem from the time whatever happens we have got the maxim gone and they have not so they were really outgunned they were probably not outnumbered i think again it's a note of the arrogance of the british that they thought they could um make do with quite a small force um but they thought they could do this with a you know a fairly low number of troops because they expected the uh the bini just to give up and run away in fact they did put up a very good fight um but it was um they just weren't going to win after this fierce battle benning city was taken and much of it destroyed by fire the obbo was deposed some of his chiefs were executed and benion came under british rule it was during the conquest and looting of the city that the benin artworks were found by the british troops they were subsequently packed up and taken back to england as war booty and then sold off to pay for the punitive expedition they were sold to museums and private collectors so that's how they ended up in the european museums like the british museum and museums in germany and france news of the punitive expedition soon appeared in the british press reaction came very swiftly within a week there are newspaper articles appearing loads of them um really decrying this expedition and really stirring up a kind of storm of moral panic and i suppose giving uh justification for the punitive expedition to go ahead in in february this will be um straight after the phillips massacre um they i've got here um an extract from the daily telegraph of um january the 12th 1897 and it uses words like um a powerful theocracy of fetish priests famous for its human sacrifice and it says the the king of benin this tyrant would not allow his own people to crack palm kernels and sell gum or collect rubber that he turned back british subjects whoever endeavored to open up trade and that the produce of his country for outside commerce was lost so you've got on the one hand the the wickedness of the the people of benin particularly the oba and on the other hand um what was regarded as a civilizing mission of bringing trade um to uh to benin and how detrimental it is that um the oba won't allow this trade to go ahead um and it's it's this double-sided thing i mean really it's all about but it's all about palm oil you know yet another war overall we're familiar with them um different sort of oil a century ago but even so um there we go um and similarly um when the uh punitive expedition reached benin i think there's a an extract from um one of the sources in the document um documents that you've got um and this one um is uh the sheffield and independent wednesday the 24th of february 1897 so again it's very soon after the incident i think within a week or so of the incident this one talks about um the king of ben benin has at last been sharply made to understand that he cannot treat peaceful white men as he treats his wretched subjects and his capital is now in british hands um and it goes on about how the british had used this smartest tactics and the most sterling pluck um and it start stirs the heart of the british the work has been quickly and well done and i love this um this phrase well i don't love it i think it's horrific this writer says the king of benin by all accounts is the greatest scoundrel on hunger um so that really gives you a flavor of um what they were thinking about with all of that i think during the actual attack on benin um they set fire the british set fire to quite a small number of houses then the fire simply got out of control um and before then there'd been great earth works big walls around the city um which were said to be on the same sort of scale as the uh the great wall of china probably not in the same sort of length but that sort of um massive ramparts those caught fire and were destroyed and um i think they were probably completely all gone by now which weren't destroyed then would have been cleared by now for urban development and whatever so it really was the end of the city um the chiefs were captured um there was some sort of show trial most of them were hung um and this chap more that we spoke about earlier um got to know to yes one of the chiefs committed suicide um in his cell he was waiting for his trial um and he couldn't bear the humiliation um and i'm quoting here um major ralph moore determined to show the natives the power of the white man so he ordered the man's corpse to be hung in front of the ruined palace some of the officers and soldiers of the niger coast protectorate further desecrated the corpse by using it as target practice and this is the man that's bringing civilization the british press portrayed benin and its people the bini as barbaric which led to great puzzlement among academics when their artworks arrived in england how could such sophisticated art have been produced by such barbarous people they wondered one of the things british journalists and writers focused on was the practice of human sacrifice in benin there was human sacrifice an anthropologist writing in the 1950s ori bradbury who wrote an excellent book on uh on bernine maintains that um human sacrifice was part of the um of traditional religion um but what happened was that the 12 worst criminals who were due for execution uh were chosen they were executed and then they were the bodies were displayed on the crucifixion trees they were not crucifixion was not the method of execution um so it was probably public execution but then display of the bodies afterwards um and we might feel absolutely appalled by this and quite right too but there'd been public execution in britain until 1868 went on in the united states until 1936 and in france using the guillotine until 1939 the vending bronzes are now displayed in the british museum and other museums in britain and europe including france and germany they were firstly displayed as anthropological or ethnological artifacts but more recently they've been treated and presented more as artworks but how should they be properly understood probably um i think they can only really be understood in the context of edo ritual and edo religion which is to do with worshiping uh the head specifically of the father so when a man dies it is particularly his head that is worshipped um which might explain why there are so many representations of of heads that we we get in uh in this collection there's also a belief in reincarnation whereby when a man dies or even a woman dies the next child born in the family is a reincarnation of that particular individual so you get names which mean things like mother has returned or the brave warrior has come back to the house so it's and it's quite um those those sorts of names are still used an awful lot amongst uh uh both the yoruba and i believe edo as well um so i mean i believe that their art in the fact the way that they're made and they're beautiful and you can admire them and go and look at them and say wow you know so certainly all that associated with art but if you want me to start defining what is art paul i'm afraid we'll have to leave that to another day so whether we can fully appreciate or understand the bending bronzes while they remain outside of their original context remains an open question but many argue that since they were taken from bernina's war booty they should now be returned to benin this is an issue that will no doubt continue to be hotly debated in the meantime if you'd like to know more about the benin bronzes what they mean how they were made and how they ended up in europe go to the open university website and follow the links to the module a111 discovering the arts and humanities get more from the open university check out the links on screen now