Lost history · 1897–2021
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After British troops took Benin City in 1897, the treasures of the palace were not just carried off. Many were sold at a London auction room to help pay for the expedition. Benin's art ended up scattered across Europe, and only now is some of it coming home.
In 1892 the British signed a treaty with Benin, known after its British negotiator as the Gallwey treaty. Britain read it as giving it a say over Benin's trade. Benin's ruler, Oba Ovonramwen, did not see things the same way. For years the two sides circled each other.
At the end of December 1896, a British officer named Phillips set out for Benin City with a party of about 250 people. He did not have approval from his superiors for the trip. Worse, he chose to travel during the Igue festival, one of the holiest times in the Benin calendar. The Oba sent word asking Phillips to wait, about a month, until the festival was over.
Phillips did not wait. On 4 January 1897, near Ugbine on the road from Gwatto, his party was attacked. Only two officers, Boisragon and Locke, survived to tell the story.
For the British, this was the excuse they needed. Within weeks a large force was being put together. Rawson led about 1,200 men into Benin territory, starting on 9 February. On 18 February, Benin City fell. Three days later, on 21 February, the palace caught fire and burned.
The figures tell their own story. Eight British were killed in the attack on the city. Nobody counted the Benin dead. Ovonramwen was captured and sent into exile in Calabar, far to the east. Six chiefs were hanged. A kingdom that had stood for centuries was broken in a matter of weeks, and its king was taken away to live out his days among strangers.
But the burning of the palace was not the end of what happened to Benin's treasures. In some ways it was the beginning.
The palace held thousands of objects: cast bronze plaques and heads, and other works made over centuries for the Oba and his court. British soldiers took them. Around 2,500 objects officially went back to Britain. About 40 percent of those went to the British Museum.
The rest were treated as something else: a way of paying the bill. The expedition had cost money, and the Admiralty set out to recover some of it by selling what had been taken. On 25 May 1897, barely three months after the city fell, Benin objects went under the hammer at Stevens Auction Rooms, 38 King Street, in central London.
Read that again. The art of a living kingdom, taken from a burning palace, was auctioned in a London sale room to defray the costs of the war that destroyed it. The people of Benin effectively paid for their own conquest, with their own heritage.
It did not stop with one sale. Between 1898 and 1900, a dealer named W.D. Webster, based in Bicester, sold many more Benin pieces. Much of what he sold was bought by museums in Germany. That is part of why so many Benin Bronzes ended up not just in London, but in Berlin and other German cities, and in collections across Europe and beyond.
So when people talk about "the Benin Bronzes", they are not talking about a single collection that could simply be handed back. They are talking about thousands of pieces spread out by the sale room and the dealer's catalogue, passing through many hands, into many institutions, over more than a century.
For most of the twentieth century, the Bronzes were treated in Europe as museum treasures and world art. In Benin, they were remembered as something stolen. The call for them to come back grew louder over the decades.
In October 2021, two British institutions acted within a day of each other. On 27 October 2021, Jesus College at the University of Cambridge returned an okukor, a bronze cockerel. The next day, 28 October 2021, the University of Aberdeen handed back a bronze head of an Oba. They were small numbers compared with what was taken. But they were real objects going home, from the country that had taken them.
Nigeria has also settled the question of who the returned works belong to. Under Nigerian policy, Benin Bronzes that come back are given to the Oba of Benin, Ewuare II. In other words, they go back to the throne that commissioned them in the first place, more than a century after they were carried out of a burning palace.
It is a strange circle. In 1897 the Oba lost his palace, his freedom and his treasures, and the treasures were sold to cover the costs of the men who took them. Today the reigning Oba receives them back, one piece at a time.
The next time you see a Benin plaque or head in a museum, it is worth asking a simple question: how did it get here? For many of them, the honest answer starts with a fire in February 1897, and an auction room on King Street a few months later.
