AMERICAN CAMPAIGNERS OF THE Restitution Study Group have denounced as “blood metal” a collection of Benin bronzes the Smithsonian is in the process of sending back to Nigeria. The RSG, representing descendants of West African slaves, believes the move ignores their own legitimate claims. “Black people,” it says, “do not support enriching the heirs of slave traders just because they [too] are black.”
From 1946 to 1957 the British government purchased so-called Benin “bronzes” from the British Museum (described as duplicates) and at London auctions to give to museums in Lagos and Benin City. These were given to Nigeria at the new nation’s independence in 1960.
Brass rather than bronze, Benin’s oldest artworks are fine examples of lost-wax casting, a skill largely lost in Nigeria today. Many were made by melting the brass and copper ingots, often formed into bracelets known as manillas, which since the sixteenth-century Portuguese traders had exchanged with the obas (kings) of Benin for slaves, ivory and other goods.
was still keeping slaves as a blockade had made selling them almost impossible. Its oba had his human sacrifices crucified, beheaded or disembowelled. Meanwhile, British public opinion had been inflamed by the massacre of an unarmed expedition to Benin City in January 1897. Two Britons escaped to tell the story, and a punitive expedition was swiftly despatched, fighting through to the palace by 18 February and deposing the oba and his chiefs. The expedition’s surgeon Dr Felix Roth survived uninjured, though surgeon C.J. Fyfe RN was shot dead while tending the wounded. This extract from Roth’s journal for
