Benin

This is part of my own initiative to open up more topics on areas that are under-represented in the forum, in this case the history of Africa.

This topic's introduction, along with the other ones, is pulled from the webiste of one of our members, Berosus, who has this site below. I find his entries on Middle-Eastern history somewhat arguable (since he's writing from a Bibilical viewpoint), but his articles on the history of the rest of the world are quite good.

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/

And now, the feature article:

Benin

The Nigerian cultures we looked at previously--those of Nok, Igbo Ukwu and Ife--were all forerunners to the splendid civilization of Benin. Located just above the Niger delta, Benin's rulers claimed direct descent from the Yoruba kings of Ife, though most of Benin's people were from the Bini (Edo) tribe. According to legend, the first oba, or king of Benin, was Oranmiyan, and he took the crown in 1176 A.D. However, the kingdom remained just another city-state for two centuries, with the real rise to greatness beginning under Ewuare the Great, who ruled from 1440 to 1473. Oral histories credit him with being not only a wise ruler, but also an excellent musician, doctor and warrior; he was said to have a gaze so potent that he had to put a veil over his face to keep from harming others with a glance. He claimed to have captured 201 towns and villages, giving Benin wealth on an imperial scale. With such resources, Ewuare commanded the building of an earthen wall around his palace, seven miles long, as much as thirty feet high in some places, with nine fortified gates and a moat 50 feet deep. Graham Connah, the British archaeologist who excavated the walls in the 1960s, estimated that this project would have required a thousand laborers, working ten hours a day, seven days a week, for five dry seasons. Even more impressive were the walls in the countryside, stretching between 4,000 and 8,000 miles, to mark the boundaries between city-states; these would have taken 150 million man-hours, spread over several centuries, to complete.
Fern�o Gomes, the Portuguese explorer, discovered Benin in 1473, the year of Ewuare's death. The people of Benin took an immediate interest in European products like velvet, firearms, saddles, candied fruit and gilded mirrors, so trade quickly developed; the next two kings built Lagos as a new trade port. Ewuare's grandson, Esigie (1504-50), went so far in promoting trade that he learned to speak and read Portuguese. When other Europeans made contact, Benin was willing to trade with them, too. However, to do business here took time. Merchants had to go through the oba's agents, who would greet them at the port in their finest costumes, wearing necklaces of jasper or coral. After the initial pleasantries, the agents would ask for news from the country of the merchants' origin, and distribute gifts of fruit. This would be followed by drinking if the visitors wished, and on the second day they would begin bargaining--which sometimes went on for months. Richard Eden, an English trader, wrote the following about these African capitalists in 1590: "They are a very wary people in their bargaining, and will not lose one sparke of golde of any value. They use weights and measures, and are very circumspect in occupying the same." All this attention to commerce paid off. By 1600, Benin City had an estimated population of 60,000, and it was so rich that the residents reportedly greeted each other by saying, "Thank God, what wealth has done for me!"

Some of our best information on Benin in its heyday comes from A Description Of Guinea, a travel guide written for Dutch businessmen by Pieter de Marees in 1602. Marees quoted many travelers to West Africa, notably one D.R. (Dierick Ruyters?), who was impressed by the size of Benin City:

"[The city is] very great when you go into it [for] you enter a great broad street, not paved, which seems to be seven or eight times broader than the Warmoes street in Amsterdam; it goes straight in and never bends." Ruyters went on to report that his lodgings were "at least a quarter of an hour's going from the gate, and yet I could still not see to the end of the street." And the side streets branching from the main one looked just as long: "You cannot see to the end of them because of their great length."

Sixty years later, another Dutch visitor, Olfert Dapper, wrote that the king's palace was a complex of buildings and courtyards that "occupies as much space as the town of Haarlem and is enclosed within walls. There are numerous apartments for the Prince's ministers, and fine galleries most of which are as big as those on the Exchange at Amsterdam. They are supported by wooden pillars encased with bronze, where their victories are depicted, and which are carefully kept very clean." Here he is referring to the bronze plaques which were made to commemorate important events, because like most of Black Africa at this time, Benin did not have its own writing system. They also made portrait heads of kings and queens, like the Ife culture had done, and sometimes they decorated them with coral beads or sprinkled them with blood from human sacrifices, believing these extreme measures were needed to keep the kingdom strong and prosperous.(23)

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Four examples of the spectacular bronzes produced by Benin's artisans. Clockwise from the top left: head of a king, head of a queen, a plaque showing the oba and two attendants, a rooster. From WorldArt Web Kiosk.

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Dapper, like his predecessors, was also careful to remind readers that in Benin they weren't dealing with savages, but with an advanced, sophisticated people: "These Negroes are much more civilized than others on this coast. They are people who have good laws and a well-organized police; who live on good terms with the Dutch and other foreigners who come to trade with them, and to whom they show a thousand marks of friendship." To the Europeans they not only sold traditional commodities like ivory and slaves(24), but also locally made textiles, jasper, leopard skins, and pepper. As time went on, they acquired tastes for new products the Europeans brought them, like silk, cotton, glasswork, cowrie shells from the Indian Ocean (used as currency in much of West Africa), tobacco and liquor.
The oba of Benin was treated much like a pharaoh; he was an absolute monarch whose every command would be instantly obeyed, and was such an important agent of the gods that anyone who didn't see him as godlike could be executed as a heretic. However, he was also kept so busy with the required ceremonies and sacrifices that most governing matters went to a council of ministers, and he had to build the queen mother's palace a few miles away from his own to keep herself and her retinue from meddling in politics.

Indeed, the obas withdrew from politics after 1550, though they appear to have maintained a tremendous amount of influence even when they didn't leave the palace. The routine of life went on in Benin for the next two centuries, with little awareness of how changing conditions in the outside world could affect them. In the eighteenth century, the ban on selling male slaves was lifted, in an effort to keep up with rival kingdoms. According to some accounts, the oba could mobilize 100,000 warriors in a day's notice, so maybe he felt that as long as he had the troops to capture slaves, he didn't have to worry about other sectors of the economy collapsing, like agriculture. When things went wrong for Benin in the nineteenth century, the oba thought the traditional solution, more human sacrifices, would cause the devil to leave him alone; instead it caused the kingdom to commit suicide, as we will see in the next chapter.