The Punitive Expedition of 1897 and the Benin Bronzes

Many cultural objects and works of art were taken from the Kingdom of Benin in western Africa in 1897, in what is typically described as a punitive raid or a punitive expedition by the British. In the last few years, some nations and institutions have committed to returning these pieces, but only a few have actually been returned at this point.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We have
talked about the artwork and other objects that have come
to be known as the Benin Bronzes on several installments

(00:24):
of Unearthed, including our most recent one. We also mentioned
these pieces briefly at the end of our two parter
I'm Lord Elegant and the Parthenon Marbles. We have not
talked in detail, though, about how these cultural objects and
works of art were taken from the Kingdom of Benin
in Western Africa in the first place. What's happened in

(00:48):
in what's typically described as a punitive raid or punitive
expedition by the British. This is in an area that
is part of Edo State in Nigeria. Today, the most
most visible calls for the return of the Benin Bronzes
started in the nineteen seventies, and they've really escalated over
the past decade or so and the last few years.

(01:11):
Some nations and institutions have committed to returning these pieces,
but only a few have actually been returned at this point,
including at least two that came from a private individual.
So that is what we're going to talk about today,
and just a heads up, there's a lot of heavy
material in this episode, including slavery and colonialism, a lot

(01:32):
of warfare and human sacrifice. The Kingdom of Benin was
founded by the Edo people also known as the Beanie
by about the eleventh century, and it's governed by the
Oba and his court. This kingdom really started to flourish
around the thirteenth century, including rebuilding the capital, which was
originally named as Edo and today is known as Benin City.

(01:54):
This capital was surrounded by ditches and earthwork walls, which
also sectioned off parts of the city's interior. Although many
of these walls are no longer standing, they're believed to
have totalled a greater length than the Great Wall of China.
According to ethno mathematician Ron Egglash, author of African Fractals,
the city was laid out as a fractal in a

(02:17):
pattern that was repeated on a smaller scale within compounds
and then individual houses and then rooms. These widely quoted
as saying that Europeans who first encountered this type of
planning found it chaotic and disorganized, not realizing the underlying
pattern that was involved. But that is really not how

(02:38):
early visitors to the Kingdom of Benim described the capital.
Multiple European accounts from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries
described the city and its palaces as impressive and orderly,
with comparisons to various cities in Europe. Dutch doctor Olford
Dapper described the compound housing the king's court as quote

(03:01):
easily as big as the town of Harlem in sixteen
sixty eight. As another example, in sixteen nine, one Portuguese
captain Lorenzo Pinto wrote, quote, great Benin, where the king resides,
is larger than Lisbon. All the streets run straight, and
as far as the eye can see, the houses are large,
especially that of the king, which is richly decorated and

(03:24):
has fine columns. The city is wealthy and industrious. It
is so well governed that theft is unknown, and the
people live in such security that they have no doors
to their houses. The Portuguese had been the first Europeans
to make contact with the Kingdom of Benin, and the
two nations started a trading relationship, with Portugal establishing an

(03:46):
embassy at the OBUs court, and Benin sending ambassadors to
Portugal as well. Benin became wealthier through its trade with Portugal,
with Benin's exports including gold, paper, ivory, fabric, animal skins,
and palm oil. Benin had a guild system for artists
and crafts people who worked in materials like ivory, wood,

(04:09):
and brass. Although this artwork and the techniques used to
produce it were developed before contact with Europeans, they really
flourished thanks to Portugal's use of brass as a trade good.
The kingdom's artist used lost wax casting methods to make
brass plaques detailing the kingdom's history, as well as life
size heads of leaders, ancestors, and historical figures. Eventually, Benin's

(04:34):
exports to Europe and its colonies included enslaved people. This
was a smaller part of Benin's economy than that of
many other kingdoms, including Dahome, which we've covered on the
show previously. Captain John Adams, who was in the area
between seventeen eighty six and eighteen hundred, noted that ivory
was a more important part of Benin's trade. One of

(04:57):
the likely reasons for Benin's compare of least smaller involvement
in the slave trade is that the Oba outlawed the
enslavement and sale of males in the early nineteenth century,
and there wasn't as much demand for enslaved women and girls.
From the fifteenth through late nineteen centuries. Most of what
Europeans knew about the Kingdom of Benin came from the

(05:19):
writing of traders and travel writers, including British, Portuguese and
Dutch travel writers, who wrote about their experiences in various
parts of the kingdom. None of the people writing these
accounts stayed long enough to get a thorough sense of
the kingdom's history or culture. They were visitors writing about
their general impressions of the kingdom, cities and towns, and

(05:39):
its people. And if you're thinking what about missionaries, the
Christian missionaries who went to the Kingdom of Benin before
the nineteenth century didn't really establish a huge presence there.
Although some people did convert to Christianity, in general, the
high ranking people, including the Oba, did not. Europeans who
tried to of in this area also faced things like

(06:02):
malaria and other diseases. They didn't have any resistance to
or experience with, so illnesses and deaths were really common.
In general, most mission projects in Benin during this period
did not last long. Eventually, Britain replaced Portugal as Benin's
primary trading partner. Britain was deeply involved in the slave

(06:23):
trade from Western Africa, and its trade with Benin included
trafficking enslaved people. After Britain passed the Abolition of the
Slave Trade Act in eighteen o seven, it started pressuring
African kingdoms and nations that it had relationships with to
end their own involvement in slavery, including the Kingdom of Benin.
As that happened, palm oil became an increasingly large part

(06:46):
of Benin's exports to Britain. This was especially true as
the Industrial Revolution progressed, since, in addition to its use
in cooking and to make soap, palm oil was used
as an industrial lubric him. By the late nineteenth century,
two things were happening that dramatically affected Britain's relationship with Benin.

(07:07):
The first was Benin's approach to trade. The Oba had
a monopoly on all trade, most of it conducted through
the port of Ugoton also known as Gutau. Anyone trading
at the market paid tribute to the OBA, and the
OBA controlled what was available. People were not paying tribute
or were otherwise breaking trade agreements they had with the OBA,

(07:28):
than the OBA could shut down the market entirely. So
as Britain became increasingly reliant on palm oil and also
wanted more access to Benin's other trade goods, merchants and
traders became increasingly frustrated by the oba's restrictions. For example,
a Mr. Brown Ridge, who was an agent for a
merchant company wrote in a letter quote, if Benin was

(07:51):
under proper government and the resources of the country properly developed,
I am firmly of the opinion that the exports would
be very great. So long as the King of Benin
is allowed to carry on what he is doing at present,
it means simply lost to the merchants, as also the protectorate.
That word protectorate ties to the other interconnected piece of

(08:12):
this that was the Scramble for Africa. In the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European powers aggressively expanded their
colonial interests and attempts to control the African continent. British
consul Edward Hewitt started trying to sign treaties with various
monarchs in Western Africa in eighteen eighty four, including along

(08:33):
the coast of what's now Nigeria. By that point, Britain
had been involved in various parts of Africa for decades,
so this was really a ramping up of its earlier involvement.
Through this process, Britain claimed multiple kingdoms in West Africa
under its protectorates, and at first this mostly prevented them

(08:54):
from making similar agreements with other European nations. But beyond that, again,
at least at first, Britain was relatively hands off. Years
could pass between Britain adding a West African kingdom to
one of its protectorates and Britain really taking concrete steps
to control the area. Britain's activities in Africa went way

(09:15):
beyond what was happening in West Africa, but that's really
the part we're focused on here from the European point
of view. Many of these claims to territory in West
Africa were negotiated at the Berlin Conference also known as
the Berlin West Africa Conference, which ran from November fifteen
eighty four to February eighteen eighty five. At this conference,

(09:37):
European nations mapped out which of them had the strongest
claims to what territory and set standards for trade among
those regions. The thousands of kingdoms, nations, and ethnic groups
in Africa were not part of this negotiation at all,
and there were no provisions for their involvement in their
own governance. Just in terms of the region that later

(09:58):
became known as Nigeria, there were at least two hundred
fifty different ethnic groups involved. Much of what's now Nigeria
today was outlined as British territory, but in practice Britain's
influence didn't extend very far from the coast. British efforts
to lay claims to the interior of the Kingdom of
Benin and to secure free trading rights with the Kingdom

(10:21):
ultimately led it to pursue this punitive expedition. Who will
have more about that after a sponsor break. Although early
European accounts of the Kingdom of Benin had described it
as large, impressive, and orderly, during the late eighteenth and

(10:45):
early nineteenth centuries, the kingdom had struggled. Both the Transatlantic
slave trade and its abolition had affected the whole region dramatically,
not just the Kingdom of Benin, so had the annexation
of various African kingdoms by European powers, which we just discussed,
and the Kingdom of Bening specifically. There was also a

(11:06):
war over the Oba's line of succession that started in
the mid nineteenth century. Throughout all of this, Benin had
also been under increasing pressure from Britain to open up
and expand its trade, especially its trade in palm oil.
In eight, Captain Henry Galwi, deputy Commissioner and Vice Consul
of the Benin District of the Oil River Protectorate, traveled

(11:28):
to the capitol to try to get the Oba to
sign a treaty with the British government. The Oba, named
Ovan Romwin, seems to have verbally agreed to sign this treaty,
but once the signing ceremony actually took place, he refused
to touch the pen. A member of his court reportedly
signed on his behalf. There are so many different interpretations

(11:51):
and conflicting accounts of this moment. The Oba ruled by
divine right as the kingdom's sovereign and its military commander,
and up on his ascension as monarch, he was also
understood to embody the kingdom's whole history and heritage. But
Galway has been described as rude and arrogant, and either

(12:12):
ignorant of the protocols involved with negotiating of the monarch
of the Kingdom of Benin, or just not even considering
those protocols to be something worth his notice. Some scholars
have concluded that Ovan Romwin had verbally agreed to sign
the Galway Treaty when he thought it was just a
simple agreement of peace and friendship, but once the signing

(12:34):
ceremony was happening and its interpreter read its actual terms,
terms that stripped the Kingdom of Benin of its sovereignty,
then he refused. Opinions also differ about whether Ovan Romwin
signed the treaty through a proxy, under duress, or did
not sign it at all. What's most clear is that
Britain and Benin did not have the same understanding of

(12:56):
this treaty and whether the Kingdom of Benin was bound
to its terms. One of the treaty's provisions established free
trade within the Opus territory, but four years later, in
eighteen ninety six, Benin was still approaching trade as a
monopoly that was entirely the ops prerogative. This had led

(13:17):
to armed conflicts in some of the kingdom's more outlying
villages and towns, and British officials based increasing pressure for
merchants and traders to force Benin to abide by the
treaty terms. British officials, including Galway, wrote that removing the
Oba would be good for British trade. Consul General Ralph

(13:38):
Moore wrote to the Foreign Office on June fourteenth, eighteen
ninety six, saying that if they were not successful in
getting a better trade arrangement by the dry season, quote,
an expeditionary four should be sent about January or February
to remove the king and his juju men. In another letter,
More also said that such an expedition could quote prov

(14:00):
the horrible human sacrifices and cruelties which were continually taking
place therein. We will return to that idea in a bit.
But More later went on leave. He returns to England
and James Phillips was made acting Consul General in his absence.
Moore had instructed Phillips to wait for his return, but

(14:21):
instead Phillips wrote to the Obah himself, seeking an audience.
The Oba replied that he was not available. He was
observing a period of seclusion and preparation leading up to
the Festival of Iguay, which is the Kingdom of Benin's
most important cultural and religious festival. It's one that both
honors the Oba and his ancestors and blesses the kingdom.

(14:43):
The Obo's preparation for this festival are a time of
spiritual cleansing and prayer. Customarily, foreigners are not allowed into
the Oba's presence during this preparatory period or during the
festival itself. So Ovian Romwin indicated that he would send
a messenger in about a month to work at a
time for Phillips and an attendant to visit. Phillips did

(15:04):
not wait for this messenger, though. On November sixteenth, eighteen
ninety six, he wrote to the Foreign Office seeking quote
permission to visit Benean City in February next to depose
and remove the King of Benin, and to establish a
native council in his place, and take such further steps
for the opening up of the country as the occasion
may require. He suggested that this exhibition might pay for

(15:28):
itself thanks to stores of ivory that he expected to
find in the palace which could be seized and sold.
Phillips did not wait for a response to this either.
On January second, eighteen ninety seven, he left for Benien
City with a retinue that included eight British officials, at
least two hundred local porters, and a pipe and drum corps.

(15:52):
In some accounts, these porters and the pipes and drums
were really hired African soldiers in disguise. The party as
you really described as being unarmed. But there was also
correspondence going on between various British offices during this period
about what would be needed for an expedition to remove
the OBA. One such letter describes four hundred armed African

(16:16):
troops to seven pounder guns, a Maxim which was an
early machine gun, and a rocket apparatus that belonged to
the Niger Coast Protectorate Force. It's likely that at least
the British officials in this expedition were provided with weapons,
but it's possible that those weapons were packed in their

(16:37):
baggage rather than being carried on their persons. As Phillips
and his party approached Beneen City, they were stopped and
told to turn back. Again. The city was in the
middle of observing its most important cultural and religious festival
when Phillips refused, the oba's fighting force attacked, something that
was done without the oba's knowledge or approval. Phillips most

(17:00):
of his party were killed and only two British officials
escaped the attack. This became known as the Benin massacre,
and the British Admiralty learned about it on January eleven,
eight seven. That was the day after it had sent
word to Phillips ordering him to postpone the expedition because
a large enough fighting force couldn't be raised in time

(17:22):
to carry it out. When the Admiralty learned about this,
it mounted a punitive expedition of twelve hundred men under
the leadership of Sir Harry Rawson. This force divided into
three columns, one of them under the command of Henry Galway.
They departed for Beneen City on February ninth, burning outlying

(17:42):
villages and killing civilians and soldiers who resisted as they went.
Armed combatants were not the only people who were killed.
Eyewitnesses also described the British force firing machine guns into
the bush wherever they thought people might be hiding. Once
they were in the capital, the British force looted the
royal Palace and the Queen Mother's home and burned them.

(18:06):
On February one, which was the last day of the expedition,
a massive fire also destroyed many of the city's homes
and buildings. Sometimes this fire is described as unintentional, but
it really may have been an intentional blaze that just
spread a lot farther than the British force had anticipated.

(18:26):
Eight members of the British force are known to have
been killed during this punitive expedition. The death toll among
Benin's military and civilians is not really known, but it
is assumed to be much much higher. None of the
sources that I used for this episode even like attempted
to estimate they were not keeping track at all, they

(18:48):
being the British force that was carrying this out. As
it was looting the capital, this British force found nine
hundred brass plaques in a warehouse. These had been removed
from the palace during a remodeling. There were also life
sized brass heads depicting various monarchs and other ancestors. Other

(19:09):
objects included brass depictions of animals, a store of ivory,
tusks and various works of art and cultural objects. Members
of the punitive expedition were given some of these items
to keep. The rest were taken back to Britain, where
about two hundred were given to the British Museum and
the rest were auctioned off to pay for the expedition.

(19:31):
It is not known exactly how many objects were taken,
since they were not cataloged at the time, but it
is estimated to be about three thousand works of art
and other objects. The British force departed from Beneen City
on February. The Oba and his surviving court had fled,
but in the days and weeks that followed, they were

(19:51):
captured and tried opan round when's chiefs testified that he
had never left his compound during Phillips's earlier expedition and
that he had ordered that no harm come to that
British force, but he was convicted and exiled to Calibar.
His chiefs were sentenced to be executed. One of them

(20:12):
took his own life while awaiting trial, and British soldiers
had his body hanged outside the palace, where they used
it for target practice. After the Punitive Expedition. One subject
dominated European discussions of Britain's actions in the Kingdom of Benin,
and that was human sacrifice. And we're going to get
into that after a sponsor break. Before James Phillips left

(20:46):
for Benin City in early Britain's primary rationale for planning
to remove the Oba was trade. Then the Punitive Expedition
set out to punish Benin for the deaths of Phillips
and most of the rest of his party. But after
the Punitive Expedition was over, the focus shifted to the

(21:07):
idea that Britain needed to take control of Benin to
put a stop to horrifying practices there, particularly the practice
of human sacrifice. Sort of rewrote that earlier history to
make it seem as though this had always been the rational.
As one example, Consul General Ralph Moore wrote to Lord

(21:28):
Salisbury saying, quote, it is imperative that a most severe
lesson be given the King's chiefs and jujumen of all
surrounding countries, that white men cannot be killed with impunity,
and that human sacrifices, with the oppression of the weak
and poor, must cease. This, of course, ignores the fact
that the Punitive expedition had killed the citizens of Benin

(21:50):
with impunity, including the weak and poor, over the course
of the Punitive expedition. To contextualize this, human sacrifice was
distant multiple nations and kingdoms in Western Africa prior to
contact with Europeans. Most sacrifices were carried out to honor
deities or ancestors, or so the sacrificed person could carry

(22:13):
a message to them. In some kingdoms, when a high
ranking person died, especially the Oba, others would be sacrificed
to accompany that person into the afterlife. Usually living people
would be entombed with the deceased person's body, and they
were understood to have done this willingly, although societal expectations
that a person would sacrifice themselves also influenced these decisions

(22:37):
enormously and then many kingdoms most are all of the
people who did not offer themselves as sacrifices had been
condemned to death for committing a crime. This was usually
the case in the Kingdom of Benine. In some places,
prisoners of war or enslaved people were also sacrificed. Today,
all of this sounds deeply and irrevocably horror fining, but

(23:00):
the first Europeans to witness or learn about this practice
did not have quite the same response because where they lived,
public executions were commonplace. Portugal conducted public executions until ending
executions altogether in eighteen forty six. The United Kingdom did
not outlaw public execution until eighteen sixty eight, and the

(23:22):
last public guillotining in France was in nineteen thirty nine.
From the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, Europeans often drew
a parallel between public executions in Europe and human sacrifices
in parts of Africa. This was especially true when the
people being sacrificed had been condemned for committing a crime.
Around the eighteenth century, though European attitudes towards human sacrifice

(23:47):
started to shift. Human sacrifice then became a justification for
the practice of slavery, even though nations in Europe were
still carrying out public executions. Europeans in braazingly saw human
sacrifice in Africa as barbaric, uncivilized, and cruel, so many
Europeans this reinforced the idea that Africans were innately inferior

(24:11):
and therefore deserved to be enslaved. Europeans also suggested that
being enslaved was a better outcome than being sacrificed. This
was an idea that people expressed explicitly. In a new
account of some parts of Guinea and the slave Trade,
William Snellgrave wrote, quote, it is evident that abundance of

(24:33):
captives taken in war would be inhumanely destroyed. They're not
an opportunity of disposing of them to the Europeans, so
that at least many lives are saved and great numbers
of useful persons kept in being. By the nineteenth century,
as European nations started to outlaw the slave trade and

(24:53):
the practice of slavery within their empires, more people started
to view slavery itself as barbaric, but a lot of
European writing about Africa continued to focus on the practice
of slavery there, as well as the continuing practice of
human sacrifice, as evidence that Africans were inferior. Over time,

(25:16):
human sacrifice became increasingly associated with the Kingdom of Benin. Specifically,
European descriptions of Benin from the nineteenth century are nothing
like those seventeenth century accounts that we read earlier in
the show. For example, Sir Richard Burton visited Benin in
eighteen sixty three and described it as a place of
quote gratuitous barbarity which stinks of death. He also wrote

(25:40):
a lurid and gruesome account of fetish worship and human
sacrifice in the region. Western observers reported an increase in
the number of sacrifices happening in Benin in the late
nineteenth century, although it's not clear how much these reports
may have been exaggerated or influenced by evolving European attitudes
to Africans as inferior and backward. To return to the

(26:04):
Punitive Expedition, various colonial officials had mentioned human sacrifice and
their letters before this point, and in some cases they've
discussed putting a stop to it, but even in these
earlier mentions that was often ancillary to the idea of
opening up trade. Knowledge of the practice of human sacrifice
in Benin also hadn't gone far beyond colonial and military

(26:28):
leadership after the Punitive Expedition, though British eyewitness accounts were horrifying, graphic,
and publicly available. For example, Sir Reginald H. Bacon wrote
a book about the expedition in eighteen seventy nine titled
Benin the City of Blood, and in it he wrote,
quote crucifixions, human sacrifices, and every horror the eye could

(26:50):
get accustomed to a large extent, but the smells no
white man's internal economy could stand. Blood was everywhere, smeared
over bronzes, ivory, and even the walls. Others described the
British force finding a scene of slaughter in the capital,
with victims of human sacrifice scattered through the city, some

(27:12):
of whom had been members of Phillip's earlier expedition. And
instead of the impressive walled streets that were so safe
that people didn't feel the need for doors, there was,
in the words of Captain Allen Wasser Gone quote, a
collection of half ruined mud houses, not better than the
huts in an ordinary native village. By the eighteen nineties,

(27:34):
British visitors to Benin were describing these post expedition accounts
as exaggerated. In more recent decades, some people, particularly historians
and scholars from West Africa, have also put forth other
explanations for what people like Reginald Bacon described. One is
that many of the bodies assumed to have been victims

(27:55):
of human sacrifice were really people who had been killed
by British machine guns while high in the bush, whose
bodies had been brought back to the capital to be buried.
Another hypothesis is that the city's residents, knowing it was
about to be captured by the British, intentionally defaced it
to try to make it uninhabitable to them. Regardless, the

(28:16):
accounts written by Bacon and others really painted the Kingdom
of Benin as a horrific, violent place that was deserving
of Britain's wrath. It influenced the way that people thought
about Benin and about Africa more generally. News coverage was
just effusive in its praise of British forces, and that

(28:37):
coverage focused on the idea that Britain was freeing Benin
from its own barbarism. Some of this was also threaded
through with the idea that Britain needed and even deserved
access to Benin's palm oil. This framing also implied that
Britain deserved the artwork that had been looted from Benin
during the expedition. Britain was entitled to it by virtue

(29:00):
of being superior and as compensation for the expense involved
with the invasion. After the fact, the idea of human
sacrifice became a major justifying factor for all of this,
for the expedition itself, for British claims to the Kingdom's
artistic and cultural property, and for Britain's colonial rule of

(29:21):
the Kingdom, even though what had motivated all this in
the first place was first trade and then retribution for
the Phillips Expedition's death. As we said earlier, the artwork
British forces took from Benin was not kept as one collection.
Pieces were auctioned off to museums around the world. At first,
most of the museums who bought these pieces were ethnographic

(29:43):
museums rather than art museums. Some of this was because
many ethnographic museums were actively working to expand their collections
at the turn of the twentieth century, but there was
also implicit or sometimes explicit racism involved. Even though the
objects taken out of Benin fit into European definitions of art,

(30:04):
the fact that it was African led institutions to categorize
it as ethnography. It wasn't until around the nineteen thirties
that Art Museum started to show an interest in the
Benin bronzes, as art or started to curate them as
part of their art collections rather than their ethnography collections.
Although Benin had managed to retain most of its sovereignty

(30:26):
before eighteen seven, including after possibly signed the Galway Treaty,
Britain took full control of the kingdom after the Punitive Expedition.
Britain replaced the Oba with a system of colonial administration
that involved in native council and warrant chiefs. Britain struggled
to make this system work, though, and started trying to

(30:46):
restore the monarchy with Opan round One's son, Awaka the Second,
as a figurehead. When Oban Roun One died in nineteen fourteen,
Britain placed his son on the throne, but with the
monarchy positioned as subordinate to the colonial it administration. The
British Protectorates of Northern and Southern Nigeria were joined to
form Nigeria in nineteen fourteen as well. In Nigeria became

(31:09):
an independent nation on October one, nineteen sixty In nineteen
sixty three, Nigeria adopted a constitution that established itself as
a republic, removing the monarchs of its many kingdoms from
formal political power. Many many kingdoms still exist today, though
with their monarchs still playing a cultural and less formalized

(31:30):
political role. In nineteen seventy seven, a festival of arts
and culture was being planned in Lagos, Nigeria that had
adopted an ivory pendant of Queen Idia of Benin as
its emblem. The festival's planning committee asked the British Museum
to loan it the sixteenth century mask of this queen

(31:51):
from its collection. There are contradictory reports of what happened next.
According to the British Museum, this mask was just too
fragile to move, but Nigerian sources reported that the museum
had required the festival to provide three million dollars in insurance.
This incident started to raise global awareness of the objects

(32:11):
that have been taken out of Benin, collectively called the
Beniin Bronzes. Even though most of the items are made
of brass and some are made of other materials, efforts
to repatriate at least some of the pieces have gone
on for decades, and there are some real complexities involved,
like if the bronzes are returned, who exactly should they

(32:31):
be returned to? Most came from Beni City, specifically from
the Oba's palace, so should they be repatriated to the
Oba or to the Kingdom of Benin, or to Edo State,
where Benien City is located, or to Nigeria as a nation,
or to some museum or cultural institution built specifically to

(32:52):
house these works. Such a museum is planned for Benin City,
with the Beni Royal family and the Nigerian government involved,
but that mean Zum has not been built yet. The
Benin Dialogue Group was established in two thousand seven to
work through these questions and other issues, and its most
recent mission statement specifically references the creation of a royal

(33:12):
museum to reunite Bening's historical artifacts, but progress toward that
end has been slow. In eighteen, the late ful Laurens
Hyland published an article in Art, Antiquity and Law titled
Bening Dialogue Group Bening Royal Museum, Three Steps Forward, Six
Steps Back. One reason why progress has been slow is

(33:34):
that there is debate about the best path forward, including
from within Nigeria, and there are also people who argue
that the bronzes should not be returned, at least not
all of them. In while at the British Museum, Nigeria's
Edo State Governor Godwin Obaseki said, quote, these works are ambassadors.
They represent who we are and we feel we should

(33:56):
take advantage of them to create a connection with the world. Still,
others feel that it's impossible to create a museum display
they would really convey all the cultural and historical context
of these objects. As of now, only a few pieces
of artwork have been returned. Mark Walker traveled to Nigeria
in twenty fifteen to return two pieces he had inherited

(34:19):
from his grandfather, Captain Herbert Walker, who was part of
the expedition. We've discussed announcements from various universities and museums
and governments that they would return the bronzes that are
in their collections. We've talked about those in several installments
of Unearthed. Some of those returns haven't happened yet, and
they also represent just a fraction of the thousands of

(34:40):
pieces that were taken. So that is the context on
all of those pieces that have come up as just
a couple of sentences. Summaries on Unearthed episodes do you
have listener mail to wrap us up. I do before
we have listener mail. Uh. We just did our unearthed
of the a year end of one and we talked

(35:02):
about an announcement UM that that Homer Plessy was going
to be pardoned, but the Governor of Louisiana needed to
sign the pardon, and that was the final step that
actually happened almost immediately after we recorded that episode. So
as was plans when we did that recording, UM, the

(35:23):
Governor of Louisiana, John Bell Edwards, did publicly sign the
pardon of the late Homer Plessy, and there were people
from both the Plessy and the Ferguson families there at
the ceremony. So I just wanted to this is the
earliest opportunity go ahead and say yes, that did happen.
And then I also have email from Kelsey. Kelsey wrote

(35:44):
to say thank you so much for your podcast. I
first been listening years ago when I heard you did
one on Frankie Manning and Lindy Hop As a dancer myself,
it was so nice to hear his story and the
story of the dance. I love. This email is also
about a dance. I love the civic Northwest Ballets Nutcracker.
I've lived in Washington State my whole life, and traveling
to Seattle for the Nutcracker at Christmas time is something

(36:06):
I've gotten to do a few times in my life
as a child. It was a transformative experience. In the
Mari sinback designs were all I knew. I was incredibly
sad when I heard they were doing away with the
sunback version, but the current production is fabulous. It was
so cool to hear you mentioned Pacific Northwest Ballet in
the podcast, as I think they are doing some incredible things.
One new thing this year is a sensory friendly Nutcracker performance.

(36:31):
Kelsey provided a link to UH document about that. The
other is the introduction of the green tea cricket character
for the Chinese dance. They have been very intentional and
they're reworking of these dances. There are some pictures in
this article, and there's a link to a story about
the Nutcracker returning for the season with some of the

(36:52):
UH the cricket pictures. I went down a rabbit hole
looking for more about that cricket because that did seem amazing.
Kelsey and on to say I'm a band teacher now
in a suburb of Seattle, and my students performed the
Nutcracker Suite for our concert this Christmas, so I've been
listening to it quite a lot. You may also enjoy
this podcast, which focuses on the music by Tchaikovsky. I

(37:12):
have not listened to that podcast yet, but I did
go look at stuff about the sensory friendly Nutcracker performance
and the green tea cricket character for the Chinese stance.
If anyone can hear a cat mewing in the background,
that is my cat Onyx, who has struck up a
new behavior called be as disruptive during re recording as possible. Uh.

(37:35):
Thank you so much Kelsey for sending this email. I
tried to find some video maybe if the new green
tea cricket character in this ballet, and if if they
may put that on online sometime at the future. I
don't know. I don't want to speak for them, but
that's not there yet, but the pictures of it looks
so interesting. Um, and that has been done in conjunction
with an organization that is just trying to move away

(37:59):
from the anti Asian stereotypes in ballet. So thank you
so much. Kelsey for sending this um if you'd like
to send us a new or a history podcast at
i heeart radio dot com and we're all over social
media Missed in History, so you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on
the I heart radio app and wherever else do you

(38:19):
like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.