Academic Reading — Test 81

Reading passage

For several centuries, the Kingdom of Benin, situated in what is now southern Nigeria, produced some of the most accomplished metal sculpture ever created in Africa. The objects that European writers later grouped together under the convenient but misleading label of the "Benin Bronzes" are not, for the most part, made of bronze at all. The majority are an alloy of copper and zinc, properly described as brass, while others incorporate lead or are worked from ivory, wood and coral. The label has nonetheless endured, and today it refers broadly to thousands of plaques, heads, figures and ceremonial items removed from the royal court of Benin City towards the close of the nineteenth century. The production of these works was never the responsibility of individual artists working alone. Instead, it was organised through tightly controlled guilds whose members lived and worked in a designated quarter of the capital. The most celebrated of these was the brass-casters' guild, known in the Edo language as the Igun Eronmwon, which traced its origins to a craftsman said to have been summoned to the court many generations earlier. Membership was hereditary, passing from father to son, and the techniques of the workshop were guarded as closely as any state secret. A young apprentice might spend years grinding charcoal, preparing clay and tending furnaces before he was permitted to touch the wax models on which a finished casting depended. Crucially, the guild answered directly to the Oba, the divine king of Benin, and it was forbidden to produce major brass works for anyone else. This restriction concentrated both the skill and the prestige of metalworking firmly within the orbit of the palace. The method the casters used is generally known as lost-wax casting, a technique demanding both patience and precise judgement. The craftsman first modelled the desired form in beeswax over a core of clay, capturing fine detail in the soft material. The wax model was then encased in further layers of clay and heated, so that the wax melted and ran out through specially made channels, leaving a hollow mould. Molten metal was poured into this cavity, and once it had cooled the outer clay was broken away to reveal the casting beneath. Because the mould had to be destroyed to release the object, every single piece was unique and could never be reproduced exactly. The commemorative heads of past Obas, the relief plaques that once decorated the wooden pillars of the palace, and the intricate hip ornaments worn during ceremonies all emerged from this unforgiving process. The plaques in particular served a purpose that went well beyond decoration. Arranged across the palace, they formed a kind of visual archive, recording the dress, weaponry, rituals and hierarchies of the court at a time when the kingdom kept few written records. A viewer who understood the conventions could read in them the relative rank of the figures depicted, since size and position were used deliberately to signal status. In this way the brass-casters were not merely decorators but, in effect, the kingdom's historians, fixing in metal a version of events that the court wished to preserve. Trade also played its part: much of the copper and brass worked in Benin arrived through commerce with European merchants, often in the form of large bracelet-shaped ingots called manillas, which were melted down and recast. In 1897 a British military expedition captured Benin City, burned much of it and removed an enormous quantity of these objects, which were subsequently sold and dispersed among museums and private collectors across Europe and beyond. For much of the twentieth century the bronzes were displayed abroad with little reference to the society that had made them, and they were frequently admired as isolated masterpieces rather than understood as the products of a living court tradition. In recent decades, however, the question of where they ought to belong has become the subject of intense international debate. Several institutions have agreed in principle to return items to Nigeria, while others continue to resist, citing legal obstacles or arguing that wide dispersal allows more people to encounter the work. Whatever the outcome, the bronzes remain a powerful reminder that the guilds of Benin produced not ornaments alone but a sophisticated record of a kingdom's memory. Remarkably, the brass-casters' guild has survived into the present day, and its descendants still practise the craft in the same quarter of the city, maintaining a thread of continuity that the upheavals of the past failed to sever.