Brass that kept a court

The first thing you notice is the break. A large piece of this plaque is gone: the lower left corner has been torn away, and the right edge is jagged, so that the warrior seems to be stepping out of a ragged window in the metal. A crack runs across the upper left. The brass has gone a deep grey-green, almost black in the hollows.

Then the man takes over. He stands in high relief, his raised right hand gripping the hilt of a broad, leaf-shaped blade incised with patterns. He wears a tall helmet worked to look like rows of beads, with little spikes standing up from it, and a high collar of beads that covers his chin up to the lower lip. Those beads are coral, and coral marked rank at the court of Benin. His face is calm, the eyes wide and heavy-lidded. Bracelets climb his wrists. A wrapper, finely patterned, hangs from his hips. Behind him, the background is engraved all over with small leafy motifs.

In the upper left corner floats an object that looks like a horseshoe. It is a manilla, a ring of copper or brass made in Europe and used as currency in the trade along the West African coast. In the sixteenth century that trade brought brass into the Kingdom of Benin in quantity, and the oba Esigie, who reigned in the first half of the century, commissioned commemorative plaques like this one for his palace. The casters belonged to a guild that served the king. The metal that came in as money was turned into history.

The plaque’s later history is also written in it, in a different way. Its museum record traces it to the palace of Oba Ovonramwen, from which George W. Neville took it during the British military raid on Benin City in 1897. It passed through English, French and New York hands and was bought by the Art Institute in 1933. Museums in many countries now hold objects removed in that raid, and some have begun to return them.

The kingdom’s court continues in Benin City, in what is now Nigeria, with an oba on the throne and brass casters still at work. This warrior was made for that court. He has spent most of the last hundred and thirty years in other people’s rooms.

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