The King of Kongo Writes to the King of Portugal
Between 1506 and 1543, Afonso I of Kongo sent dozens of letters to Lisbon about trade, priests and the slave traders ruining his kingdom. Kofi reads them and asks what Lisbon did.
The Guild That Cast the Benin Bronzes
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Show notes
The Igun Eronmwon and their furnaces
The Benin bronzes were not the work of anonymous artisans but of a hereditary guild, the Igun Eronmwon, who still cast today on the same street in Benin City. This episode goes into the workshop and the court that commissioned it, from the 1500s to the British raid of 1897 and the restitution debates since.
- How lost-wax casting worked in Benin and where the brass came from
- The plaques as a record of court history, not decoration
- The Oba's monopoly and what a caster could and could not make
- 1897: the raid, the looting and the museums
- A conversation with a current guild member recorded in Benin City
Images of the plaques discussed are on the episode page.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to Gold Weights and Griots. I am Kofi Mensah-Darko, a historian from Accra, and this show exists because I spent twelve years at school learning about Henry the Eighth and almost nothing about the empire two hours up the road from my classroom. We are going to fix that, one kingdom at a time. Today, Benin. Not the modern country, the kingdom, in what is now southern Nigeria. You have probably seen the Benin bronzes in a museum far from home. What you may not know is that they were made by a single hereditary guild over four hundred years, that the plaques were a record of court history rather than decoration, and that the guild still works on the same street today. I went and talked to them. Then we get to 1897. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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