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.