City of Blood

Ever since the early Cubists first caught the fever in 1910, African Negro sculpture has had an important influence on modern artists. In recent months first-rate exhibitions of this art have been held in Manhattan, Paris, London (TIME, April 119th). Plain gallery-goers sometimes find it difficult to understand much of an art which has nothing whatever to do with the civilized European concept of Beauty, but which stems directly from the basic emotion of fear. But one fact is plain to all eyes: in any showing of African art the bronzes and carvings of the vanished Kingdom of Benin are definitely superior in spirit and technique to other Negro art. Proudly last week in Manhattan the distinguished Knoedler Galleries put on display 31 objects which constituted the most important collection of Benin art ever exhibited in the U. S. Follow the Equator westward across Africa to its crotch where the Guinea coast joins the coast of the Cameroons. Just in that corner stood until the end of the 19th Century the ancient Kingdom of Benin. In 1486, six years before Columbus sailed to the west, Portuguese traders searching for pepper first entered the sacred city of Benin. There they found palaces of red clay polished until they shone like marble, great treasures of ivory, brass and bronze, a broad main street stretching to the horizon. In the 400 years that followed, only a handful of white travelers followed them. In the early 16th Century one King of Benin ordered his whole nation converted to Christianity in exchange for a white wife, provided by Portuguese missionaries. The conversion was short-lived, though later generations of the Bini adopted wholeheartedly the custom of crucifying their human sacrifices. By 1896 Britain had already established control of the coast of Nigeria, was eager to trade with forbidden Benin in the interior. Acting Consul General Phillips, eager to hurry matters, sent a message to grinning black King Overami of Benin, asking permission to visit his capital, arrange a treaty. With the messenger the Briton sent the traditional present: a bottle of gin, a piece of cloth, a walking stick. King Overami appreciated the gin, but sent word that it would be unwise for a white man to come at that time as he was celebrating the anniversary of his father's death. Mr. Phillips, who had not read the works of early travelers sufficiently to realize what this meant, decided to go in anyway. With a party of eight white men, completely unarmed, he left the Benin River on Jan. 4, 1897 and started overland for Benin City. A volley of shots rang out when a Mr. Locke bent over to tie his shoelaces. All but two men in the party were brutally slaughtered. By Feb. 17, a punitive expedition, complete with an admiral. 500 troops, five Maxim guns and a 7-year-old native boy who kept saying "God bless the Queen and I hope you will knock hell out of the King of Benin," were fighting up that same trail, blasting away at the gates of Benin.

The first dispatches to reach London gave Benin the name it has since held-- "The City of Blood." Grinning King Overami did not want Consul Phillips to enter his town because for three months he and his chieftains had been slaughtering living slaves in memory of the dead King Adolo. The stench of rotting corpses was overpowering. Blackamoors had been crucified to ladders made between two trees, left there to feed the buzzards. On the city's mud altars the carved tusks and terrifying bronze heads, displayed in Manhattan last week, were caked thick with dried human blood.

The British force looted the city thoroughly, burned it to the ground, shot six chiefs responsible for the Phillips massacre, exiled grinning King Overami to Calabar, where he died in 1914, and brought back not only the first Benin bronzes Europe had ever seen, but practically the entire output of an art that had ceased to exist after 1830.

In the loot of 1897, there were 2,400 pieces, sold at auction by the British Admiralty. The British Museum bought 289, all it could afford. German museums snapped up 1,085 pieces. The rest drifted to private hands. Most of the greatest pieces were portraits of kings in their high-necked coral headdresses. What kings it was impossible to say, for Benin had no written history until the coming of the English.

Most appealing to moderns is the great King Oguola, traditionally fourth king of the Bini. Since his people were rich and peaceable and his slaves had little to do, he sent 20,000 of them into the forest to dig a ditch about 40 feet wide, 20 feet deep. "Not for war," explained King Oguola. "But when I die and people say 'Who was Oguola?' they will hear 'he was the King that dug the Big Ditch.' "

Benin today is part of British Nigeria, a prosperous city of 35,000 blacks with paved highways and scarcely a trace of the old City of Blood. Under British guidance a king still rules there. Though he affects the coral headdress of his ancestors and a curved executioner's sword still precedes him wherever he goes, he wears gold-rimmed spectacles, speaks with an Oxford accent, and was discovered last year seated in a rocking chair, reading Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son.

Under British guidance the present King's people have revived the art of bronze casting, are happily turning out hundreds of Benin bronzes almost identical to the works of the Classical period (1500-1691).

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