Detail of a Benin bronze in the British Museum
Shutterstock/Mltz
The world-famous Benin bronze works of art created by African metalsmiths between the 16th and 19th centuries were made from brass rings produced in the Rhineland region of Germany. These rings were used as currency in the Atlantic slave trade.
The people of Edo (modern-day Nigeria) combined ivory and wood carvings with metal parts to create Beninese bronzes in the form of heads, foreheads, and ornaments. Researchers had previously suspected metalworkers in Edo were using metal from Manila, but in the horseshoe-shaped brass rings Europeans made especially for trade in Africa. bottom.
Tobias Skowronek and his colleagues at the Georg Agricola University of Applied Sciences in Germany performed chemical analyzes of 67 manilas found at five Atlantic shipwreck sites, including off Cape Cod near Massachusetts and the English Channel. Sweden, Ghana, Sierra Leona.
The researchers measured the amounts of trace elements and lead isotope ratios in Manila and compared them with those of Benin bronzes and ores used in the German Rhineland brass industry. They found strong similarities in all metals, indicating that an African metalworker used manila, possibly obtained from a European trader, as an important source of material for his bronzes in Benin.
The findings are consistent with historical sources, such as the 1548 contract between a German merchant family and the Portuguese king, related to the production of Manila for trade in West Africa. Other written sources document contracts between the slave-trading countries of the time, including Portugal and the Netherlands, and the German brass industry between the cities of Cologne and Aachen.
This new evidence could reconstruct the narrative of Germany’s involvement with the Benin Bronze, says Cresa Pugh of New York’s New School. Much of the focus is usually on the late colonial period and the Berlin Congress held from 1884 to 1885, where the European powers divided Africa into so-called spheres of influence for colonization and exploitation. summoned to do so.
Thousands of Benin bronzes were looted by a British military expedition in 1897 and distributed or sold to various museums in Europe, many of which ended up in German museums.
“The role Germany played in the colonial period is understandable. These relics were looted and circulated after the Berlin Congress, but we have no idea what happened during the pre-colonial period of slavery.” I had no idea,” says Pugh. “And I think this really provides something of a missing link between those periods.”
From 2022, Germany will begin returning some of its Benin Bronze to Nigeria as part of a broader international debate on cultural restoration and decolonization.
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