Magazines - Tribal Art Summer 2007

By Barbara Plankensteiner, curator for African art at the Museum für Völkerkunde in Vienna.

Introduction
The West African Kingdom of Benin lies in the southern range of the tropical forest belt in southern Nigeria. Its wealth and influence were triggered by trade and territorial expansion, which made it one of the most powerful kingdoms of the region in precolonial times.
Until the twelfth century, Benin was made up of an agglomeration of autonomous village unities headed by so-called “sky rulers,” the ogiso. According to oral tradition, this changed when a prince from Ife named Oranmiyan founded a second royal dynasty, the kings of which were called oba. The present reigning king of Benin, Oba Erediauwa, is the thirty-eighth ruler in this line of succession.
In the thirteenth century the kingdom began to call itself “Ubini,” and when the Portuguese reached the coast of the Bight of Benin in 1472 they began to refer to country they encountered there as “O Beny,” from which the name Benin eventually derived. In the fifteenth century, a powerful king renamed both the kingdom and its capital “Edo,” the term that denominates the population and its language to this day.
As central authorities for both religion and politics, the obas of Benin have traditionally headed a complex hierarchy of hereditary and non-hereditary titleholders. Artists organized in guilds created spectacular artworks in bronze and ivory to glorify the god-like kings and to adorn the royal ancestor altars and shrines devoted to various deities in the royal palace. Bronze (metallurgically brass, though the term “bronze” is used to equate these works with European artworks) was a material reserved for the king and for those upon whom he conferred the right of its use. In addition to their ritual and ceremonial functions, these sculptures also document historical events. In the Edo language, “to remember” literally means “to cast a motif in bronze.” The act of casting captures history.
Before the tragic end of the independent kingdom in 1897, little was known in Europe about the extraordinary artworks from Benin. Since then, about 3,000 artworks have moved into Western museums and private collections, where they are treasured as among the most important and valuable works of art from Africa, ones that bear witness to the remarkable culture of a legendary kingdom, the history of which spans seven centuries.

The exhibition Benin: Kings and Rituals opened in Vienna at the Museum für Völkerkunde on May 8. It is a joint project with the Musée du quai Branly, the Ethnologisches Museum – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and The Art Institute of Chicago. It will be shown at these instutions respectively from October 2, 2007 –January 6, 2008; February 7– May 25, 2008; and July 3–September 21, 2008.