They don't have to. They bought it from Britain. Will Britain pay them back?

COdeGenesis:
I would have preferred them remitting some amount of money from the proceeds gotten from sighting them at the museums. Returning them to Nigeria won't yield any economic value for now. Artifacts like this are not appreciated here

It's is not 1000,it's 22 they returned

BRATISLAVA:


Well, you're talking rubbish.

If the British didn't attach value to them and keep them, they wouldn't exist. The same way you sold people as slaves, they would've ended up in their hands anyway. For all we know, they were sold.

You speak of empty palaces that colonials built and restored as if Africans could've done anything with them.

This is exactly what I'm trying to say, Africans acting all important for things that wouldn't have been valued if the colonial masters didn't place value on them. You would think Nigerians cared about Artifacts over money or oil, when they don't even value human lives. Just look at our country since the discovery of oil. Our fore father's were actually evil, barbaric, primitive and diabolic and if not for civilization they still would have been locked in the past. Ungrateful people.

COdeGenesis:
I would have preferred them remitting some amount of money from the proceeds gotten from sighting them at the museums. Returning them to Nigeria won't yield any economic value for now. Artifacts like this are not appreciated here

Will you get any shares from the financial proceeds?

Good one we hope these dont end up in the homes of our politicians, the brits had better returned their own share of what they stole from us.

BRATISLAVA:


Well, you're talking rubbish.

If the British didn't attach value to them and keep them, they wouldn't exist. The same way you sold people as slaves, they would've ended up in their hands anyway. For all we know, they were sold.

You speak of empty palaces that colonials built and restored as if Africans could've done anything with them.

oga u have a comprehension problem.

goshen26:
I hope we are smart enough to watch those images keenly before bringing them in...

Some tiny chips might be on them

They will be well examined by experts on arrival.

Slawomirr:
Damnnn niggar

The ancient city of Benin where the King is truely king

The most feared and respected oba and kingdom in the whole of West Africa
The most advanced and organised kingdom
The Portuguese explorers marveled by the development of the Benin Empire! The thing shock them say as at the time they thought Africans were far away from civilization but how come the Binis were able to come up with the idea of linking and connecting the entire town to that ring road

Benin city for a reason....the only city well spelled on Nigeria map

Proud to be a Bini son

Bro, u no mention the street lights powered by palm oil. Another dutch explorer compared to the the streets in Benin to the streets of Netherlands bit better road network, well paved roads.

ozijay:


This is exactly what I'm trying to say, Africans acting all important for things that wouldn't have been valued if the colonial masters didn't place value on them. You would think Nigerians cared about Artifacts over money or oil, when they don't even value human lives. Just look at our country since the discovery of oil. Our fore father's were actually evil, barbaric, primitive and diabolic and if not for civilization they still would have been locked in the past. Ungrateful people.

Says a demented, colonised slave.

Here's what the UK Guardian wrote about ''our forefathers'' whom you just insulted.

Benin City, The Mighty Medieval Capital Now Lost Without Trace


Benin City was described as ‘wealthy and industrious, well-governed and richly decorated’. Illustration: Decompiling Dapper: A Preliminary Search for Evidence


Guardian Newspaper, UK

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/18/story-of-cities-5-benin-city-edo-nigeria-mighty-medieval-capital-lost-without-trace


With its mathematical layout and earthworks longer than the Great Wall of China, Benin City was one of the best planned cities in the world when London was a place of ‘thievery and murder’. So why is nothing left?



This is the story of a lost medieval city you’ve probably never heard about. Benin City, originally known as Edo, was once the capital of a pre-colonial African empire located in what is now southern Nigeria. The Benin empire was one of the oldest and most highly developed states in west Africa, dating back to the 11th century.

The Guinness Book of Records (1974 edition) described the walls of Benin City and its surrounding kingdom as the world’s largest earthworks carried out prior to the mechanical era. According to estimates by the New Scientist’s Fred Pearce, Benin City’s walls were at one point “four times longer than the Great Wall of China, and consumed a hundred times more material than the Great Pyramid of Cheops [in Egypt]”.

Situated on a plain, Benin City was enclosed by massive walls in the south and deep ditches in the north. Beyond the city walls, numerous further walls were erected that separated the surroundings of the capital into around 500 distinct villages.

Pearce writes that these walls “extended for some 16,000 km in all, in a mosaic of more than 500 interconnected settlement boundaries. They covered 6,500 sq km and were all dug by the Edo people … They took an estimated 150 million hours of digging to construct, and are perhaps the largest single archaeological phenomenon on the planet”.

Barely any trace of these walls exist today.

Benin City was also one of the first cities to have a semblance of street lighting. Huge metal lamps, many feet high, were built and placed around the city, especially near the king’s palace. Fuelled by palm oil, their burning wicks were lit at night to provide illumination for traffic to and from the palace.

When the Portuguese first “discovered” the city in 1485, they were stunned to find this vast kingdom made of hundreds of interlocked cities and villages in the middle of the African jungle. They called it the “Great City of Benin”, at a time when there were hardly any other places in Africa the Europeans acknowledged as a city. Indeed, they classified Benin City as one of the most beautiful and best planned cities in the world.

In 1691, the Portuguese ship captain Lourenco Pinto observed: “Great Benin, where the king resides, is larger than Lisbon; all the streets run straight and as far as the eye can see. The houses are large, especially that of the king, which is richly decorated and has fine columns. The city is wealthy and industrious. It is so well governed that theft is unknown and the people live in such security that they have no doors to their houses.”

In contrast, London at the same time is described by Bruce Holsinger, professor of English at the University of Virginia, as being a city of “thievery, prostitution, murder, bribery and a thriving black market made the medieval city ripe for exploitation by those with a skill for the quick blade or picking a pocket”.

African fractals

Benin City’s planning and design was done according to careful rules of symmetry, proportionality and repetition now known as fractal design. The mathematician Ron Eglash, author of African Fractals – which examines the patterns underpinning architecture, art and design in many parts of Africa – notes that the city and its surrounding villages were purposely laid out to form perfect fractals, with similar shapes repeated in the rooms of each house, and the house itself, and the clusters of houses in the village in mathematically predictable patterns.

As he puts it: “When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganised and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn’t even discovered yet.”


At the centre of the city stood the king’s court, from which extended 30 very straight, broad streets, each about 120-ft wide. These main streets, which ran at right angles to each other, had underground drainage made of a sunken impluvium with an outlet to carry away storm water. Many narrower side and intersecting streets extended off them. In the middle of the streets were turf on which animals fed.

“Houses are built alongside the streets in good order, the one close to the other,” writes the 17th-century Dutch visitor Olfert Dapper. “Adorned with gables and steps … they are usually broad with long galleries inside, especially so in the case of the houses of the nobility, and divided into many rooms which are separated by walls made of red clay, very well erected.”

Dapper adds that wealthy residents kept these walls “as shiny and smooth by washing and rubbing as any wall in Holland can be made with chalk, and they are like mirrors. The upper storeys are made of the same sort of clay. Moreover, every house is provided with a well for the supply of fresh water”.

Family houses were divided into three sections: the central part was the husband’s quarters, looking towards the road; to the left the wives’ quarters (oderie), and to the right the young men’s quarters (yekogbe).

Daily street life in Benin City might have consisted of large crowds going though even larger streets, with people colourfully dressed – some in white, others in yellow, blue or green – and the city captains acting as judges to resolve lawsuits, moderating debates in the numerous galleries, and arbitrating petty conflicts in the markets.

The early foreign explorers’ descriptions of Benin City portrayed it as a place free of crime and hunger, with large streets and houses kept clean; a city filled with courteous, honest people, and run by a centralised and highly sophisticated bureaucracy.

The city was split into 11 divisions, each a smaller replication of the king’s court, comprising a sprawling series of compounds containing accommodation, workshops and public buildings – interconnected by innumerable doors and passageways, all richly decorated with the art that made Benin famous. The city was literally covered in it.

The exterior walls of the courts and compounds were decorated with horizontal ridge designs (agben) and clay carvings portraying animals, warriors and other symbols of power – the carvings would create contrasting patterns in the strong sunlight. Natural objects (pebbles or pieces of mica) were also pressed into the wet clay, while in the palaces, pillars were covered with bronze plaques illustrating the victories and deeds of former kings and nobles.

At the height of its greatness in the 12th century – well before the start of the European Renaissance – the kings and nobles of Benin City patronised craftsmen and lavished them with gifts and wealth, in return for their depiction of the kings’ and dignitaries’ great exploits in intricate bronze sculptures.

“These works from Benin are equal to the very finest examples of European casting technique,” wrote Professor Felix von Luschan, formerly of the Berlin Ethnological Museum. “Benvenuto Celini could not have cast them better, nor could anyone else before or after him. Technically, these bronzes represent the very highest possible achievement.”




What impressed the first visiting Europeans most was the wealth, artistic beauty and magnificence of the city. Immediately European nations saw the opportunity to develop trade with the wealthy kingdom, importing ivory, palm oil and pepper – and exporting guns. At the beginning of the 16th century, word quickly spread around Europe about the beautiful African city, and new visitors flocked in from all parts of Europe, with ever glowing testimonies, recorded in numerous voyage notes and illustrations.

Lost world

Now, however, the great Benin City is lost to history. Its decline began in the 15th century, sparked by internal conflicts linked to the increasing European intrusion and slavery trade at the borders of the Benin empire.

Then in 1897, the city was destroyed by British soldiers – looted, blown up and burnt to the ground....

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/18/story-of-cities-5-benin-city-edo-nigeria-mighty-medieval-capital-lost-without-trace

boogie2:


Bro, u no mention the street lights powered by palm oil. Another dutch explorer compared to the the streets in Benin to the streets of Netherlands bit better road network, well paved roads.

This was how Benin looked in the 1500s according to the descriptions by visitors. Note the streetlights. There also had underground drainage, and theft was unknown. A crime - free society.



Here's an artist's rendition of the great palace of the Oba of Benin that was built in the 11th century and burnt down by the British in 1897.

Slawomirr:
Damnnn niggar

The ancient city of Benin where the King is truely king

The most feared and respected oba and kingdom in the whole of West Africa
The most advanced and organised kingdom
The Portuguese explorers marveled by the development of the Benin Empire! The thing shock them say as at the time they thought Africans were far away from civilization but how come the Binis were able to come up with the idea of linking and connecting the entire town to that ring road

Benin city for a reason....the only city well spelled on Nigeria map

Proud to be a Bini son

Now you and your people do yahoo and olosho for a living how the mighty has falling.

BRATISLAVA:
Things that Nigerians would've thrown into fires and roasted snakes on centuries ago, because colonials made them valuable, they've been acting like they were stolen from them.

you don't think.

Slawomirr:
Damnnn niggar

The ancient city of Benin where the King is truely king

The most feared and respected oba and kingdom in the whole of West Africa
The most advanced and organised kingdom
The Portuguese explorers marveled by the development of the Benin Empire! The thing shock them say as at the time they thought Africans were far away from civilization but how come the Binis were able to come up with the idea of linking and connecting the entire town to that ring road

Benin city for a reason....the only city well spelled on Nigeria map

Proud to be a Bini son

Our sophisticated yoruba brothers will say otherwise

On a second thought, these people probably 3D printed the artworks, removing any need for originals. The white man is tricky like that. I assumed once returned we could rent them to foreign nations — no different from the trick white people would pull. With technology been so sophisticated, we only gained back history with no financial compensation.

White are more organized than blacks, imagine after how many years, they kept everything intact even when we have finishing destroying the ones we have

BRATISLAVA:
Things that Nigerians would've thrown into fires and roasted snakes on centuries ago, because colonials made them valuable, they've been acting like they were stolen from them.

Nor mind those fools.

Tell them to name one technology they can offer the rest of the world that their “ancient traditions and empires” allowed them to invent.

Their mates were busy inventing rockets to space,inventing the internet that they cannot do without today. They are there crying over worthless artifacts.

If your traditions were so powerful, why didn’t you defeat your colonial masters like the ethiopians did?

I cannot blame the white for seeing themselves above the blacks because,they have made a lot of sacrifices before they could arrive with the technologies we all enjoy today.

Black men are simply consumers, we are simply lucky to have raw resources in this part of the world or else, no one would have cared if the black man lives or dies.

Begin to invent technologies the world has never seen before and then when you begin to complain, maybe someone will hear you out.

Useless thieves (Britain). All they know how to do is steal and plunder other peoples resources. Awon oloshi...waka!!!

Now that they’ve given it back to the useless African people now what are they going to useless it for?
I’m sure they’ll still sell it for money
Useless black � man

Nolevel666:


Nor mind those fools.

Tell them to name one technology they can offer the rest of the world that their “ancient traditions and empires” allowed them to invent.

Their mates were busy inventing rockets to space,inventing the internet that they cannot do without today. They are there crying over worthless artifacts.

If your traditions were so powerful, why didn’t you defeat your colonial masters like the ethiopians did?

I cannot blame the white for seeing themselves above the blacks because,they have made a lot of sacrifices before they could arrive with the technologies we all enjoy today.

Black men are simply consumers, we are simply lucky to have raw resources in this part of the world or else, no one would have cared if the black man lives or dies.

Begin to invent technologies the world has never seen before and then when you begin to complain, maybe someone will hear you out.

Tell them.

They seem to be living in fantasy land where they would've done anything with those items. Truth is, right now, they would've been fighting intertribal wars and have destroyed those artefacts.

Kennyking1234:
you don't think.

I do. You don't.

ozijay:


This is exactly what I'm trying to say, Africans acting all important for things that wouldn't have been valued if the colonial masters didn't place value on them. You would think Nigerians cared about Artifacts over money or oil, when they don't even value human lives. Just look at our country since the discovery of oil. Our fore father's were actually evil, barbaric, primitive and diabolic and if not for civilization they still would have been locked in the past. Ungrateful people.

If you tell them, they begin to spit like slugs all over the place.

Cc: TheOgaBoss

BRATISLAVA:


If you tell them, they begin to spit like slugs all over the place.

Cc: TheOgaBoss

if u can think critically, if the ancient kingdom that created those artefacts didn't value them, why did they invest time and resources to create them, even during an era where the casting was a tedious and labourous job. Many of u lack critical thinking ability. To further stress the importance of these items to the bini kingdom they were stored in the palace or do u think the British picked them from the streets?

TheOgaBoss:
if u can think critically, if the ancient kingdom that created those artefacts didn't value them, why did they invest time and resources to create them, even during an era where the casting was a tedious and labourous job. Many of u lack critical thinking ability. To further stress the importance of these items to the bini kingdom they were stored in the palace or do u think the British picked them from the streets?

Stop living in denial

ozijay:


This is exactly what I'm trying to say, Africans acting all important for things that wouldn't have been valued if the colonial masters didn't place value on them. You would think Nigerians cared about Artifacts over money or oil, when they don't even value human lives. Just look at our country since the discovery of oil. Our fore father's were actually evil, barbaric, primitive and diabolic and if not for civilization they still would have been locked in the past. Ungrateful people.

oga stop spewing rubbish, before the brish came and took these items, were the items not valuable to the culture and people that owned them? But your backward mentality and inferiority complex makes u think that is the British that made them important, how could items that were of cultural value to the bini kingdom, hundreds of years before the british came be said to have become valuable because the British took them? Guy are u enlightened at all?

BRATISLAVA:


Stop living in denial

Go and get sense abeg.

Even if it one kobo sense

sotall:


Go and get sense abeg.

Even if it one kobo sense

Says a senseless piece of firewood.

BRATISLAVA:


I do. You don't.

white supremacist.

Kennyking1234:
white supremacist.

AreaFada2:


Please, don't bother educating somebody unwilling to learn. Benin banned slavery centuries before so-called British abolition in 1807. Reason was simple, Benin needed to keep its population growing, to have enough Benin people to administer colonies and fight wars. Common sense. Territories that have certain internal affairs devolved to them decided to continue slave trade. Those people today deny being under Benin control but at least Lagos history still admits it. By 1740s, a French trader seeking slaves to buy recorded that of the roughly 100 slaves displayed for sale between Benin and Gwatto Port, all slaves and their sellers were non-Benin. They were primarily Igbo and Yoruba. That was a written confirmation of how Benin people within the empire were forbidden from buying or selling slave and being bought or sold as slaves.

When Benin prohibited selling slaves, the Europeans imposed an embargo on buying pepper, ivory or other goods from Benin. In turn, Oba of Benin forbade any trade with the Europeans. So began the economic decline of Benin Empire and rise of Oyo Empire and became quite big in 1680s/90s. Oyo was the key slave trading state by now. Today, nobody gives Benin credit for halting slave trade much earlier than any European nation.

People claim that Oba of Benin supported Eleko Kosoko who was a slave trader against Eleko Dosunmu, so Benin supported slavery. But slave trade was a devolved matter and provincial rulers and their people could decide what to do with themselves. Even if Oba wanted slavery stopped throughout the Empire and spheres of influence, how could he have policed such a large part of the Bight of Benin? Obas of Benin back then were pragmatic, astute politicians and made laws carefully. They made laws that could be policed mostly and not too much restrict the cultural practices of non-Benin parts of the empire.

In any case, if the Oba already gave the instrument of office to a provincial ruler/duke, it was uncommon to remove such an instrument unless for some serious issues/violation/rebellion. Oba had no issues with Kosoko. It was the British, with their Royal Navy cannon guns at Lagos Harbour, threatening and fanning embers of division between members of the Eleko family to gain control of Lagos for Queen Victoria.

Since Oba backed Eleko Kosoko, the British backed Dosunmu and ordered Dosunmu not to take orders from Benin anymore. This was in 1861. The British did not rest until until they attacked Benin in 1897, burned it down, looted treasures and removed the only true obstacle they faced in colonising the area now called Nigeria.

Nigerian education is very faulty. Too many poorly enlightened "educated" people.

Gregyboy
UGBE634
Samuk
Etinosa
AutomaticMotors

All these delusional Binis self loooool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksxzm26yPUY

Germany Returns Stolen Art to Nigeria but Main Criminal Culprit the British Refuse

TheOgaBoss:
oga stop spewing rubbish, before the brish came and took these items, were the items not valuable to the culture and people that owned them? But your backward mentality and inferiority complex makes u think that is the British that made them important, how could items that were of cultural value to the bini kingdom, hundreds of years before the british came be said to have become valuable because the British took them? Guy are u enlightened at all?

It is Benin kingdom, not "Bini kingdom".