Famous Benin Bronzes from West Africa used metal sourced in Germany

The world-famous Benin Bronze artworks created by African metalsmiths between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries have been fabricated from brass rings produced in Germany’s Rhineland area. These rings have been used as foreign money within the transatlantic slave commerce.

The Edo individuals in what’s now modern-day Nigeria created the Benin Bronzes within the form of heads, plaques, collectible figurines and different objects by combining steel elements with carved ivory or wooden. Researchers had beforehand suspected that Edo metalsmiths used metals from manillas – horseshoe-shaped brass rings produced by Europeans particularly for commerce in Africa – however had no definitive proof till now.

Tobias Skowronek on the Georg Agricola University of Applied Sciences in Germany and his colleagues carried out a chemical evaluation of 67 manillas found in 5 Atlantic shipwreck websites – together with these off Cape Cod close to Massachusetts and the English Channel – together with a number of land-based archaeological sources in Sweden, Ghana and Sierra Leona.

The researchers measured the quantity of hint components and the ratio of lead isotopes within the manillas and in contrast them with these of the Benin Bronzes and the ores utilized by the German Rhineland’s brass business. They discovered a powerful similarity between all of the metals, indicating that African metalsmiths most likely used manillas obtained from European merchants as a key supply of fabric for the Benin Bronzes.

The findings align with historic sources, comparable to a 1548 contract between a German service provider household and the Portuguese king regarding the manufacturing of manillas for commerce in West Africa. Other written sources have documented contracts between slave-trading nations of the time, together with Portugal and the Netherlands, and the German brass business positioned between the cities of Cologne and Aachen.

This new proof might reshape the story of Germany’s involvement with the Benin Bronzes, says Cresa Pugh at The New School in New York. Much of the main target has sometimes been on the later colonial interval and the Berlin Conference in 1884-1885, when European powers convened to divide up Africa into so-called spheres of affect for colonisation and exploitation.

Thousands of Benin Bronzes have been looted by a British navy expedition in 1897 and distributed or bought to varied European museums, with many ending up in German museums.

“We understand Germany’s role during the colonial period as these artifacts were being looted and circulated following the Berlin Conference, but we really didn’t have a sense of what was happening before the colonial period during the period of slavery,” says Pugh. “And so I think this really does provide a kind of missing link between those periods.”

Starting in 2022, Germany started returning a number of the Benin Bronzes to Nigeria as a part of a broader worldwide dialogue about cultural restitution and decolonisation.