The Kingdom of Benin (the Edo state in what is now southern Nigeria, not the modern country called Benin) was one of West Africa's most sophisticated and long-lived kingdoms — ruled by a divine king called the Oba, ringed by vast earthwork walls, and famous above all for the cast-brass and bronze artworks whose looting by a British force in 1897 became a defining case in the global debate over returning stolen heritage.
In February 1897, a British force marched into Benin City, set it ablaze, sent the Oba into exile, and carried off thousands of cast-metal sculptures that the kingdom's craftsmen had made over four centuries. The objects were auctioned to cover the cost of the expedition and scattered to museums across Europe and America. More than a hundred years later, those same sculptures — proof that a precolonial African kingdom built a world-class artistic tradition — sit in foreign display cases precisely because an army took them. The Benin Bronzes are now one of the central cases in the worldwide argument over whether stolen heritage should go home.