Contesting the History of Benin Kingdom

Once Upon a Kingdom: Myth, Hegemony, and Identity, by Isidore Okpewho. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998.

Anioma : A Social History of the Western Igbo People, by Don C. Ohadike. Athens: Ohio UP, 1994.

Ancient African civilizations span the course of several millennia, in time, and a large expanse of lands stretching from the Nile Valley across the cursed Sahara to the forest states of West Africa, in space. Many states and kingdoms lived and thrived centuries ago in these regions. Most of them have now been packaged into intellectual memory banks that historians and their ever-probing kindred colleagues in learned literary studies love to mine. Egypt, Kush, Nubia, Ghana, Songhai, and dozens more ancient civilizations that are claimed for Africa have been respectfully treated by African historians and literati.

Many of these past states and civilizations died away before European incursions into Africa introduced new dynamics in the continent's public affairs. Their histories live in blessed memory and are generally safe from attacks by either European managers of the images of Africa or by modern African historians and literary men and women. Who wants to besmirch Egypt's reputation for its atrocities in Kushland? Many African intellectuals would prefer that we allow the holy pharaohs, who have brought so much pride to us in Africa, to rest in peace. Ancient Ghana's glory and veritable history of conquests of ethnic neighbors have been appropriated by nationalist Kwame Nkrumah for his country whose profane colonial designation of Gold Coast he changed to the famed and exalted name of Ghana in 1957--perhaps the greatest gift this anti-imperialist campaigner made to his native land. Walter Rodney, the formidable Caribbean scholar of African affairs, was bemused by the practices of African intellectuals who rush to invoke the heritage of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai in their search for the validation of claims that Africa too was well developed before the troublesome Europeans arrived in our lands. ¹ In this wonderful show of good grace and good manners to kingdoms that are no more, such acts as King Mansa Musa of Mali's reckless endangerment of his country in his carting away so much wealth to Arab lands in his year long pilgrimage to Mecca in the fourteenth century are forgiven or even glorified. ²

Such robust respect for dead ancient African civilizations contrasts sharply with the searching attitudes and attention by African historians and the literati towards those of Africa's indigenous states and civilizations that survived into the European era of dominance and into our own times. Consider just how well Ethiopia and Benin would have been received into our archives of glorious history if they had avoided survival from the past, thus escaping confrontation with vicious English propaganda in the 1890s that has ruined their images. If only it too had died, Ethiopia would have escaped scathing attacks from Oromo intellectual nationalists who have successfully revealed many foul blemishes in the moral valuation of what Oromo intellectuals derisively label as Abyssinian civilization. ³ And if only Benin had disappeared by, say, some act of self-inflicted civil war, as Oyo did in the nineteenth century before the British arrived into its once proud country, then perhaps Benin kings would have dodged Isidore Okpewho's biting analyses of their behaviors in Once Upon a Kingdom.

We must take Okpewho's analysis and thesis on Benin seriously. To do so we need to evaluate his claims not just against local standards and sentiments in Benin City and its historic peripheries. That is what Okpewho has called upon us to do. We will engage him and his book in such local analysis. But we must go beyond that angry land of disputes among ethnic intellectual nationalists and treat Benin as an ancient African civilization that survived from the past, diminished but relatively intact at the end of the nineteenth century. In this respect, pagan Benin has close parallels, but also sharp...