A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [195]
The arrival and the reception of these completely unknown sculptures caused a sensation in Europe. It is not too much to say that they changed European understanding of African history and African culture. One of the first people to encounter the plaques, and to recognize their quality and their significance, was the British Museum curator Charles Hercules Read:
It need scarcely be said that at the first sight of these remarkable works of art we were at once astounded at such an unexpected find, and puzzled to account for so highly developed an art among a race so entirely barbarous …
Many wild theories were put forward. It was thought that the plaques must have come from ancient Egypt, or perhaps that the people of Benin were one of the lost tribes of Israel. Or the sculptures must have derived from European influence (after all, these were the contemporaries of Michelangelo, Donatello and Cellini). But research quickly established that the Benin plaques were entirely West African creations, made without European influence. The Europeans had to revisit, and to overhaul, their assumptions of easy cultural superiority.
It is a bewildering fact that by the end of the nineteenth century the broadly equal and harmonious contacts between Europeans and West Africans established in the sixteenth century had disappeared from European memory almost without leaving any trace. This is probably because the relationship was later dominated by the transatlantic slave trade and, later still, by the European scramble for Africa, in which the punitive expedition of 1897 was merely one bloody incident. That raid and the removal of some of Benin’s great artworks may have spread knowledge and admiration of Benin’s culture to the world, but it has left a wound in the consciousness of many Nigerians – a wound that is still felt keenly today, as Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer and Nobel laureate, describes:
When I see a Benin Bronze, I immediately think of the mastery of technology and art – the welding of the two. I think immediately of a cohesive ancient civilization. It increases a sense of self-esteem because it makes you understand that African society actually produced some great civilizations, established some great cultures, and today it contributes to one’s sense of the degradation that has overtaken many African societies, to the extent that we forget that we were once a functioning people before the negative incursion of foreign powers. The looted objects are still today politically loaded. The Benin Bronzes, like other artefacts, are still very much a part of the politics of contemporary Africa and, of course, Nigeria in particular.
The Benin plaques, powerfully charged objects, still move us today as they did when they first arrived in Europe, a hundred years ago. They are arresting works of art, evidence that in the sixteenth century Europe and Africa were able to deal with each other on equal terms, but also contested objects of the colonial narrative.
78
Double-headed Serpent
Mosaic-decorated figurine, from Mexico
AD 1400–1600
Any visitor to Mexico City today is likely to hear the sounds of buskers beating Aztec-style drums and wearing feathers and body paint. These buskers are not just trying to entertain passers-by: they are trying to keep alive the memory of the lost Aztec Empire, that powerful, highly structured state that dominated Mexico in the fifteenth century. The buskers would have us believe, and you can believe it if you like, that they are heirs of Moctezuma II, the emperor whose realm was brutally overthrown by the Spaniards in the great conquest of 1521.
In the course of the Spanish conquest much of Aztec culture was destroyed. So how much can we actually know about the Aztecs whom these buskers are honouring? Virtually all the accounts of the Aztec Empire were written by the Spaniards who overthrew it, so they have to be read with considerable scepticism.