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Benin City

Capital city of Edo State, Nigeria

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Benin City
DipoTayo · CC BY-SA 4.0

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History

European contact and colonization

The Portuguese visited Benin City around 1485. Benin grew rich during the 16th and 17th centuries due to trade within southern Nigeria, as well as through trade with Europeans, mostly in pepper and ivory. In the early 16th century, the Ọba sent an ambassador to Lisbon, and the King of Portugal sent Christian missionaries to Benin. Some residents of Benin could still speak a pidgin Portuguese in the late 19th century. Many Portuguese loan words can still be found today in the languages of the area. A Portuguese captain (Lourenco Pinto) described the city in 1691: "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".

Whilst 16th and 17th century European accounts of Benin City compared its scale to European cities, in a 1701 or 1702 letter the Dutch East India Company merchant David van Nyendael described Benin City as a “mere village”. Although he praised the king’s palace with its turreted roofs decorated with brass snakes, and described the city’s intact houses as “large and handsome,” he noted that the town had clearly been more densely populated in the past and was now mostly “half-ruined houses.”

In 1820 a British Naval officer, Lieutenant John King, visited Benin city and wrote, "The walls having been to a large extent destroyed and the city having been formerly depopulated by a civil war, the circumference of the inhabited area does not now exceed two or three miles." In 1897 Reginald Bacon, a member of the British Punitive Expedition, described Benin city as "an irregular straggling town formed by groups of houses separated from each other by patches of bush. It is perhaps a mile and a half long from east to west, and a mile from north to south." The town was located about a mile beyond the large surrounding rampart and ditch encountered by the Expedition (the Benin city wall or moat), suggesting that it had shrunk in size from its earlier peak.

On 17 February 1897, Benin City fell to the British. In the "Punitive Expedition", a 1,200-strong British force, under the command of Admiral Sir Harry Rawson, captured, sacked, and burnt the city after all but two men from a previous British delegation led by Acting Consul General James Robert Phillips were ambushed and killed. Alan Boisragon, one of the survivors of the Benin Massacre, included references of the practice of human sacrifice in the city in a firsthand account written in 1898 (one year after the Punitive Expedition). Historian James D. Graham notes that although "there is little doubt that human sacrifices were an integral part of the Benin state religion from very early days," first-hand accounts regarding such acts often varied significantly, with some reporting them and others making no mention of them.

The capture of Benin paved the way for British colonization and the merging of later regional British incorporation of African kingdoms into the Niger Coast Protectorate, the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria and finally, into the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria. The British permitted the restoration of the Benin monarchy in 1914, but true political power still lay with the colonial administration of Nigeria.

Nigerian independence

Following Nigeria's independence from British rule in 1960, Benin City became the capital of Mid-Western Region when the region was split from Western Region in June 1963. In 1976, when the region was renamed Bendel State, it remained the capital of the region. it became the State Capital of Edo State when the state of Bendel was divided into the Delta State and Edo State in 1991.

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