Africa in World History
° Benin ° Cameroon ° Congo ° Cote d'Ivoire
° Gabon ° Ghana ° Guinea ° Kenya ° Liberia ° Mauritania
° Mozambique ° Nigeria ° Senegal ° Sierra Leone
° Somalia ° Tanzania ° Zanzibar
KING OBBAH OF BENIN, AFRICA'S WORST SOVEREIGN.
CANNIVAL AND SLAVER.
His Massacre of English Visitors Will End His Atrocious Reign.
His Stores of Ivory Worth Millions.
If England makes good its intentions to punish King Obbah of Benin for the recent massacre of an unarmed expedition, the most atrocious of the African monarchs will get a taste of the misery he has so generously bestowed upon tens of thousands of others. And that England will do this there is little doubt, for in addition to avenging the deaths of her subjects the conquest of Benin will open up a country of immeasurable richness. Not only this, but it will abolish one of the central points of the slave traffic of Africa and go a long way toward crushing cannibalism and human sacrifice.
The domain of King Obbah forms the central section of the notorious Slave Coast of the Gulf of Guinea. This was a favorite resort of the slave hunter as far back as a century ago. The ancestors of the King helped the slavers in exchange for trifling baubles, and when the foreign demand ceased, the traffic was continued for native purposes, just as had existed before the advent of foreign slavers.
Slavery is a formidable part of the social fabric of this African kingdom. It supplies a currency system; it does away with the need of jails or penitentiaries; it is an exchangeable commodity for the riches of the slave cities in northern Africa, and forms a scheme for the disposition of captives made in the petty wars which are constantly being waged . . . owing to the cruelties and exactions of the different kings the rich country has been rendered next to useless for commercial purposes.
A CITY OF DREAD
. . . Very few white men have ever visited the city of Benin, located some two hundred miles inland from the coast. Even the missionaries have given the city a wide berth . . . The city of Benin is quite extensive, having twelve or fifteen hundred houses of clay. What the population is can only be conjectured, as the men are constantly going on expeditions in the country. The number of women and children in the city is very great. Polygamy is extensively practiced. The fathers look upon the girl children as so much property, or as so much money. They are virtually slaves from birth, and eventually many of them are sold by the dealers in the slave marts of Morocco.
HAS VAST STORES OF IVORY
It is believed that the city of Benin contains fabulous amounts of ivory. For many generations the natives have been compelled to give the reigning king a certain amount of ivory, and as the surrounding country is the richest in elephants of any section of Africa, the accumulation of tusks is figured to be immense.
When Brass. Captain H.L. Gallway, (the British Vice-Consul of that district) visited the king's palace he sake enough to convince him that the ivory of the kingdom was worth millions. The palace is surrounded by high walls of clay, and in the enclosure were numbers of shrines of carved tusks, some of them of prodigious size. Each shrine was guarded day and night by naked attendants, as the average native is not above stealing from the king, although he well knows that detection means death in a horrible form . . .
For two years he (King Obbah) has waged a guerrilla war against the Royal Niger Trading Company, which maintains stations for many hundreds of miles along the river Niger. These wars have been mainly directed against the native employees of the company, and thousands of them have been killed or captured within the past two years. Europeans have seldom suffered from these depredations, and for that reason, no regular military expedition has been sent against him. This has evidently made the king bold, as was shown by the recent massacre of Englishmen.
A DREARY MARCH TO BENIN
To punish King Obbah will not be an easy matter. To reach the city of Benin means a march of more than two hundred miles through an almost impenetrable country . . . Among the Benin warriors cannibalism is rife. Animal flesh is despised as coming from dumb, inferior brutes, while human flesh is regarded as the proper meat for great soldiers. The bodies of enemies killed in battle, even at great distance from the city, are transported to Benin with much labor for the purpose of supplying the population with an immense feast. The warriors eat first, then the male children are fed, while the women and small girls receive the leavings . . .
King Obbah, through his dealings with Asiatic slavers, has contracted some luxurious Oriental customs. One of his most important attendants is a functionary whose sold duty is to tickle the soles of the royal feet. This service is always performed for the king while he is attending to affairs of state, seated on his throne of ivory and coral.
A collection of Church Missionary Society manuscripts from the early part of the nineteenth century until the late 1860s. In their reports and missives, the missionaries - black and white - document life and activities, such as trade in Yorubaland, Sierra Leone and Dahomey (Benin). The missionaries did not restrict themselves to writing about church missionary activities, rather they reported whatever struck them as worthy news, commenting for example on slavery, commodity commerce, internal and external conflicts. As a whole this collection of primary source material sheds light on a unified understanding of the period, and is an important contribution to historical reconstruction.
