Date of document publication: 2024-01-30

It is fascinating to listen to oral accounts of the pre-colonial (ancient) traditions of Benin Kingdom. Laced with tactics, strategies and heroic personages, the stories of events which shaped the past are narrated with an invigorating storytelling skill (like the Ibota) performed as a daily household ritual. According to Dan Ben-Amos (1975, p.21), Ibota is ‘an evening relaxation (pastime) among family members, wherein age long nourished family and ethnic traditions are transmitted from generation to generation in ritual songs, proverbs, and narratives’. The oral tradition of storytelling was an integral part of the household of the Benin people. The same household produced the Benin Bronzes, which document events and rituals as well as engage these material cultures in the re-enactment of the past of family traditions and societal values (Osadolor, 2021, p.213-5). Therefore, these sacred ritual and aesthetic objects become archives that can be read to better understand our cultural context.

All the archives relating to the Benin Bronzes document the past and serve as primary sources for data collection, analysis and interpretation. They are useful for historical studies and can provide a background for anthropological fieldwork. For the Digital Benin (DB) project, the archival documents transcend written documentation from the pre-colonial to post-colonial era in Benin Kingdom. They include the Benin Bronzes and oral tradition from the kingdom. For this reason, as a team we decided that these archives would be the focus of the first extension phase of DB, from October 2022 to September 2023. We built our activities around the corpus of Benin Bronzes that has been digitised and included on the DB catalogue. I have set out to collect oral traditions to include alongside the written documents and Benin Bronzes, veritable archives of historical documentation and reconstruction. Therefore, DB becomes a research tool that brings multimedia and multidisciplinary approaches to the study of Benin history and culture through the material remnants of the past.

Before embarking on a journey to collect these oral traditions, I carefully examined how scholars have employed these sources as primary data in writing Benin history and understanding Benin society and its values. Historians, sociologists and anthropologists have studied these archives as independent sources: documents or material culture which provide comprehensive knowledge of the cultural heritage of the Benin people. Describing the veracity of the sources in the study of Benin Kingdom to stress the need for a multidisciplinary approach, as DB’s interactive videos are intended to accomplish, Robert Elwyn Bradbury asserts that ‘where written records do not exist for the pre-colonial period and the testimony of European visitors is scanty, lacks continuity, and is for the most part superficial and biased in content towards the interest of traders, missionaries, and government official, unorthodox approaches are necessary for getting at the evidence of the past’ (Bradbury, 1973, p.4). Bradbury has argued that material remains like the Benin Bronzes are sources of information whose value, he emphasises, ‘would only increase when the materials can be related meaningfully to the living culture of the people’.

In the first phase of DB (October 2020–September 2022), I collected oral traditions and recorded video documentation of Benin ceremonies, festival and rituals, taking a cue from Bradbury to treat these collections as current political and sociocultural configurations of Benin society (Bradbury, 1973, p.4). In addition, Prof. Agbontaen-Eghafona has stated that ‘Benin art works were originally meant for recording historical events and satisfying the needs of the Benin Oba’ (Agbontaen, 1983, p.ii), and Joseph Nevadomsky (2015, p.219) describes the Bronzes as visual documentation of events such as ceremonies and the reign of kings.

With this in mind and the support of CALIBRO (Matteo Azzi and Giorgio Uboldi), my fieldwork focused on recording audio and video about a select group of objects that can help in the study and understanding of the 5,246 objects in the DB database. Our researcher Project Researcher Imogen Coulson identified paper trails that archives, libraries and museums transferred to DB in this extension phase. Together with Eiloghosa Obobaifo and Ermeline de la Croix, she identified actors (institutions, people, etc.), specific objects and objects groups in these archival materials that were linked to the objects identified in the first phase of DB. Eiloghosa Obobaifo tagged specific objects and object groups in the interactive oral history videos developed by the Calibro design studio. The link between archival materials (paper trails) and historical Benin objects is made in the oral accounts. The objective was to establish a relationship between pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial documents and the Benin Bronzes as an archive.

Conversations between Prof. Dr Barbara Plankensteiner, Dr Anne Luther, and Eiloghosa Obobaifo led to identifying a starting point for the research into the history of Benin through the interpretation and observation of the historical objects. In this field study, contributors, including members of Benin society and the royal family, descendants of notable personages, titleholders, artisans, historians, scholars and traditional-religion practitioners, are the experts that contextualise the objects. We contacted all potential contributors with formal requests for an interview; I made follow-up calls to book appointments with those who were available and willing to contribute to the preservation of these valued traditions.

The selection of videos for the development of the interactive segment was influenced by two main factors: the ambitious timeframe of the project and the setup of the field research with the experts who were informants (not all interviews and conversations were recorded on camera) and the experts who were contributors. Our intention is to continue with this research process in the upcoming phases of the project as well as to establish a continuous method for the study of the historical objects. I was supported in this fieldwork by Eiloghosa Obobaifo, the Digital Benin data steward in Nigeria; Mabel Osaruemwinomwa Oviahon, a research assistant collaborating with Digital Benin; and Priscilla Biakolo, my research assistant. Together we kept a diary of requests and reminders, and we made a consistent effort to locate people and places. We had contact with over thirty people who helped establish inquiries for the contributions we would record for DB, and we interviewed nineteen experts who consented to contribute. The fieldwork for this collection of oral traditions lasted for a period of four months, from January to April 2023.

How Did We Conduct the Interviews and Tag the Videos?

Before conducting the interviews, we posed pertinent questions to conceptualise the process and give meaning to oral history within the DB project. These questions included: What is the relationship between archival records and the Benin Bronzes as documentation of the past? How does ethnographic fieldwork (that is, the collection of oral histories) about the re-enactment of history through rituals, festivals and ceremonial activities link documents and objects as archives? Which archival record or iconography of the Benin Bronzes has remarkable links to historical events, rituals, festivals or ceremonies? What is the most attractive iconography of the Benin Bronzes?

Having prepared a list of themes and iconographies as subjects to guide the interviews, we ventured into the field, approaching the individual contributors with specific thematic questions and topics. Thereafter, we identified the iconography mentioned in the interviews, following their transcription by Mabel Osaruemwinomwa Oviahon. There was no standardised list of questions, apart from a structure to allow the contributors to express themselves when telling their story about particular subjects and themes. With the aid of simple digital tools – a Sony camera, a Zoom recorder, a wireless Lavalier microphone and mobile phones – we documented the entire interview process. Each session began with an introduction that stated the purpose of the short video documentation, why and how they would be hosted on the DB database. After the theme of the discussion was then presented, the contributor responded by narrating the accounts without any interruptions by the interviewer apart from occasionally asking follow-up questions to elicit further information.

After each session, steps were taken to make the videos interactive, which involved the use of various application interfaces. The contributions were edited using Adobe Premiere to remove irrelevant aspects of the discussion and focus on the thematic objectives. A template was created on Airtable to build the relationship between the objects identified and the oral histories as archives. A combination of ten columns with information about the interviews, timespans, kings, objects IDs, themes, iconography, Edo designation, oral history-archive timeline, contributors and the Nigerian archive to describe the interviews or relate to the interviews was used by a team of developers to create their wireframe. Every transcribed interview was proofread and imported into the interview column as well as Google Drive. Using the transcriptions, Eiloghosa Obobaifo subtitled the videos and tagged relevant and related iconography with the application Aegisub. Some icons were revealed by zooming onto the objects with the aid of Aegisub. This stage completed the video- making process.

What Objects Were Digitised as Archives, and Where Are the Relevant Archival Sources in Nigeria Located?

Archival Materials as Paper Trails

This research identified available archival resources in Nigeria. It started by looking for institutions with potentially relevant collections. The National Archives of Nigeria in Ibadan, the National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM) Library in Benin City and Lagos, the Ministry of Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs Library and Archive, and the Ọba Palace Library and Archive were initially identified. The archival sources from these institutions are mainly written documents from the colonial and post-colonial periods. As a result, we include an archival documentation index as a source guide to the historical events in these archives.

Objects as Archival Materials

We digitised over three hundred objects identified from high-resolution photographs and transcriptions of the catalogue cards of the NCMM (Benin City and Lagos). This led to new research about iconography and oral traditions. Our research developed an interactive oral-history space in which our audiences can learn about significant historical events and ceremonies from pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial sources linked to the knowledge that the historical Benin objects carry as an integral part of their existence as archives.

These interactive videos afford scholars the opportunity to study historical objects in their original functional, sociocultural and spiritual context rather than as a museum object interpreted generically by art historians. This research will be a significant contribution to the knowledge of Benin history and culture because it links pre-colonial and colonial records, material relics as documentation of the past and oral history from fieldwork based on specific subjects. 

We have relied on colonial intelligence reports, newspapers in the National Archives in Ibadan, and the NCMM in Lagos and Benin City regarding the use of primary sources. Other sources included iconography from the Benin Bronzes on the Digital Benin website. These primary sources have been complemented by oral histories, which is imperative in the understanding of the past or a society through its material culture. The scope of this research covers the period from 1500 AD to the colonial era.

In conclusion, this research illuminates the historical events and sociocultural activities of Benin Kingdom using an interactive online space and diverse materials like archival records, bronze iconography and oral history.