Benin City

Benin City is the capital of one of West Africa's longest-lasting states. Edo tradition traces its rulers through the Ogiso kings to the Oba dynasty founded in about the 12th or 13th century, and from the 15th century the kingdom expanded under warrior obas such as Ewuare and Esigie until it reached from the Niger towards the Lagos lagoon. The city was laid out in wards of specialised guilds — casters, carvers, weavers, doctors — and enclosed by iya, earth walls and ditches that ran around the capital and its villages as part of a network estimated at some 16,000 kilometres in all.

Portuguese ships reached the kingdom's port at Ughoton in the 1480s, and European visitors described a broad, orderly city of long straight streets and a vast royal court whose walls were hung with cast brass plaques. Those plaques and the carved ivories and brass heads made for the palace are what the world now calls the Benin Bronzes. Trade in pepper, cloth, ivory and enslaved people ran through the same channels, and the kingdom guarded its independence into the 19th century.

In February 1897 a British punitive expedition, sent after a British party was ambushed and killed, captured and burned Benin City, deposed and exiled Oba Ovonramwen, who died in 1914, and removed thousands of works of art, which were sold and dispersed through European and American museums. The monarchy was restored under Eweka II in 1914 in a reduced form and the palace rebuilt. It became capital of Bendel State and, from 1991, of Edo State. Since 2021 European institutions have begun returning bronzes, and in 2023 the Nigerian president declared repatriated works the property of the royal family. The Museum of West African Art, built in the centre to receive them, has not yet opened.

Edo court culture is the city's defining feature. The Oba stands at the head of a hierarchy of palace chiefs, town chiefs and guild heads whose titles and duties are centuries old, and the palace year turns on ceremonies that culminate in the Igue rites in December. Coral beads — worn in strands at the neck and wrist and in a high beaded collar by the Oba — are the mark of rank, and the palace is still served by guilds of casters, carvers, leather-workers and drummers.

Bronze casting at Igun Street is the best known of these crafts, carried on in small open workshops by families who trace their trade to the old guild; wood and ivory carving, weaving and cast-iron work continue alongside it. Shrines to ancestors and to Olokun, the deity of the waters and of wealth, are kept in compounds across the city, and the Aruosa church represents an Edo form of worship distinct from both Christianity and the traditional shrines.

Most residents today are Christian, and Pentecostal churches are large and numerous. Edo is the everyday language of Benin City alongside Pidgin and English. The city has a strong musical tradition — Victor Uwaifo, born here and winner of the first gold record in Africa, made his name in highlife — and it takes football seriously. Edo's heavy emigration to Europe, and the trafficking that came with it, is a subject of continuous public discussion and church campaigning.

Benin City was the fourth-largest city in Nigeria at the 2006 census, after Lagos, Kano and Ibadan, and has gone on growing outwards along the Lagos, Sapele, Auchi and Agbor roads. It is the seat of the Edo State government, a market city for a wide farming region, and a university town: the University of Benin at Ugbowo brings tens of thousands of students each year.

Work is in government, trade, transport, construction, small manufacturing and services, with rubber, palm oil and timber from the surrounding country and oil-industry business drifting in from Delta State. Markets are the economic spine — Oba Market beside the palace and New Benin to the north among them — and street trading fills the roadsides. Grid electricity is unreliable and generators are everywhere; flooding and erosion damage roads in the rainy season.

The day starts with church services or market deliveries before the heat, thins in the afternoon, and ends with evening trading and roadside grills. Families keep close ties to ancestral villages in Edo State and return for burials and festivals. Emigration is a defining feature: many households have relatives in Italy, Spain or Britain, and remittances support a good deal of local building.

Edo cooking is based on soups eaten with swallows and on starch, the smooth, stretchy cassava pudding coloured with palm oil that is the local alternative to pounded yam. Black soup, ebe-omoebe, is the city's signature: a mixture of bitter and aromatic leaves blended smooth and cooked with palm oil, meat and dried fish. Owo soup, thickened with palm oil and potash, and banga, made from boiled palm-fruit pulp and delta spices, are eaten across the city.

Ogbono and egusi soups appear as they do throughout the south, and pepper soup made with goat, catfish or bush meat is the usual evening dish in bars. Yam is central — pounded, boiled with palm oil and pepper, or roasted at the roadside — and plantain is fried as dodo or roasted whole. Rice and beans, akara fritters and moin moin fill out everyday eating, and suya grills set up along the main roads at dusk.

Fresh palm wine, tapped in the villages around the city and brought in each morning, is the traditional drink and is poured at ceremonies; ogogoro, the spirit distilled from it, is used in libations. Beer, malt drinks, zobo made from hibiscus and chapman are drunk in the bars, and roasted groundnuts and coconut are sold at every junction.