Benin City

We were very excited about going to Benin City – centre of the ancient Benin kingdom, lots of history, lots of culture and art, including bronze casters whose work we had seen across Nigeria in galleries and shops. What we got, however, was a bit of a disappointment.

The roads to and around Benin are pretty bad, and also hugely busy with traffic. If you’re ever in the area, do all you can to avoid a place called Ore. It’s probably impossible to avoid, because it’s on the main expressway from Lagos to Benin and at the junction to the road to Ife and Ibadan, so wherever you’re travelling around here, you’re likely to have to go through it. But it’s a horrible mess of muddy, bumpy roads, many of which are less road and more HGV graveyards. Long go-slows are around every corner, either because yet another tanker has broken down in a hugely inconvenient place or, as in the most terrifying of the hold ups we experienced yesterday on our way out of Benin, because there isn’t actually a road – just a huge mess of mud and sludge which cars and lorries are still driving through, making it worse with every vehicle that passes. At one point I actually had to close my eyes as our battered old Peugeot station wagon skidded over a swamp, with the brand new Toyota pick up truck in front clearly struggling and spraying mud onto our (cracked) windscreen (The car in front is a Toyota…so you haven’t got a hope.) One man in our car said that they had been repairing the road for 7 years in that spot, and it still wasn’t finished. You can’t help but think that allowing huge great oil tankers to drive over your unfinished road every day isn’t the quickest way to get it finished; you also can’t help noticing just how much the local economy is flourishing with stationary car-loads of travellers buying food and drink from hawkers who roam the go-slows, and wondering whether it actually isn’t in Ore’s interest to keep that road unfinished.

Anyway, after a long and bumpy journey in a –thankfully – air-conditioned minibus from Lagos, we arrived in Benin City and paid a little extra for the bus to take us right to the Hotel door. The Hotel is surprisingly nice (the Motel Benin Plaza) – rooms are a little grubby and basic (“shabby splendour”, as Simon called it), but the lobby and bar are lovely and you can sit drinking beer and eating suya by their “Olympic sized swimming pool” (that was the way the brochure in our room described what was, at most, a 10m pool in an angular kidney shape).

The next morning, we headed for the street of the bronze casters, crossing busy roads and walking alongside the (permanently rush hour) traffic on yet more pavements. En route we passed a very interesting building with carvings and statues, and as we stood looking up at it, a man arrived and introduced himself as Patrick, the King of Benin’s first cousin. He took some time to explain some of the area’s history and told us that the building we were in front of was the home of the King’s High Priest. That was pretty cool.

A little further along the main road we came to the bronze casters, proudly announced as a World Heritage Site (it’s not, although UNESCO did support a project to revive this all but forgotten craft) by a huge arch at the start of the street. That was about as good as it got. Far from being the authentic street of craftsmen which the guidebook promised, with workers who are unused to visitors and don’t hassle you, it was instead the most touristy place I have seen in Nigeria. We were constantly hissed and shouted at by pushy sales people trying to force us into their shops. When we did enter a few shops, the work was largely poor and obviously for a tourist market, and – the most frustrating thing – was clearly made from brass rather than bronze! The one interesting thing we saw was an old man – the only person actually crafting that we could see – who was making the small wax models which are then covered in clay to form a relief mould into which the metal is poured. That, too, was pretty cool. But all in all, disappointing – definitely not worth schlepping all this way for.

From here we went up to Benin’s National Museum – a striking round orange building, much more attractive than the run down Lagos museum. It has three floors containing some very interesting (and very old) artefacts, though there’s very little information about them and it’s poorly lit (when I complained I couldn’t see inside one of the display cases where the light was broken, an attendant gave me her mobile phone with a torch on it so I could look!). The really difficult part, though, is getting to the museum. It’s set in the middle of a huge roundabout with no walkway or crossings at all – so you have to negotiate the5 or 6 lanes of chaotic traffic if you want to get in! When we asked some official looking types in high-viz jackets if they could help us cross, they kept saying “The entrance is over there. You go in over there” and pointing to the museum gate in the middle of the island. “It’s not finding the gate that’s the problem, it’s crossing the road!!” They didn’t seem to understand, so we just went for it. Benin is not a place for the faint-hearted pedestrian.

We decided to give the Oba’s (King’s) Palace a miss, since it sounded like you could only walk around the “grounds” (i.e. car parks and forecourts) and couldn’t actually see inside, and instead we walked to the other end of the main road to look at an ancient house. This mud building is from the time of Old Benin (so anywhere from the 15^th century onwards) and was the only structure to survive a huge fire started by the British to destroy Benin in the 19^th century (because it wouldn’t agree to the trade rules that we wanted to impose). Once we got into the inner courtyards, it looked like people were still living in parts of it, so we didn’t pry too far, but did manage to see some amazing traditional shrines, complete with feathers, blood stains and jaw bones.

So that was our day in Benin. A couple of really cool moments, but the main attraction – the bronze workers – was a huge disappointment and generally it just felt like a busy, noisy city, with little to charm us.