The Oba: Sacred King Who Cannot Touch the Ground

His feet do not touch the earth.

The Oba of Benin, the divine king of the Edo people, moves through his world elevated: carried on a litter when he travels, preceded by attendants who clear the path, surrounded by the elaborate visual language of Benin royal protocol. The sacred royal feet that touch common ground would be feet that have allowed the divine to be contaminated by the ordinary.

He is the axis of the Edo world.

The Benin understanding of sacred kingship is among the most elaborated in West Africa: the Oba is simultaneously the political ruler, the ritual center, the divine authority, and the human face of the ancestral king-force that has been running since Oranmiyan came from Ile-Ife (the Yoruba city of origins) and established the dynasty. He performs rituals that maintain the fertility of the land and the social order. He is the being whose health is the kingdom’s health, whose sickness is the kingdom’s sickness.

His palace is the center of the capital, and the capital is the center of the kingdom, and the palace’s layout encodes the structure of the cosmos: the ancestral shrines arranged in prescribed order, the galleries where the bronze heads of the royal ancestors are kept, the places where the ceremonies that renew the world are performed.

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The bronzes were his ancestors.

The Benin bronzes — the plaques, the heads, the figures that are now in the British Museum and the Metropolitan and the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin and dozens of other institutions — were not decorative. They were the ancestral shrine objects, the bronze heads on which offerings were made to the dead kings and important chiefs who had become divine forces in the kingdom’s ongoing life.

Each head represented a specific person. The specific person, after death, required specific offerings at specific times. The offerings were made on the bronze head the way they might be made on a grave — addressing the person at the place where they were most present.

When the British Punitive Expedition of 1897 burned Benin City and loaded the bronzes onto ships, they did not remove art. They removed the dead from their shrines. They scattered the ancestors of the Edo people across the museums of the world, where the dead have been displayed under glass for a hundred and thirty years without offerings.

The kingdom has continued. The Oba remains. The repatriation negotiations are ongoing.

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He is accessible through layers.

The Oba does not speak directly to ordinary people. The protocol for approaching him involves multiple layers of titled intermediaries — the Uzama (the seven high chiefs), the palace chiefs, the town chiefs — each with specific roles in managing access to the royal person. This is the same logic as the Akan Okyeame and the Fon Legba: direct contact between the ordinary and the sacred requires mediation, and the mediation is itself a sacred act.

The Oba’s words are never reported directly. They are translated, amplified, clarified by the appropriate intermediary. The Oba’s face is not visible during certain ceremonies — he is concealed by curtains or by the elaborate beaded and coral regalia that transforms his body from a man’s body into a royal body.

The transformation is real. The person who wears the coral regalia of the Oba is no longer only a person.

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The kingdom survived its burning.

In 1897, the British burned Benin City, killed many of its people, looted its palace, and exiled the Oba. They installed a colonial administration. They tried to end the institution.

The institution continued in exile, then returned, then was formally recognized by the colonial administration which discovered that ruling the Benin area without the Oba’s cooperation was practically impossible.

The current Oba of Benin — Ewuare II, who succeeded to the throne in 2016 — is pursuing the return of the stolen bronzes through legal and diplomatic channels that he and his predecessors have been using since the bronzes were taken. Some have been returned. The largest collections remain in Europe and America.

His feet do not touch the earth.

He is waiting.

The bronzes know where they belong.