sustainability

The Benin Bronzes are a broad term used for the carved ivory, wooden works, metal sculptures and plaques looted by British troops during the Punitive Expedition in 1897.

Scholars estimate that more than 5,000 artefacts were stolen, some of which were gifted to Queen Victoria, others sold in auctions, held in private galleries or donated to museums across Europe and elsewhere.

The call to return the art, which began in the 1930s, intensified in the recent decade, inspired by growing pressure, repatriation activism and the relentless effort of the Benin Dialogue Group, a multilateral stakeholders’ group.

As momentum built at the peak of the homecoming of these arts, Igun Street unexpectedly found itself in the global spotlight. Diplomats, state officials, museum curators and researchers began arriving in numbers local artisans say they had never witnessed before.

This noon, Double Chief’s voice brims with pride as he points to a recently completed sculpture resting on a wooden bench. The bronze figure, a man in a suit and tie, had received its final polish only that morning after months of work.

Yet for many bronze casters, the attention has done little to solve underlying concerns.

“We are struggling to keep the industry alive,” says Oriakhi Osazee, who sits on a wooden stool at the entrance of a store in Igun. A sculptor whose mediums are clay, fibre, brass and bronze, Osazee has been in the craft for more than 35 years. He speaks with depth and conviction, drawing from vivid dates and past events to reinforce his ideas.

Efforts to recruit apprentices have stalled, he says. Young people, on whom the future of the craft depends, are increasingly leaving in search of what he calls “quick money” in other professions, cities and countries.

When their ancestors began, he recalls, their craft extended beyond bronze casting. There were, among the Iguns, men who had a gift in ivory carving. Long before the global ban on ivory trade was made official, that layer of art, without heirs and hope of continuity, had died.

For Agbonmwenre Alex, the subject of heirship within the craft is a matter of personal pain.

Alex, who was taking a tour of his workshop, began learning the craft at the age of eight under the guidance of his father. He started with errands and light tasks before progressing to kneading clay pottery. Over time, he learned every stage of the casting process, from preparing moulds to the final polishing of finished works.

Today, he is the only one of his father’s seven sons who remains in the profession. But uncertainty now hangs over the next generation.

“I would like my sons to take after me,” Alex says. “Unfortunately, I started exposing them to this craft so late. They literally see this work as outdated, archaic, and dying. The zeal, the love for the job, is dead.”

I would like my sons to take after me. They see this work as outdates, archaic, and dying. The zeal, the love for the job, is dead.

by AGNONMWENRE ALEX, BRONZE CRAFTSMAN

His first son chose to study law. His second is pursuing a degree in healthcare. Despite repeated efforts to pique their interest, including offering workshop space, raw materials and financial support to start a business of their own, neither accepted.

“The number of youths is declining drastically. It [the craft] is at risk of going into extinction. Apprentices are so scarce,” says Osazee. “We used to have a lot of apprentices in the past.”

The final journey

“By mid-June it is over,” Evansis says.

The mature cicadas, dark-shelled and spent, begin flying towards the Umrong River in large numbers and drop into the rapids. The river fills with them. Along the banks, dead cicadas collect against wet stones and bamboo roots, their wings plastered flat by the current.

Locals call it niangtaser suicide. Hajong offers a simpler explanation: Cicadas are naturally drawn to sound and movement, and the fast-moving river may trigger that instinct in their final hours.

For the fish below the surface, it is a feast. For the forest above, closure.

The journey that began four years earlier beneath the ground ends in the same river that separates Livi’s home from the sanctuary.

Not everyone has watched that cycle for as long as Kewstar Majaw.

At 92, he has witnessed more emergences than almost anyone alive in the village. He served in the Indian Army. He loves watching football. And every four years, without fail, he waits for his noisy visitors.

For Kewstar, the passing of the cicadas has become another way of measuring life. World Cups came and went. Governments changed. Forests retreated. But every four years, if the rains arrived on time and the bamboo still held, the forest sang.

As a boy, he would follow his parents into the forest carrying bamboo containers, the sound reaching them before the insects came into view. In those days, the niangtaser was everywhere. Behind houses. In the trees along village paths. Young ones, mature ones – the forest floor was alive with them.

The chorus was so loud, he recalls with a laugh, that people stuffed cotton into their ears to bear it.

The insect did not need to be searched for. It found you.

Kewstar sits quietly for a moment. At his age, he has watched the forest retreat, the bamboo thin, and the chorus fade with each passing emergence. The insect that once appeared on his doorstep now requires a torch and a walk in the dark to be found.

“It was everywhere,” he says softly. “Now you have to go looking for it.”

In a few weeks, the cicadas will disappear beneath the earth once more,  keeping time in darkness until the cycle begins again. By the next emergence, another football World Cup will be under way somewhere else in the world.

Whether Saiden’s forests will still sing with them depends on what survives until then.