Word: benin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...BENIN. Benin's history was once the brightest of all the African kingdoms': its famous bronze sculptures are collector's items across the world. Today, the 450,000 members of this Nigerian tribe are led by Oba Akenzua II, 74. Like the Oni of Ife and the Alafin, he receives a stipend of about $10,000 a year from the Nigerian government; in addition, he has extensive landholdings that produce considerable extra income-just how much, no one will say. His successor is Crown Prince Solomon Akenzua, 48, who retired from the Nigerian civil service in June...
Modest & Monumental. The show makes clear what many people overlook -that Black Africa developed highly organized cultures and a sophisticated naturalistic art long before the Europeans arrived. A few works survive from this era, among them the superb bronze head of a queen mother from 16th century Benin, whose kings ruled a large area of what is now southern Nigeria. There is also the portrait statue of King Bom Bosh, ruler of the Congolese kingdom of the Bakuba about 1650-1660. Most impressive of all is the famous Tada bronze from Nigeria, a relatively small (20 inches high) but monumental...
...court art of Ife and Benin demonstrates that the ancient Africans could achieve a naturalism comparable to that of Egypt, Greece and Renaissance Italy. But Africa's unique contribution to world art is the violently expressionistic wooden sculpture and highly stylized masks of tribal art-the art that impressed and excited Picasso and Matisse and strongly deflected the course of modern art. Oddly enough, this tribal art owes much of its vitality to the wood-eating white ant of Africa. Because of its depredations-and some help from natural decay-each generation of carvers had to create new images...
...Biafrans made the first important moves of the war. Boiling out of their enclave, they captured Benin, capital of the neighboring Midwest. By early 1968, however, the difference in troop strength began to be felt. Federal forces won one of the most important battles of the war by taking the key shipping center of Calabar and Port Harcourt, with its airport, harbor and oil installations. For the remainder of the fight, Biafra was a landlocked island. Apart from radios, its sole contact with the world was a 75-ft.-wide strip of highway at Uli that had been converted into...