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Editorial: Edo 2016=> Osioba Vs Oghian Oba

Historically speaking, it is accurate to say that: THE SON OF A TRAITOR IS A TRAITOR, when it comes to the Ogbeide Oyoo family a.k.a the Obaseki Family of Benin Kingdom. We know that a man is described according to his past achievements and not according to his future plans. That is why it is paramount to describe the Obaseki Family according to their past antecedents not according to their future pre-requisites especially as another Obaseki is vying for the political ruler-ship position of Benin Kingdom and Edo State, after we have had two previous disastrous Gaius Obaseki and Agho Obaseki in a similar position in the last two generations of our fathers and grand fathers as stated in these 15 ARTICLES OF FACTS. It seems that fate has played a fatal card on the Benins with the Obasekis as a recurring generational disaster that comes up again and again after every one thought that the last one was the final one. That is why this compendium of factual accounts of historical events in the last three generations have been proffered as a pathfinder, for those objective minded Benins seeking the truth out of the facts and fables bandied about by both sides of the argument, in this so-called democratic debate between the: PATRIOTS OF BENIN & TRAITORS OF BENIN. Vis-à-vis the Friends of Oba (Osioba) and Enemies of Oba (Oghian Oba). This analysis will be the determining factor for the Benin voters in this highly competitive and hotly contested 2016 Gubernatorial Election, as a

litmus test of loyalty to the Oba. It is paramount to understand that the Benins cannot do without their Oba and the Oba cannot do without the Benins in a symbiotic bond that is inexplicably spiritual, which predates two millennia since the days of the Ogiso Dynasty starting from about 40 BC, to these 21st century days of the Oba Dynasty. That is why in the Traditional Constitution of Benin Kingdom, the Oba of Benin is the highest mortal being in the world and all others are beneath him be they presidents, governors or kings regardless. So the fastest way to provoke the wrath of the “Loyal Benins” is to provoke the wrath of the “Royal Oba”, for where ever he sends, they will follow even unto the sweet or bitter end, as history as shown in the hard fought 1897 Invasion of Benin by the British superpower nation of the time, to their utter amazement and massacre. The ferocious and bloody Benin-British Wars lasted two long brutal years after Benin City fell in February 1897 before the last pocket of Benin Resistance was defeated, with the capture and execution of the warlord, Chief Ologbosere in June 1899. Which made the war weary British to conclude according to Robert Home the English Chronicler that: “THE BENIN TERRITORIES EXPEDITION… WAS ONE OF THE HARDEST BUSH CAMPAIGNS EVER FOUGHT IN BRITISH WEST AFRICA”. The consequence of that singular historic battle which is still more or less current affairs today especially in Africa, America and Europe, with countless movies, documentaries, books, journals and papers

including this one you are reading referring back to it till date. Even this is an undeniable fact that the nation christened “Nigeria” by the British was born out of the defeat of Benin Empire at the hands of the British Empire. For if the British Empire had not defeated Benin Empire, they would never have been able to merge the Northern protectorate and Southern Protectorate into one Protectorate of Nigeria in 1914, as Benin would have retained its independent status with all its imperial borders in southern Nigeria more or less still in tact. Now the British are gone but the Obasekis who collaborated heavily with them against Benin are still sticking around, and another Obaseki packaged as a TROJAN HORSE by his COMRADE-IN-ARMS has stepped up stir up the polity of past politics, exactly like the British colonial governors did in the past on previous and painful occasions. For many Benins this is just like De-javu. It is written, Affliction shall not rise again!

For those Iyekeze-Benins on the other side of Benin Rivers, who argue that we should move on, and that this history should remain where it belongs in the past, I simply say that a man who has no past mistake to guide his present action has no future success. Likewise you are a product of your past and your present is pregnant with your future. A medical doctor practicing in the present must have studied medicine in the past. So what you did yesterday determines what you will do tomorrow, because your past controls your future! Similarly, those Iyekeze-Benins with divided opinions that are

counseling us, that as humans, we should have a forgiving spirit, should remember that humans do not have a forgetful spirit. That is why some wrongs are forgiven but not forgotten. Our own counsel to them is that they should elect the “grandson” of Adolf Hitler the Nazi who “holocausted” six million Jews in gas chambers, to go and represent them as their country’s Ambassador to Israel and see if the Jewish people and government in Israel will forgive, forget and accept their “Ambassador”.

Likewise, those Iyekeze-Benins (Settler-Benins) using the mantra of Christianity to excuse the in-excusable, saying that as progressive Christians, we should NOT visit the sins of the fathers on the sons. We should remind them that, that is exactly the contrary of what God Himself said: that He would visit the sins of the fathers, unto the third and fourth generations. God in His wisdom knows why He said it, which is wisdom for the wise. So they too should first follow their own “good” advice and “elect” the GRANDSON of Judas Iscariot the TRAITOR who betrayed Jesus Christ as their CHURCH PASTOR and tell God that, they have moved on from the long forgotten past and have FORGIVEN Judas Iscariot. After they have heeded our counsel, we too will heed their counsel! Practice what you preach! Finally, for the selfsame Godwin ENOGHEGHASE Obaseki’s middle name is in itself an affront on our dearly revered traditional Oba-ship institution. For in Benin we only have OGHOBA-GHASE (Oba’s decision prevails), we do not have ENOGHE-GHASE (one who’s decision prevails). As they

say, Tell me your NAME and I will tell you WHO you are! say, Tell me your NAME and I will say: Tell me your NAME and I will tell you WHO you are!

We the Patriotic Benins loyal to the Oba shall see to it that we stop this attempt to repeat the history of affliction in our Edo land. for Affliction shall not rise against us in Benin Kingdom a second time. Those who want a TRAITOR to rule over them should kindly go and form their KINGDOM. Because Benin Kingdom belongs to no one else but the Oba of Benin since 2000 years till date. Now if you do not like it, you are free to relocate to another kingdom of your choice.

It is FORBIDDEN to oppose, challenge, condemn, speak or

fight against Omo N’Oba N’Edo in Benin Kingdom. AWUAH!

Edo people needs one who comes from a proven family history of unblemished and unalloyed LOYALTY and support for the revered monarchy and Kingdom of Benin, not a contrary and opposing family of Oghian Oba, Oghian Edo .Our Great Obas and Ancestors (Enikaro) will prevail on the true, loyal and patriotic Benin people with Benin blood in their veins to vote against GODWIN OBASEKI, who has been sent to come and fulfill the failed mission of his grandfather, AGHO OBASEKI against the Edo monarchy and people! Do what our loyal fathers like Omo-Osagie and other Otu-Edo Patriots did to protect the Edo Monarchy against the Edo Enemy.

If you are EDO then you MUST be Loyal to OMO N’OBA!

A word is enough for the wise! Oghian Oba is Oghian Edo!

The Choice is Yours!

Otu-Odoledo (EDF)

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ARTICLE ONE:

GREAT BENIN

KINGDOM AWAITS

THE CORONATION OF

A GREAT OBA Great Benin Kingdom awaits the moment when the Crown Prince Eheneden, the Edaiken N”Uselu will sit on the Ancestral Stool of Benin on the 18th of October, 2016. Many believe that he will be the one to fulfill the 500 year old prophecy of Oba Ewuare the Great who said: that the Warrior Oba (Ovonramwen) during whose reign the kingdom will be destroyed by the white foreigners (British), will “return” later to restore the glory and greatness of the kingdom.

Today we see the recently erected Memorial Bronze Statue of Oba Ovonranmwen sitting at the entrance of the Oba Palace waiting expectantly in anticipation for his “descendant son” to come and fulfill the prophesy of his “ancestral father” as OVONRAMWEN II”

Edaiken N’Uselu

OBA GHA TO OKPERE, ISE!

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ARTICLE TWO:

HOW AGHO OBASEKI

BETRAYED THE OBA

Thoughts on Benin

By Michael Yates (Edited)

Agho Obaseki-Oyoo

In 1897 Agho Obaseki conspired with Ralph Moor and James Phillip the British Consuls (with whom he had contact during his numerous trade transactions with the

Europeans on the Benin River trade route), a well developed plan to DEPOSE Oba Ovonranmwen and replace him with a NATIVE COUNCIL OF CHIEFS headed by himself. The evil machination of this Traitor of Benin against his Oba and people eventually came to pass, as we all know after the Benin – British War of 1897. After which he became the regent of Benin. See excerpts below from the write up of the British Anthropologist: Michael Yates

If there is one factor that led up to the events of 1897, then it is the fact that Britain wished to trade with the

people of West Africa. In 1892 Captain Henry Gallwey (he later changed his surname to Galway), then Britain’s vice-consul in that part of the world, arranged to travel to Benin City to meet the Oba. Henry Gallwey was accompanied by his consular assistant, Haly Hutton, a Dr Hanley and John Swainson, a trader with the Liverpool firm of Pinnock’s. They also took with them some thirty Itsekiri porters. Eventually Gallwey negotiated a treaty with the Oba, which placed the Oba under the protection of the British Government. The treaty was in the form commonly used in the Protectorate: Queen Victoria undertook to extend to Benin ‘her gracious favour and protection’, and in return the Oba agreed to entertain no foreign power without British approval, to give the consular officials full and exclusive jurisdiction over British subjects in Benin and the right to arbitrate in disputes, to act upon their advice, to allow free trade, and to receive missionaries.

The Benin River Trade

The treaty sought to limit the activity of foreign traders, especially the Germans and the Dutch, and to encourage trade with Great Britain. It does seem to be a somewhat one-sided affair, with the interests of the British far outweighing those of the Oba and the people of Benin. In fact, it is unclear whether or not the Oba actually signed this document. At least one source says that he did not ‘touch the quill with which the treaty was to be signed’ giving, as a reason, the fact that he was ‘in the midst of an important ritual’. Apparently the Oba was aware of a number of prophecies which predicted that a great catastrophe would befall Benin. It also seems likely that the Oba

did not fully disclose to his cabinet what had been said between himself and Gallwey. No doubt Captain Gallwey left Benin City in the belief that trade would improve between Benin and the British, but this did not happen. In fact, the Oba continued to go about his business as though no treaty existed.`

Henry Gallwey

One person who did trade with the British, and who was very pro-British, was the Itsekiri Chief Dogho. Perhaps Dogho was mindful of what had happened to one of his predecessors, Chief Nana, who had upset the British. In 1884 Chief Nana had been given the title ‘Governor of the (Benin) River’ by the British because of his business acumen. But, in 1894, the British removed the title, finding that he had become too wealthy and independent for their liking. This led to Chief Nana fortifying his home town of Brohimi. When the naval gunboat Alecto sailed up the river to Brohimi some of its crew came under fire from a concealed battery on the river bank. Two sailors were killed and others seriously injured, including Vice-Consul Peter Wade Grant Copland-Crawford who happened to be on the boat at the time of the attack. Two warships, the Phoebe and Philomel, under Admiral Bedford, were dispatched and Brohimi was bombarded by the ships. At the same time a force of sailors and Protectorate constabulary edged their way through the forest and into the town.

Chief Nana Olumo

Chief Nana Olumo of Ebrohimi was eventually captured and, following a trial, was deported to the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana). One observer at the time commented that ‘There is only one king in this country and that is the white man.’ Nor was Nana the only chief to have been removed from his country by the British. In 1886 Chief Jaja of Opobo (to the west of the town of Old Calabar, on the mouth of the Cross River) was tricked, under promise of a safe conduct, and removed to St Helena. It should, perhaps, be born in mind that the removal by the British of both Chief Jaja and

Chief Nana would have been uppermost in the mind of the Oba of Benin when events began to unfold there in 1897. So it was crystal clear to the Oba what the grand design of the British was which was to COLONIZE his kingdom as was already done in Ashanti Kingdom (Ghana), Lagos, Calabar, Itsekhiri, Oyo, Nupe and Borgu, Borno and other kingdoms of the expanding British colonial empire.

Consul James Robert Phillips was the eldest son of the Reverend T. Phillips (later Bishop of Carlisle). Following a public school education, he attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied law, before becoming a colonial officer in the Gold Coast (present day Ghana). In June, 1896, he was appointed Deputy Commissioner and Consul-General for the Niger Coast Protectorate (NCP). Phillips was on leave in England when his new posting was announced. Although he wanted to return to Africa as soon as possible, he was ordered to remain in England until he could meet the NCP Commissioner and Consul-General, Ralph Denham Rayment Moor, who was then en route to England to begin a period of leave. The pair probably met in September, 1896, possibly in London, although no record appears to exist of what was said between the two men. In many ways they were like chalk and cheese. Phillips had public school and university contacts, unlike Moor, and had an unblemished colonial record, again unlike Moor who had been previously criticized for his dealings with Chief Nana. Moor may also have felt that Phillips was being groomed to take over his job. No doubt they did discuss the situation in Benin and we do know that, before he left London, Phillips was overheard boasting that his intention was to lead an expedition to Benin City. Phillips arrived in the Protectorate on 24th October, 1896. As a lawyer, he had been instructed to concentrate on the prisons and legal system of the Protectorate, but, on 31st October, he met Chief Dogho and other Itsekiri chiefs, as well as a number of European traders at Sapele on the Benin River. Phillips felt that he had ‘gained a very clear picture of the state of affairs’ in Benin and he quickly sent the following dispatch to the Foreign Office in London: The King of Benin has continued to do everything in his power to stop the people from trading and prevent the Government from opening up the country. By means of his Fetish he has

succeeded to a marked degree. He has permanently placed a Juju on (Palm) Kernels, the most profitable product of the country, and the penalty for trading in this produce is death. He has closed the markets and has only occasionally consented to open them in certain places on receipt of presents from the Jakri chiefs. Only however to close them again when he desires more blackmail…I feel so convinced that every means has been successfully tried that I have advised the Jakri chiefs to discontinue their presents (tributes). Phillips added four letters from trading companies such as Miller Brothers from Liverpool, who complained of loss of trade, before ending his dispatch with this stark paragraph: “I therefore ask for his Lordship’s permission to visit Benin City in February next, TO DEPOSE AND REMOVE THE KING OF BENIN AND TO ESTABLISH A NATIVE COUNCIL IN HIS PLACE and to take such further steps for the opening up of the country as the occasion may require. I do not anticipate any serious resistance from the people of the country – there is every reason to believe that, they (THE TRAITORS OF BENIN) would be glad to get rid of their King – but in order to obviate any danger I wish to take up A SUFFICIENT ARMED FORCE, consisting of 250 troops, two seven-pounder guns (canons), 1 Maxim, and 1 Rocket Apparatus (missile launcher) of the Niger Coast Protectorate Force (NCPF) and a detachment of Lagos Hausas (colonial soldiers) 150 strong, if his Lordship and the Secretary of State for the Colonies will sanction the use of the Colonial Forces to this extent…PS I would add that I have reason to hope that sufficient Ivory may be found in the King’s house to pay the expenses in removing the King (Oba) from his Stool. “

Ralph Moor

When the Phillips dispatch reached London, a copy was sent, by the Foreign Office, to Ralph Moor, asking for his comments. Moor at once agreed that Phillips had the right suggestion and offered to return to Africa at once. Indeed, such was Moor’s enthusiasm for the venture that one might suggest that the whole of Phillips’ dispatch was something that had been put together by Moor and Phillips when they met in London, prior to Phillips’ departure for Africa. However, the Foreign Office were unconvinced and, having more or less ignored the dispatch over the Christmas and New Year holidays, they did not reply to Phillips until 8th January, 1897, when they sent a telegraph, instructing him to desist from his planned invasion. But the

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telegraph never reached Phillips. He had been killed a few days earlier. James Phillips, for reasons that still remain unclear, decided that he would visit Benin City without waiting for Foreign Office permission. Was this the rash decision of a young, inexperienced European? Or was this, as I say above, a plan devised by Phillips and Moor at their London meeting? The fact is, WE JUST DO NOT KNOW.

EDITOR’S SUMMARY

Oh Yes! Mr. Yates, we do KNOW! Because we know what “you just do not know” that both Ralph Moor and Robert Phillips had conspired with some of their Benin agents like Agho Obaseki to betray Benin Kingdom, that was why they said in their pre-concocted dispatch to London inter alia: “I do not anticipate any serious resistance from the people of the country – there is every reason to believe that they (THE TRAITORS OF BENIN) would be glad to get rid of their King (Oba Ovonranmwen).” No wonder Agho Obaseki after failing to “convince” Oba Ovonranmwen to sign away his kingdom and people as “slaves” to the British Queen Victoria and earn his 30 pieces of silver promised him by the British Consul. He decided to do the Judas Iscariot Stunt and sell our beloved Benin Kingdom to our enemy to earn both the Money and Monarchy promised him by his colonial slave masters, which was the crystal clear MOTIVE for Agho Obaseki’s ACT OF TREASON Remember that the main reason why traitors betray their people or government to the enemy is strictly for monetary gains or self aggrandizement or both. Just like: Agho Obaseki the Judas Iscariot of Benin Kingdom!

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ARTICLE THREE:

ADMIRAL RAWSON’S

SURPRISE ATTACK

ON BENIN CITY

Today In History/ 100 Years Ago. "Second

Blood" By Ademola Iyi-Eweka (Edited) PART ONE: The news of the massacre of Acting-Consul James Philip and his men reachedBritish Newspapers on 12th Jan 1897. A call for immediate action against Benin City was loudest in the mercantile communities of Liverpool, Glasgow and Belfast-all of them having trading post in West Africa.

Admiral H. Rawson

The British Government and politicians were not amused that the Govt was being maneuvered into a war with Benin by Ralph Moor. And the House of Commons grilled the Foreign Minister on the wisdom of Acting-Consul Phillips journey to Benin without the Govt or Oba Ovoranmwen's approval. The Foreign Minister also grilled Ralph Moor on his involvement in Phllips unauthorized trip to Benin, reminding him that the Govt has turned down his request twice on the use of force on Oba Ovonramwen. Ralph Moor denied any knowledge of thetrip.They therefore put the blame on the shoulders of the inexperienced late James Phillips and the barbarous Oba Ovonramwen. On Jan 12, the British cabinet met to consider what action to take against Benin. At the end of the meeting, they settled on Rear-Admiral Harry Rawson to lead the "Punitive Expedition" against Benin. He was at the time the commander of the squadron at the Cape of Good Hope. From all over the world Britain gathered its fighting forces against Benin. One of the men who served in one of the ship called ST GEORGE was a Petty-Officer Callaghan, who became the father of the future British Prime Minister, James Callaghan. From the colonies, Britain recruited many people either as fighters or carriers. In Sierra Leone alone Britain recruited 600.From Opopo She got one hundred. From Bonny, one hundred. At Sapele under the guidance of chief Dogho [Dore Numa] and Fregene hundreds more were recruited. Experienced Hausa soldiers were recruited in Lagos Colony as scouts. And of course hundreds of veterans of the Yoruba civil wars were also recruited. The brunt of the fighting was intended to fall on the NCPF [Niger coast protectorate Administration] the force raised and trained by Moor since 1891It was a force made up of about 450 troops under the command of officers of British Army, at whose head was Allan Boisragon one of the survivors of the Jan 4th massacre. Moor not wanting share the glory for the capture of Benin with the Navy under Rawson, suggested that Rawson only needed 250 naval men to supplement his own fighting force of NCPF. Rawson then cut the size of his own fighting men however to 700 having been told that the Edo people are cowards and would not stand to fight- a decision he was later to regret. It later turned out that Ralph Moor had developed a plan of attack on Benin for two years. The British invading army suffered its first casualty near Warrigi [ Warri] as one of the Navy men collapsed and died from sunstroke. When the British Army was now ready to land, Rawson decided to attack Benin from three fronts-Gwatto [Ughoton], Sakpoba [Isokpoba] and Ologbo. The Sakpoba attack was to prevent Benin chiefs from escaping into friendly areas when Benin City falls. At least that was

the reason they gave. It was however diversionary. Between 10th and 12th of Feb 1897,the fighting began as Rawson met fierce resistance from Benin Soldiers at Gwatto [Ughoton] and later Ologbo. Rawson immediately realized that he has been misled by Ralph Moor. He called on more men from his ships noting that the Edos are no cowards and were ready to fight to death. The group attacking Gwatto (Ughoton) was led by captain O'Callghan. His order was to destroy Ughoton, take and hold on to the Edo military camp at Ugbine where Phillips and his men were killed. They took the deserted town on the 10th without firing a shot at Benin soldiers and started burning the town. Then Benin soldiers emerged from nowhere and started firing at the landing party. Lieutenant-Commander Hunt was severely wounded in the chest. So too was O'Callaghan. The British Army fought a retreating battle as they promptly evacuated the town to the safety of their ships. They never came out of their ships until the end of the war. The Benin army that successfully repelled the invasion at Ughoton was under the command of Generals Ologbosere and Ebeikhimwin. O'Callaghan was reported to have sent a message to Rawson saying that the Edos are no cowards and were prepared to fight to finish.

The Yoruba Black Collaborator a.k.a “Lieutenant Daniels” From the Royal Niger Coast Guard (seated on the right) On the 12th Rawson was lucky at Ologbo. After heaving fighting the British army captured Ologbo. Wounded on the British side was a Captain Koe and Lieutenant Daniels, the only black officer in NCPF and a private. On the Edo side the casualty was heavy. Six bodies were counted the first day. By the second day 38 more bodies were found. They stood their ground and died in an unequal fight. The British fire power was overwhelming. At Sakpoba [Isokpoba] Rawson's men were not so lucky. At about four miles from Sakpoba the British military tried to build a staging camp. Early in the morning on the 11th, Benin soldiers had under the cover of darkness moved closer to the British position. In the first volley of shots fired, Lieutenant commander Pritchard and Able Seaman Cheverill were killed. A Petty Officer Tiddy was wounded. They were hurriedly buried there as the British evacuated Sakpoba junction. Britain was to suffer more casualties when Able

Seaman Cook, who had survived the fighting collapsed and died of sunstroke. Benin suffered ten dead. Rawson was now left with only one option - march on to Benin from Ologbo with the military might he could muster. But the attack at Ughoton and Sakpoba also left the Benin army divided. O'Callghan ships kept the finest of the Benin fighting men under General Ologbosere pinned down at Ughoton waiting for the British attack which never came. It is a tactic reminiscent of Iraqi Army bogged down on Kuwaiti's shore waiting for American led invasion from the sea which never came. At the same time the British main column under Rear Admiral Rawson was gradually pushing Edo soldiers backwards on Ologbo sector towards Benin City. Without the proper communication gear it was impossible for other soldiers in Edo army to know how the war was progressing in other sectors. By the rule of their warfare they have stay put on the front line they were assigned to. So by the 17th of February 1897, they had pushed Benin soldiers back enough for Rawson to contemplate entering Benin with a flying column on the 18th of February 1897. Rawson was having problem of not having enough drinking water for his men. He has miscalculated the willingness of Benin soldiers to die rather than surrender. Therefore the Ologbo-Benin march was like a death match especially when Rawson would not trust the bush tracks left by Edo soldiers. He saw it as ambush trap. He therefore relied on his “compass” and a few Itsekhiri guides still left in the army. Others have deserted him and the British army on the death match knowing the ferocity of Benin soldiers. It was a race for survival. After the battle of January 4th at Ugbine during which James Phillips and his men where massacred, the Edo war chiefs met and sent men to fight the British. The war party was led by IYASE OKIZI the then traditional Edo Prime Minister. He had seen a lot of military service in the Yoruba areas especially in Akure and Ekiti. The peace party was led by Chief Osarogiagbon Ezomo, the then Ezomo and traditional commander of the Edo Royal army. He refused to participate in the war on the ground that it will not be good for the country. The Ezomo was in charge of Ijero-Ekiti, an area which had already fallen to the Lagos Colony Administration. Was the Ezomo acting on the intelligence report about the strength of the British weaponry? There were of course the moderates who were neither here nor there. And so right from the word go, the Edos were divided on how to combat the British menace on the coast. There were those who prayed quietly for the defeat of Oba Ovonramwen because of the series of executions

of some Edo chiefs on his attempt to stabilize his position as the Oba of Benin. So it came to pass, that Rawson with poor information about the Edos, their country, unwilling to get involved in a protracted warfare because of the risks of disease and climate, set one goal for himself - SEIZE THE EDO CAPITAL OF BENIN and leave Moor and the local troops to enforce submissions. Rawson knew there was water in Benin for his men. With his compass he could guess the approximate location of Benin City. And with his COMPASS he could clear his way towards Benin while avoiding a series of ambush the Edo soldiers had set up. On the 17th day of Feb.1897, Rawson emerged on the old Sakpoba road about 5 miles to Benin. He had the Benin Army to his rear at Sakpoba. The Benin Army in Sakpoba had Rawson at their rear at Ugbeku. The two armies were unaware where the other was. The Benin Army at Sakpoba waited in vain for British attack unaware that the British were already at the gate of Benin City, ready to attack the civilian population with their Maxim Machine Guns.

1897 Maxim Gun (The First

Automatic Machine Gun) From beyond the moat at Ugbekun, Rawson fired his Rocket missiles and Cannon balls and some fell at the Oba Market and the Palace compound. Many were killed at the Oba's market as it exploded. There was pandemonium. There was confusion since they could not see the enemy which was firing at them. The Edo women called the cannon fire EKHIRI KHIRI. The war meeting going on at the palace broke up immediately. The Royal family was now ferried out of town to a safe distance and was never to come to Benin City until six months after, only to perform an act of submission to the British army.

Rocket Apparatus was the first weapon to be used to launch ‘missile’ attacks from a distance To give time for the evacuation of the city, a young man called ASORO a palace page

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[OMUADA] organized what could be described as the last civil defence of the city. The Edo army had been totally cut off at Ughoton, Sakpoba and even Ologbo road with all of them waiting in vain for the British army to show up. Asoro and his group of fighters [probabably Eghobamien and Aguebor] gave a good and gallant account of themselves. From the top of trees and on the ground, they held the British army at bay on Sakpoba road. So many British troops were killed on this encounter notably among them were ten British marines including Captain Byrne and Dr Fyfe the surgeon on Rawson's flag ship St. George. Many more were wounded. At the palace precinct a hand to hand combat for the palace was fought. The Edos lost and the British won. Thanks to their superior weaponry, tactics and good luck. The British captured a ghost town, the city having been evacuated by the Edos leaving behind the thousands of massacred civilians of our aged, women and children, who perished from the indiscriminate bombardment. Which the British covered up the bloodshed by claiming that their civilian casualties of war were human sacrifices on a massive scale and libelously coined Benin City as THE CITY OF BLOOD! Meanwhile the finest of the Benin/ Edo fighting men were still holed up at Ugbine, Ughoton, Agbor and Sakpoba waiting for the British. The British occupation of Ondo, Owo, Akure and Ekiti from Lagos made it impossible for Edo soldiers stationed in those areas to be relevant to the war that was raging on. The British set up defence fort in Benin. Rawson and his men spent the night at Oba Ovonramwen's quarters. But fearing a counter attack, the building was dynamited the following day. The British soldiers began an orgy of looting and burning. Within hours all the buildings in Benin was on fire after being stripped of all valuable ivory, art objects and loot which were plentiful in those days. Ralph Moor characteristically denied ordering the burning of the City while laying the blame on drunken Itsekhiri carriers in his service. When the news of the fall of Benin reached the different Edo military units, there was the cry of "TREACHERY" on every throat. A few of the warriors found their way to where Oba Ovonramwen and his court had moved. Some linked up with General Ologbose, Ebeikhimwin and the crown prince AIGUOBASIMWIN [who was later crowned as OBA EWEKA THE SECOND]. The British soldiers left no building standing in Benin City. Even the Ezomo's Palace the “undeserving’ Defense Minister of the kingdom who resolutely REFUSED to fight and defend his king and kingdom for reasons best known to him. Found to his chagrin and “amazement” that his own palace was not spared. He was reported to have said to

himself, “of truth the enemy of my people, is truly my enemy". He got another shocker when he requested that the people of Ijero-Ekiti should come and help him rebuild his destroyed palace. The Lagos Colony Administration “politely” told him that Ijero-Ekiti was no longer under his command and tributary control which he wanted to keep benefiting from Benin kingdom, while refusing to fight for Benin Kingdom. It now belonged to the British Government based in Lagos. Among those who supposedly “fought” in the war and evacuated the city in Oba Ovonranmwen entourage was notably CHIEF AGHO OBASEKI. The number of the dead during the last phase of fight could not be ascertained on the Benin side, because all the dead bodies found in Benin City on February, 18th.1897 were all ascribed to the human sacrifice of Oba Ovonramwen by Ralph Moor. It must have been heavy. The city was accordingly renamed the “CITY OF BLOOD" by the same British who caused the bloodshed. MAY THE SOULS OF GRAND FATHERS AND GRAND MOTHERS WHO FELL ON FEBUARY 18TH 1897 REST IN PERFECT PEACE. AMEN!

EDITOR’S SUMMARY

With retrospective analysis we can see that they were two main characters in this confirmed report of what transpired in those bloody days of warfare. First of all, the fact that Admiral Rawson a total stranger to the Benin country and bush paths, claimed to have found his way from the riverine areas at the coast to Benin city with only a navigational compass is too incredible to be true. Imagine a compass that can ONLY show you the direction to a place is, now acting as a local guide that is showing you the “secret” bush paths in the jungle to Benin City that can only be known to indigenes and locals not Itsekhiri guides from afar. Then this miraculous compass was able to safely steer you away from all the “ambushing soldiers” waiting patiently along all the major roads, routes and bush paths to Benin City known by both the Europeans and their so-called Itsekhiri guides who were indeed collaborators. Such must be an inter-active HUMAN COMPASS sent by the chief collaborator and Traitor of Benin called Agho Obaseki who was at all times staying “close” to Oba Ovonranmwen during the war so as to ensure that he got all the updated intelligence reports from the battle field commandants as per their troop deployment. Which he would then secretly divulge to the British enemy in “guiding” them away from the snare of the Benin army lying in wait to ambush them as soon as they started their march towards Benin City.

If Agho Obaseki the spy in the palace, had not aided Admiral Rawson then there is no way on earth that Rawson and his invading troops would ever have survived all the ambushes that they would have encountered at the hands of the Benin Warriors. I repeat no way! It would have been a terrible massacre of Rawson’s forces just like that of Phillip’s forces in the Benin Massacre! Secondly it is record that Asoro who veritably earned the title as Okakuo (War General) during the invasion butchered the British soldiers during the close contact combat and could not be harmed by the British soldiers gunshots and machetes. Until once again, the Traitor of Benin (guess you know who by now), revealed to the British how to disable Asoro’s deadly mystical charms or “Benin Juju” as the British famously called it in those days.

General Asoro

The Memorial Statute of Asoro depicting the slain British soldiers at his feet still stands at Ring Road by Sakponba Road Junction as a loyal and patriotic SENTINEL guarding the entrance to the gate of the Oba Palace. On the same spot he took his last stand to protect the Oba of Benin and people of Benin, faithfully declaring that no one would go past his position “except the Oba” - Sokpan Oba. ***************************

ARTICLE FOUR:

BRITISH WAR TRIALS

WITH AGHO OBASEKI

1897 War: Aisien, Son Of Erhunmwunsee And The

British

By Dr. Ekhaguosa Aisien (Edited) From the South Atlantic Naval Station in Simons town, South Africa, seven warships were mobilized for the Expedition. The warships were The St. GEORGE, named after the Patron-Saint of England. The Foremost British Warship served as the Command Headquarters of the Expedition, being the Flagship of Rear-Admiral Harry Holdsworth Rawson, the Commander-in-Chief of the expedition and two warships, the THESEUS and the FORTE The other six warships from South Africa were: *the MAGPIE, the PHILOMEL. * the PHOEBE, the ALECTO * the WIDGEON and * the BARROSA totaling nine warships. The BARROSA was at the Island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic - the Island where Napoleon

Bonaparte. the defeated French Emperor, bad been exiled to by Britain, and had died, nearly a Century earlier. Maintaining maximum speed continuously on her journey back home to Africa, she was able to re-loin her sister-warships for the attack on Benin. From the British Mediterranean Fleet at anchor in Valetta, Malta, two warships, the THESEUS and the FORTE, were ordered to the Benin river, with their full complement of the fighting sailors, the Blue-jackets. From Military Barracks in the cities of Portsmouth, Plymouth, and Chatham in Britain herself, Marines were mobilized for the Benin Expedition. In West Africa troops of the Niger Coast Protectorate Force, based in Calabar, the Capital of the Protectorate, were mobilized for the Expedition. They consisted mainly of HAUSA AND YORUBA TROOPS, commanded by white officers, including one black officer, a Lieutenant Daniels. The Force was taken to the Benin river from Calabar by the Steamers ILORIN, EKO, ELOBI and the LAGOON. From Lagos Colony a contingent of Military Scouts, made up of Hausas and Yorubas of the Lagos Colony Constabulary, were ordered to the Benin river. In 1897 Lagos Colony was a separate country from the Niger Coast Protectorate of the Niger Delta Basin. A trading ship, the liner, MALACCA belonging to the P & O (Pacific and Orient) Steam-ship Company, the equivalent of the Elder Dempster Lines of fifty years later, was commandeered in London and fitted out as a Hospital ship for the Benin Expedition. It was fitted out with Operating Theatres, one hundred beds for In-patients, and an adequate number of Naval Doctors and Nurses. It was sent to the Benin River in support of the Expeditionary Force. Troops from the West Indies, who were already in Africa, in Freetown, Sierra Leone, were ordered to Akassa in the Niger Delta to replace the Niger Coast Protectorate troops who had been garrisoning that district, so that the N.C.P.F. troops could join their colleagues in the attack on Benin. Just imagine how the British were forced to mobilize a multi-national coalition force to wage war against only a single African tribe, evidently because of their fear of being defeated a second consecutive time by the formidable and indomitable Benin Army that as at then undefeated in any war.

The HMS Theseus Warship was also deployed 17 years later in World War II

To thoroughly appreciate the odds which the Benin army faced in its confrontation with Britain in 1897, it is pertinent to point out that Britain was already, in 1897, as thoroughly modern a country as she is today. For instance, the London Underground Transport Service was already in existence at this time, and had been for a few decades before 1897, with Underground electric trains ferrying commuters from one part of the city to the other, on underground railway tracks. After the audience with Ovonramwen Aisien departed the Benin Palace, and arrived at Obagie n’vbosa village where he met the defending Benin army of the Ologbo Front, in camp. He was told that the forward positions of the army had made active contact with the enemy in the attempts of the enemy to cross the Orhionmwon river into Ologbo village. Aisien decided to go forward and see things for himself. Accompanied by his two servants Oduduru and Tuoyo he plunged into the Ologbo forests, on a reconnaissance mission. The party reached the outskirts of Ologbo village, and under cover of the forest vegetation crept towards the perimeter of the extensive British military Camp. Aisien surveyed the awesome scene for a while, with its large population of soldiers and carriers, the soldiers in their different colors of uniforms — from the Blues of the Naval men to the Reds of the Marines, and the Brown khaki of the Niger Coast Protectorate troops. And the Sentries posted at intervals around the perimeter of the Camp. And the Officers’ tents dotting the huge expanse of the clearing. Aisien was wondering what his next line of action should be when an incident made up his mind for him. The Batman, the Orderly, of an Officer brought out from within the tent of his Officer a collapsible table and chair. (The word “Orderly” gave rise to the Benin name “Idele.” The black soldier of the Niger Coast Protectorate was called: “Idele ebo,” meaning “Orderly of the White Officer”). The Orderly set up the table at the entrance of the tent, put some prepared tea and other tea accompaniments on the table, saluted and invited his officer to the refreshment. The Officer sat alone, on the direct sight of Aisien’s hidden gun, and sipped at his tea. He made a very tempting target. By hand signal Aisien let his two companions know that they were to shoot only after he himself had commenced the proceedings. In his battle-dress of the “Osun, Olikia” adaegha or tunic, he was indistinguishable from the brownness and the greenery of the earth, where he lay flat on his abdomen. He felt as safe and as inviolable as the ground itself. He raised himself on one knee, and with his Dane gun took a measured aim at the white officer at tea. But then he began to worry whether his gun would fire, aimed as it was at the imposing figure in his sights. To ensure that the gun performed to expectation Aisien delved into a pocket of his “Osun Olikia” tunic, and brought out a little ukokogho charm pouch. He poured a little of

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the contained black powder on the trigger-assemblage of his gun, and muttered the incantation: Emunemune gha rhan ifuen, t’Oba “When a fire-fly spreads out its wings, it lights up the night!” He pulled the trigger. The sound of the gun-shot, surprisingly loud, shattered the relative quiet of the late afternoon Camp life. Oduduru and Tuoyo stood upright in the shrubbery, emptied the charges of their own Dane guns into the Camp, and then went flat on their bellies. That was all the anger that the three Benin Dane guns had the time to let loose on the assembled might of the British army. For before the three snipers could re-load their weapons the earth under their bellies began to quiver with the concussion of the noise of war. The British guns opened up. The sound made by each type of gun was characteristic and easily identifiable. The sounds from the rifles, from the Martini-Henrys, the Lee Metfords, and the Sniders, (which the Edos called “Esada”) were sharp, explosive and of a tearing quality. The Maxim Gun, the early type of machine-gun, joined in the chatter of death. Firing thirteen times a second the sound from it was low-pitched, subdued and un-hurried. Yet it was insistent, unrelenting, steadfast - and unforgiving.

Captain Burrows firing the Maxim Machine Gun at Ologbo Battle Field The forest itself began to move. Huge branches of mahogany were cut off from their parent - trees by rifle - fire as if sliced off with giant pairs of scissors. The branches, in full foliage, were hurried through the air like giant umbrellas, then suddenly let go, to crash back to earth a hundred or more yards from the trunks from which they were severed. Aisien, flat on his belly, turned towards Benin, with his two comrades-in-arms. This was his first exposure to rifle fire. The people of Benin City, unlike those in the villages, had a passing acquaintance-ship with the Snider rifle, quantities of which had passed through their hands, at the Ughoton Port, then through Ondo, to the Ekiti-Parapy armies in conflict with the invading Ibadan armies, during the Yoruba “Kitiji,” inter-tribal Wars of the latter decades of the Nineteenth Century. But the people of the villages knew only about the smooth-bore Dane gun, brought from Europe about three hundred years earlier, but now locally manufactured by the

people. As the ground heaved under them, and forests of greenery flew over their heads, the three scouts, on their bellies, rounded a bend in the bush-track, regained their upright position, and returned to the Benin army at its Obagie Evbosa base. Aisien re-iterated to Commander Urugbusi that the British had indeed occupied Ologbo, and he described, in some detail, the deployment of the enemy troops in their Ologbo Camp. He and his two companions then left Obagie and returned to Benin City.

The British Ologbo Camp

Aisien’s encounter with the British army in Ologbo was probably the episode which was cryptically referred to in Dr. Felix Roth’s account of the “Benin Punitive Expedition,” as reported in the Book: “Great Benin,” written by Ling Roth, the Museum Curator-brother of Dr. Roth, and published in 1903, only six years after the war. Curator Ling Roth was quoting from Dr. Roth’s Diary written in the Ologbo Camp: “…We have seen no natives since yesterday, but wine have crept up and fired into us.” page 6 of the Appendix of the book). Dr. Felix Roth was one of the Medical Officers of the British Expeditionary Force mounted against Benin. Back in Benin, Aisien went straight to the Palace, and briefed the monarch about his experiences during his fact-finding trip to the war front. He summarized his report by telling the king that it was unlikely that the Edos would gain victory in this fight, in contrast to their previous experiences during all their many centuries of uninterrupted history as a kingdom. The fire-power of the British army, confided Aisien to Ovonramwen, was not what the Edos were likely to have any antidote for. The Omo N‘Oba Ovonramwen thanked Aisien for the mission undertaken, and for his unvarnished assessment of the situation. He then gave him permission to return home to Iyeke Orhionmwon. On Thursday 18th February 1897, about five days after Aisien reported on his errand to Ovonramwen, Benin City fell to Rear Admiral Harry Rawson and the British Expeditionary Force which he led. The Benin Kingdom became yet another territorial addition to the expanding British Empire. A few months after the fall of Benin City ,Aisien was at home in his Emodu Quarters in Evboesi village when, before dawn, a detachment of Soldiers (Mete Ebo) from the occupation Force in Benin threw a cordon round his house, effected his arrest, put him in chains, and marched him to Benin City. His mother, Egunmwcndia,

accompanied her captive son to Benin. The British authorities had acted upon information at their disposal provided by the same bunch of Traitors of Benin, that Aisien had fired upon the British army in Ologho. The alleged act was not a war-crime, as was reiterated later by Sir Ralph Moor, the Consul-General of the Niger Coast Protectorate and Head of Government of the Colony which the Benin territories were now a part of. in the trial of Oba Ovonramwen in September later that year, Consul- General Moor had stated that the taking up of arms in order to defend one’s country was not a war crime. But during the early months of the occupation of Benin, when security considerations still consumed a lot of the time and energy of the British Occupation authorities, Aisien’s action was apparently still regarded as a hostile act which deserved to be punished by the victors. The prisoner was locked up in the Guard-room of the Military Barracks created by the British along Forestry Road in the City, stretching from the junction of Ugbague Street to that of Iwegie Street, from the premises of the Iyase Nohenmwen to that of the Ogiefa Nomuenkpo.

It was in the same guardroom that Chief Agbonkonkon, the Obayuwana of Benin and lover of Princess Ehendia, the widowed eldest daughter of Oba Adolor, was later to commit suicide by slashing his throat with a heavy jack-knife while awaiting the convening of the “Assizes” Court which was to sentence him to death for being involved in the Ugbine village ambush of the James Phillips party in January. It was also the same guard room which later held Oba Ovonramwen, the monarch of the kingdom, during the last four nights he spent in Benin City, before he was taken to Calabar, on a life exile.

Agho Obaseki sat with Major Ralph Moor, Captain Turner and Captain Roupel to Judge and Execute our Benin Chiefs and War Generals (1897-1899) By the time of Aisien’s arrest AGHO, the Obaseki of Benin, was already on the way to attaining the ascendant position of influence which he ultimately enjoyed for about two decades during the early years of the British administration in Benin. The British officials came to rely heavily on Agho’s opinions in native matters. In this wise he was the Benin equivalent of his contemporary, Chief Dogho Numa (Chief Dore) of the Warri territories.

The Edos noted this relationship of trust between the British Officials and Agho Obaseki, and they were compelled to employ him as the advocate who pleaded their cause with the white man whenever the occasion arose. Aisien’s relatives in Evboesi therefore brought to Obaseki in Benin intercessory gifts in the form of a cow, goats, boxes of Aromatic Schnapps bottles (ayon ebo), and money. They asked for his advocacy services on behalf of their patriarch, the detained Aisien. The Court convened, and Aisien was led from the guard-room and put on trial. Sitting in judgment on the case was Captain A.H. Turner, the first Colonial Resident and Head of Administration of the conquered Benin territories. Sitting with him as “Assessors” were three Benin City Chiefs, amongst whom was Chief Agho Obaseki. In spite of Chief Obaseki’s efforts in the Court room in pleading the innocence of the prisoner, Aisien was found guilty as charged: for firing on the Whiteman in the Whitman’s Camp at Ologbo. The Court then pronounced the sentence, not of Death, but of Sixty Strokes of the Birch, on him. A sentence of Death had been widely expected, since that was the fate of earlier prisoners-of-war who had been tried by the new administration. Notable amongst these prisoners was the Okakuo or Warrior General Ebeikhinmwin who had commanded the Benin army at the Ughoton Front. The sentence handed down on Aisien was therefore received with some wry relief. Soon after the conquest of Benin the subsequent British Patrols had apprehended Commander Ebeikhinmwin in the Okokhuo districts, near Ekiadolor village, after he was betrayed by the same cadre of Traitors of Benin. He was condemned to death in Benin City, and tied to the stakes. As the shots of the firing squad rang out, Ebeikinmwin was heard to laugh with a loud guffaw, as he shouted at his executioners: “Me ero khian vbe gb’uwa Vbe ariavbehe - The pensure will be mine again, during my next incarnation, to inflict on you, the defeat you deserve!”

The Memorial Statue of Ebeikhimwin the Sentinel, standing by Apkapkava Road junction at Ring Road Then he gave up the ghost. He was referring to his initial successful defence of the Ughoton Front against the British Expeditionary Force during the war, when the British forces first landed at the coast and made a push inland

towards Benin City. There they tasted for the first time raw might of the Benin army, which caused them to re-strategize their military tactics, by relying heavily on informants, spies and traitors to help them defeat the Benin War Machine. The British Navy, under Captain O’Callaghan, invaded Ughoton twice. In their first attempt, they were defeated and driven back by the Benin troops under Okakuo Ebeikinmwin. Six days later, and reinforced with troops from two other warships O’Callaghan re-attacked and reoccupied Ughoton, and then systematically leveled the village to the ground with heavy artillery, leaving Ughoton the little village that it has remained to this day. Aisien’s sentence was to be summarily carried out, and it was effected by B.P.S. Roupell, the twenty-seven-year old Captain of the Royal Engineers, whom the Edos had earlier nicknamed — Amehien: “Pepper Juice”, because of his pepperiness towards his newly—conquered subjects. He was the Commanding Officer of the 120-strong Niger Coast Protectorate Force garrisoning the conquered City.

Captain Roupel (fourth from right

with black trousers) The convicted prisoner was laid prone, and four “Hausa” soldiers held him down on the bench by his four limbs. When the first stroke of the birch landed on his buttocks the prisoner’s involuntary, convulsive spasm of pain sent the four restraining soldiers, in their red khaki uniforms, tumbling away to the four corners of the compass. Roupell gave Agho Obaseki a knowing look, as if to tell him: “Eat your words! This is not the man you insisted was not a soldier, and therefore could not possibly have been sent to the warfront, let alone to fire on the white man! Obaseki got the message in Roupell’s look, and then said, famously, to Aisien: A khu ovbi okhokho hien irhu rhe, O wee uwu udi eri ren khian wu yi “A chick is being shooed off a cauldron of boiling palm oil; But the chick is insistent in its efforts to perish in it!” Aisien in turn got the message in Obaseki’s admonition. He lay down again, and expressly forbade any restraining hands on his person. He then received, on his hare back and buttocks the remaining fifty-nine strokes of the birch, at the hands of the Army Engineer from Chelteham College, England.

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A deep, tortuous, guttural grunt from the prisoner was the only accompaniment of each landing, on his raw flesh, of the flagellation device. With his sentence served Aisien, the son of Erhunmwunsee, was released. His relatives took him away from the Military Barracks, bruised and bleeding. He spent the next three months in Benin City, while his mother Egunmwendia, and his three wives — Emeze, mother of Iriaghonse, Imadiyi, mother of Idemudia and Ariowa, and Obenhen, mother of Obasohan tended to his wounds until they were healed. Then the family returned to Uvboesi in Iyekorhionmwon. Until his death Aisien carried on his back and buttocks the broad scars of the flagellation he had received as punishment for his encounter with the British Army in Ologbo village in mid-February 1897. He died in Benin City on the 20th October 1913, sixteen years after the Benin — British War, and three months before the death of his monarch, Oba Ovonramwen, in Calabar on the 13th January 1914. Aisien lies buried today in the first cemetery created by the Colonial Authorities in Benin. ‘Ibis cemetery was situated along the Upper Oba Market Road, just beyond the Ogbe Obaseki, after the Uzebu Moat, and exactly opposite the present-day YANGA Fish Market. The cemetery has since been built over. The Colonial Authorities had forbidden the usual Home or Compound burial of the dead in Benin City after the conquest. All dead citizens, without any exception, and irrespective of rank or status, were mandatorily buried in the Town’s designated public Cemetery. It was only after the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1914, when there was once again an Oba in Benin, that the occasional Compound burial was grudgingly permitted. “And the Oba of Benin had to acquiesce in it, in writing, to the authorities. This was a permission not lightly given by the Palace because the Oba knew that Compound burials offended the sensibilities of the British Medical Officers of health in charge of Benin City at that time.” Source: Nigerian Observer Digital Edition, Friday August 23, 2013 ****************************

ARTICLE FIVE:

THE RESTORATION OF

BENIN KINGDOM

The Oba of Benin with the British consuls and traders subject to him before Agho Obaseki betrayed Benin

In the 19th century, disputes over trade led to strain between Benin and its chief trading partner, Great Britain. This escalated as the European powers moved to divide Africa into colonial territories. The situation culminated in 1897, when a large delegation led by Britain’s Acting Consul-General in the region, James Phillips, set off for Benin City despite requests from Oba Ovonramwen (enthroned c. 1888) to postpone their visit. On January 12, the British delegation was ambushed by an Edo force that by all accounts acted without the Oba’s knowledge. Almost the entire party was killed, including Phillips. In quick order, a large British military force—deemed the Punitive Expedition—was assembled, and on February 18, they arrived in Benin City under orders to invade and conquer it. In time they captured Oba Ovonramwen and sent him into exile to Calabar, a town east of Benin. With these events, the daily routines of the royal court were disrupted and the Edo people were severed from their leaders. Objects within the royal palaces were now the spoils of war, many of which were sold to defray the costs of the invasion. Others were shared among members of the expeditionary force. Still others left Benin in the confusion that followed the devastation of the kingdom. Upon their arrival in London, Benin’s royal arts were a topic of conversation and speculation. They sparked immediate interest from museums, particularly in Britain and the German-speaking world, which made efforts to purchase the objects for their collections. Eventually works from Benin could be found in museums across Europe and the United States. Oba Ovonramwen died in exile in 1914, the same year that his son returned to Benin City and was crowned Oba Eweka II. Benin’s monarchy was thus restored, though its power was greatly curtailed. While the Edo people maintained a strong connection to the Oba, the monarchy was re-configured to be secondary to the colonial system, and later to the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Oba Eweka II and Oba Akenzua II (enthroned 1933) used the arts strategically in their efforts to reinvent the kingdom. They commissioned works to replace those that were taken in 1897 and reinstated some royal rituals, while reconsidering their roles within a modern context. Among Eweka II’s first acts was the establishment of an altar dedicated to his father, Oba Ovonramwen. He also erected a single collective altar dedicated to all the Obas that had reigned before him. Under the current monarch, Oba Erediauwa, the kingdom has a vital cultural and political life that is steeped in history and tradition. Erediauwa observes important royal practices, including the establishment and upkeep of ancestral altars and the performance of royal rituals. He is

also a respected local and regional leader. In 1938, in a gesture of great significance to the Edo people, the British returned pieces of Oba Ovonramwen’s coral regalia to his grandson Oba Akenzua II, thus restoring some of the sacred force of his ancestors. Upon receiving the regalia, Akenzua II is said to have sung out with joy, “The poisonous arrow has killed the elephant,” a reference to the long wait that is sometimes necessary before a victory can be attained. ***************************

ARTICLE SIX:

THE RESISTANCE WAR

IN BENIN (PT. I)

How Britain Marauded Benin Kingdom (The

Gruesome Guerrilla War (1897–1899)

Featuring Generals Ologbosere, Ebohon &

Oviawe)

General Ologbosere (seated in the picture, flanked by African colonial regiments) alongside Oviawe, Ebohon (not in the picture above) and others, led a two year Guerrilla War of Resistance against the British in Benin destroying the British outpost, flags after the invasion. He was captured by the people who got frustrated with the British tactics of destroying houses and food crops of any town and villages that harboured him.

As in most of Africa, the early colonial period in Nigeria was characterized by intermittent rebellions, revolts and uprising against the newly established colonial state. These upheavals were mostly the reaction to colonial oppression: the imposition on the people of strange policies and exacting demands like taxation. There were however areas that they spared of such upheavals. Such was the area of the former Benin Kingdom. On the surface it might seem that they acquiesced in their own oppression and exploitation.

This chapter examines a case study that proves that such areas did not acquiesce, but rather engaged in resistance in some other ways that were not obvious and have therefore been mostly inadequately documented. Some of these forms of resistance have been variously described as passive resistance. and more recently as every day forms of peasant resistance. According to J.C. Scott the occurrence and tenacity of the latter, in dominated societies, is influenced by existing forms of labour control, severity of retaliation/punishment from the

ruling power and what safety valves exist for the oppressed groups. The peasant subjects in many communities under the powerful Benin Kingdom entered colonialism with a long long tradition of resistance to several hundred years of domination by a tribute exacting ruling aristocracy. As a result, exit strategy or migration out of the reach of the oppressing power had become the norm in resistance activities among the peasants of the Benin area.

The violence and brutality that characterized the conquest and establishment of colonial rule over Benin Kingdom showed to the colonized populace the extreme lengths to which the colonizing power would go to enforce it’s dictate and punish infringements by those opposed to it. Consequently, from the time of conquest and into the earlier years of colonial rule many chose to flee or emigrate. Since these emigrations were very disruptive of effective administration, labour mobilization and tax collection it is not surprising that the administration not only frowned at it, but also responded with violence in an attempt to check it.

This also chapter examines the interface of colonial violence, together with process used to establish colonial administrative apparatus on the one hand, and the use of migration as a resistance strategy on the other. It shows how Benin peasants outsmarted the administration for a long period during colonial rule and how fugitive communities produced by these migrations managed to escape the reach of the colonial administration and survived for almost four decades until 1935/6 in the Benin rainforest. (Source: Colonial Nigeria 1897-1934)

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ARTICLE SEVEN:

THE BETRAYAL OF

OLOGBOSERE

The Execution Of Chief Irabor, The Ologbosere

Of Benin

By James Agbogun

The January 1897 killing of Captain James Philip and his men, coined the “Benin Massacre,” was headed by Chief Irabor, the Ologbosere of Benin. His doggedness in defending the Benin Kingdom at large, its culture and tradition culminated in the ambush and murder of Captain James Philip and his men. The actions of Chief Irabor and his men did not only led to the destruction of the palace of the Oba of Benin, but a deliberate manhunt for the Benin Officers that were directly involved in the killing of the British intruders. Small wonder the British launched an assault on Chief Irabor, but not without a resistance on the part of Chief Irabor. Another Niger Coast Protectorate official, Captain Norman Uniacke was killed at

Okemuen village, near Ehor in April 1899 while trying to arrest Chief Irabor. Chief Irabor was eventually arrested by the British, and subsequently executed in Benin in May, 1899.

Tried on June 27 — just one day before his actual execution; the verdict, of course, foreordained — Ologbosere was damned by those chiefs’ testimony that the strike force he had led back in 1897 to precipitate the intervention “was not sent to kill white men — and we therefore decide that according to NATIVE LAW his life is forfeited.” The small but mighty Ologbosere said otherwise, to no avail: "The king told me that he had heard that the white men were coming to fight with him, and that I must get ready to go and fight the white men...when all the people called the mass meeting at Benin City and selected me to go and fight the white men, I went. I had no palaver with the white men before. The day I was selected to go from Benin City to meet the white men all the chiefs here present were in the meeting, and now they want to put the whole thing on my shoulders."

Great Britain’s punitive expedition also resulted in the capture of many thousands of metal objects scattered to European museums and collections — collectively known as the Benin Bronzes. Nigeria, and the successor obas of Benin, have for decades besought their return in vain.

Feet Washing of European traders before they enter benin

City to trade

The British traders who were mandated to always wash their feet first before stepping their foot into Benin City to trade or visit, all of a sudden claimed the internationally renown clean-city always stank with the smell of the rotten corpses used as human sacrifice. Whereas in the Benin traditional history, the human sacrifices were mostly buried in pits or graves and never exposed about to be decomposing and polluting the atmosphere. Proving the propaganda lies of the British to be blue lies.

Come to think of it no normal human being can stomach the stench of hundreds of rotten corpses and still refuse to bury them at least in mass graves. Yet these liars claim that is exactly what their lying eyes saw. So how come the other Europeans missed this gory aspect of Benin that only the English witnessed?

FEE! FIE!! FOE!!! I SMELL THE LIES OF AN

ENGLISH MAN!

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ARTICLE EIGHT:

THE RESISTANCE WAR

IN BENIN (PT. II)

Pre-Colonial Peasant Resistance In Benin

The Benin Resistance War against British colonialism lasted from 1897 to 1899 at the stronghold of Iyeke Orhiomwon which was the back bone of the Benin Army.

According to Benin oral traditions, thirty-one Ogiso Kings ruled in Benin from a yet to be established date until the alleged tyranny of Oba Owodo resulted in the termination of the Ogiso ruler ship in the 13th century.

Ogiso Owodo (1stDynasty)

The second Eweka dynasty took over with thirty-five successive Obas, the last of whose misfortune it was to face the colonialist onslaught of British Imperialism in 1897. Population movements in form of migration are a dominant thread that runs through the history of pre-colonial Benin Kingdom. Oral traditions here relate stories of despotic and disagreeable policies of some of the rulers and courtiers leading to rebellions and wars and consequent waves of protest migration as well as various forms of passive resistance. Those who did not migrate and had to remain adopted various strategies of coping with the authoritarian tendencies and character of their rulers; many of these can be glimpsed from Benin proverbs.

For instance, those who did not flee from the tyranny of the fifteenth century Emperor of Great Benin Empire, Oba Ewuare were said to have ignored his excesses through silence. This is reflected in a proverb attributed to Ewuare indicating the devastation he felt by this resistance strategy:

Oba Ewuare were a we te iren renren ghe gha ghere we e ebo no, Iren gha we ne Edo seri ihen...If I had known that to be ignored is a curse, I would have asked the Edo to revoke the curse.

Another proverb that provides us with evidence of such passive resistance is: Ne gue Oba mua evben, o re okpe vbe igue - He

who argues with the king stays long in a kneeling position.

Oba Ewuare 2nd Dynasty

Since the King is addressed in a kneeling position, prolong argument will only keep one kneeling and enduring punishment. The strategy was therefore to accept whatever the king says without argument even if one was not going to carry out the directive. Thus passive resistance was well known and practiced in the area. When the British eventually conquered Benin and established their colonial rule, these various strategies came readily to hand. Violence and the Foundations of Colonial Rule In Benin .

The 1897 ambush and killing of a British Consular party by Benin Chiefs provided the much needed pretext for the long planned invasion of Benin though it was termed a “punitive” expedition. The fierce Benin resistance and the extreme violence of the conquest set the tone for the subsequent violence that was to characterize the establishment of British colonial rule. With the capture of the city on 17th February 1897 after five days of fighting, the conquering army went about destroying various quarters of the city suspected to belong to Chiefs believed to have participated in the ambush and/or involved in “fetish” practices. In the process, a supposedly “accidental” fire burnt the palace and adjoining quarters.

The pursuit of Oba Ovonramwen and Chiefs who left the city before its fall provided another opportunity for violence against the people. A report of 18th March, 1897, confirmed the killing of the headman of Orio for attempting to escape, while being forced to guard officials to the king’s hideout. In the same report, a new town to which the king was said to have recently escaped from, and the town of Amofia were destroyed.

In another report, Ebeikhinmwin, one of the heroes of the Benin Resistance to invasion was summarily tried and executed after he was betrayed by another chief vis-à-vis Agho Obaseki. Captain Roupell reported burning down two villages and collecting their livestock during his pursuit of a chief on 23 April 1897.

Such wholesale violence terrorized the people and made their situation and admitted with some regret that the chiefs were “afraid of the whiteman…..It was a pity to have burnt their houses”. As a result, he resorted to cajolery and blackmail that succeeded in

making many chiefs and, later on, the Oba the submitted himself to the colonial officials. The Oba and some of the chiefs were tried, and the Oba later deported to Calabar, while some of the chiefs were executed in September 1897. The continued resistance of Chiefs Ologbosere, Ebohon and Oviawe ensured the continuation of this orgy of violence against communities in areas where they are based. According to Robert Home,

“THE BENIN TERRITORIES EXPEDITION….WAS ONE OF THE HARDEST BUSH

CAMPAIGNS EVER FOUGHT IN BRITISH WEST AFRICA"

The resistance took the form of subversive activities against the new government in Benin. The Chiefs continued to govern their areas of Jurisdiction in defiance of the colonial power. Ologbosere in charge of Ehor, Ebohon in charge of Okemue and Oviawe in charge of Igieduma and Uhi. They stopped people in these communities from going to Benin to pledge allegiance to the new white man’s government. British symbols of authority like flags, outpost and rest houses were destroyed. Telling them that as patriotic Benins, they should serve the Oba and not the Ebo..

Furthermore, spies were used to keep track of what the new government was up to. Despite early effort of the British officials in Benin to reconcile them to the new government, these chiefs adamantly maintained their non-cooperative attitude. The result was a month long reconnaissance in the territories of Ologbose and Ebohon of May 1898 and “The Benin Territories Expedition of 20th April to 16th May 1899, which ended their resistance to British rule. Atrocities committed by the British expeditionary force in these communities were worse than earlier ones.

This was because according to Galway, “So long as they (Chiefs) are at large, so long will the prestige of the government hang in the balance”. The pursuit of the chiefs between 1897 and 1899 became a seasonal affair that trailed by an orgy of violence and destruction. Reports of the reconnaissance of these communities in 1898 by Ag Resident R.K. Granvile confirmed the burning and destruction of the towns of Eko, Ologbosere, Ovbi-Ehor, Isure and Okemue.

The situation was made worse for the people of the area by the rivalry between the Niger Coast Protectorate administration, which had conquered Benin and the Royal Niger Company administration which was laying claims to part of the territory.

In January 1898 the town of Irrua was burnt by the RNC which was trying to annex these areas through the encouragement of the rebel chief to whom they were supplying arms. The expedition of 1899 was even more violent as the reconnaissance

troops reported their destruction of every community on their way to the territory of the rebel chiefs.

In the rebel territory itself the rebuilt towns of Okemue and Eko Ologbosere were again destroyed and ALL HOUSES LEVELED TO THE GROUND while the towns of Ekpon, Idumere, Udo and Ugiamwen, Oviawares camp, and parts of Igbanke were reported to have been destroyed in the expedition between 20th April and 11th May. Their farms were burnt and troops were stationed in Okemue. Oviawe died from injuries while Ologbosere and Ebohon were captured by the local people and handed over to the officials in June to save them from further violence and starvation arising for the burning of their farms.

Chief Ologbosere was “tried” sentenced and executed shortly after and this put and end to armed resistance. The British success in squelching the armed resistance by these chiefs was facilitated by the help of some collaborating Benin Chiefs a.k.a THE TRAITORS OF BENIN who were said to have been co-opted into the administration with the promise that they would be placed in charge of the various towns to be covered by the expedition. The instruction of the troops during the uprising of 1906 was “in the event of natives not complying with the instruction….the villages concerned will be considered unfriendly and dealt with accordingly”

In 1906, the people of Owa had attacked the Forest Guard sent to instruct them to tap rubber and for this a section of their town was burnt by troops as punishment in addition to a fine. Earlier in late 1905, troops had “visited” Urhonigbe to enforce collection of tributes. However, the end of armed resistance did not stop the use of violence against the Benin people. It seems to have been a deliberate policy to continue to TERRORIZE the people into total submission.

The British colonial officials, have painted a negative image of the people as bloodthirsty, maintained their rampaging troops in the territory of some time. They were withdrawn in 1904, returned 1906, and were thereafter deployed at will until the First World War. The incessant use of military force to terrorize the populace had instilled the fear of the Europeans and their agents in the people.

The British became synonymous with violence and the people summarized their experience of this time in the proverb: Ebo gha re, Evben re [When the white man comes, trouble comes.] The severity of British colonial official retaliation registered deeply in the peoples psyche. Henceforth, punishment among the Edo that was considered to be extreme was declaimed by the proverbial query: Te ime gbe Ovbiebo? [did I kill a white man?] This proverb expresses the people’s execration of the barbarity of British violence

that can be likened to killing a fly with a sledgehammer.

With such wanton violence on the part of the British confronting the colonial administration was therefore discounted as a resistance strategy; instead many people deserted their communities to seek refuge in relative safety elsewhere from the reach of Europeans. While much has been documented about the general oppression and exploitation of the colonized during the colonial rule by colonial officials and their agents, very little seems to be written about the cruelty of particular colonial officials, which was also seriously felt by the helpless peasantry.

A combination of personal psychological make-up of the officials prevailing racist ethos and the negative stereotypical depiction of particular African peoples by Europeans like the Benin people who were depicted as blood thirsty and their capital city dubbed THE CITY OF BLOOD in many instances produced great acts of cruelty. Oral sources and written document attest to the cruelty of certain colonial officials.

“Okhaemwen Ologboshere Irabor continued his resistance of the British occupiers. It was a resistance that lasted two years during which the Benin war commander defeated the Royal Niger Company private army at Okemue and prevented the British penetration of the hinterland and the European traders from establishing trading posts in Benin City. Eventually with the help of their Edo Collaborators (Oghian Oba) in May 1899 the British captured war hero, General Ologboshere Irabor.”

As expected the British occupiers, in their usual kangaroo court proceedings, the Ologboshere was found guilty of being the chief instigator and perpetrator of the ‘Benin `Massacre’. On June 27 1899 he was hanged for defending his land against a group of Marauding British thieves whose hands were covered with blood and hearts fill with hatred and evil intentions” against our people and land.

WARNING: the true Edo People MUST beware of these Edo Collaborators (Oghian Oba) who WILL always take the side of Edo Enemies and betray us while pretending to be our brothers. We MUST get rid of them from our land by all means necessary or else they will keep on betraying us, sabotaging us and destroying us as the ENEMY WITHIN... a.k.a THE TROJAN HORSE

Because the CURSE OF OVONRANWMEN whom their fathers also betrayed that caused Benin to be defeated by the British Enemy is still upon them!

BEWARE! BE WARY!!

BE WARNED!!!

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8

ARTICLE NINE:

HOW AGHO OBASEKI

SCHEMED TO USURP

THE THRONE OF BENIN

Eweka: Edo Man Of The 20TH Century

By Dr. Ekhaguosa Aisien

(Edited)

With a few months to go to the end of the Twentieth Century it is right to look back at the last one hundred years and attempt to identity the one Edo person who lived during this period, and whose life brought the greatest good to the Edo people. Aiguobasinmwin, Prince of Benin, and later EWEKA II, Oba of Benin is, in my opinion, that person.

Oba Eweka II

EDO State, amongst the thirty six States of Nigeria is referred to as the "Heart Beat of the Nation". It has earned this flattering appellation because of the world-wide exposure which Benin's sophisticated art culture has enjoyed this century, supported by the surprisingly great span of the remembered history of Edoland. These have made Benin to loom large in the tapestry of cultural Nigeria, and the life of Prince Aiguobasinmwin played a pivotal role in bringing about this prominence enjoyed by Edoland. Crown Prince Aiguobasinmwin, son of Oba Ovonramwen succeeded in succeeding to the throne of his fathers, the Obas of Benin when Ovonramwen died in Calabar on his seventeenth year of exile from his throne and his kingdom.

On this achievement is founded the significance of Aiguobasinmwin's life. His attainment of the throne was against great odds, and the benefits which have accrued to Edoland from this personal triumph of his have been incalculable. These benefits are sufficiently important to make Aiguobasinmwin the "Edo Man of the Twentieth Century." Hampate Ba, the Malian Writer said: "Every old person who dies in Africa Is like a library set ablaze."

With equal veracity it could be said that every long-lasting Dynasty which died in Africa was like a whole country losing its history. Prince Aiguobasinmwin was crowned the Oba of Benin on 24th July, 1914. Two events, each

of enormous significance, took place conjointly in that single act. The first event was that Benin land had once again become a kingdom, with the restoration of the monarchy. There was again a Palace in Benin seventeen years after the City had lost the services of that institution, and the belief was already widespread that the ruling British would see no need to restore the institution after having been able to cope without it for nearly two decades.

In point of fact, two thirds of the Palace grounds had already been taken over by permanent fixtures of the colonial authorities. The remaining one third was not built upon because it had been pressed into service as a Government farm where the in-mates of the Benin Prisons did the "Hard Labour" aspect of their sentence, raising food crops to augment the supplies to the Prison Kitchens by the Prison Contractors. The second significant event inherent in the crowning of Aiguobasinmwin in 1914 was that the monarchy was restored to the same dynasty, the same family which had possessed it for nine hundred years when their patriach ORONMIYAN, the Ile Ife Prince, arrived in Benin, and which had lost it in the British conquest of 1897,

We have it on the written testimony of Dr. J. U. Egharevba, the Obakhavbaye of Benin and the father of Benin historiography, that it was the ceremonies which accompanied the crowning of Oba Eweka II in 1914 which brought to his attention the richness of the history of old Benin. Grateful at discovering what would have been hidden from him but for the Restoration Egharevba frenziedly put pen to paper, and recorded for posterity as much as he could of the lore of old Benin, as narrated to him by the old men of the Nineteenth Century who had survived into the Twentieth. In a long life of labor he published at least thirty two works on this single subject.

Jacob Egharevba

J. U. Egharevba saved Edoland from the fate spelt out in the truth of Hampate Ba's profound observation. The crowning of Prince Aiguobasinmwin as the Oba of Benin determined the great writing career of Egharevba.

Had the 1914 Restoration resulted in a change of dynasty, as would have happened if Aiguobasinmwin had lost out in the struggle for the restored throne to Chief Agho, the Obaseki of Benin, there would have taken place a determined if subtle suppression of the seven century-

long history of the Obas of Benin. With the discouragement of the dissemination of the history of the defunct dynasty by the succeeding rulership much of the now remembered history of the Edo people would also have been suppressed, since the history of pre-literate peoples was always tied up with that of their Kings.

This type of situation occurred in Benin eight hundred years ago during the period of the dynastic change from the Ogiso period to the Oba period. At the time the Obas were struggling to entrench themselves in Benin the word "OGISO" became taboo in the land. The mere mention of it attracted sanctions. A euphemism: Ogie gui: "the King is angry" was adopted for the word "Ogiso", and used whenever the word had to be mentioned. This tendency is natural and is to be found in all of history. It happened in Hausaland two hundred years ago. Uthman dan Fodio, the Fulani Moslem cleric, had conquered much of Hausaland and beyond during the course of his Jihad. Before Dan Fodio's time the courts of the kings of many of the Hausa kingdoms were already literate in Arabic. The histories of the kingdoms and their interaction with their neighbors had been written down by their learned clerics.

But the successor sons of Uthman dan Fodio, highly literate and keenly aware of the power of the written word, ordered the written records of the pre-Jihad histories of the conquered kingdoms to be consigned to the flames. This was to ensure that the centuries-old native ways, the indigenously developed habits and thought - processes of Hausaland were wiped off the memory of the conquered peoples. In their place the ways of the new Caliphate were to constitute the only remembered and accepted truth of the land.

Uthman Dan Fodio

The age-old wrong-headed belief in racial superiority had always underpinned the sustenance of all empires, and the British Empire was no exception to this rule. This belief was the moral foundation for, and thereafter the justification of, colonialism. Fervently believed in by the colonial Field officers the idea upheld and reinforced their personal authority in their day to day dealings with their colonial subjects. Any appearances which tended to question this faith were denied, discouraged or actively suppressed, to ensure for colonialism the unchallenged tenure which it enjoyed.

The story of the publication of the book the "History of the Yorubas", written by the Rev. Samuel Johnson, the Yoruba Pastor of Oyo town, illustrates this point rather well. The book was completed in 1897, the year Britain conquered Benin, after twenty years of labor by the author. The manuscript was sent for publication to a Publishing House in London. The voluminous manuscript got "lost" in the offices of the Publisher, who then turned round and offered to pay for it! The author died broken hearted in 1901.

But luck was with Africa. The Rev. Johnson had an equally eruditely educated brother, in the person of Dr. O. Johnson. From the copious notes and scripts which the author left behind Dr. Johnson re-wrote the "History of the Yorubas". It is assumed that the British colonialist of one hundred years ago, whether he was a field officer in the colonial administration in Nigeria or a Publisher in London, must have seen very clearly that the publication of such a sophisticated history of a colonized people would tend to strike hard at the battlements of colonialism, and question seriously the reason for its continued existence. The saving, and therefore the preservation for posterity, of the more than one thousand year history of Benin land was achieved, and more importantly encouraged, by the successful accession to the throne of his father by Aiguobasinmwin in 1914. His struggle to attain the throne was successful because of his sterling personal qualities. He seemed to have been specially structured by fate to wage this struggle, so that victory in the fight would not elude the land. Aiguobasinmwin was himself the first person to acknowledge, and to mark, the fortuitous roles which fate played in his becoming the first Oba of the Restoration. He took the title: Eweka : meaning “ Got it!"

Later in his reign he formalized this sense of quiet triumph by creating a new title, an Egie Ozema, to celebrate and commemorate the happy circumstance. The title was: Eweka - guosa - d'Oba : "Eweka II purchased the Obaship of Benin at the hands of the Lord God Almighty". Chief M. I. Agbontaen is the current holder of this title which is heavy with the weight of the improbable history that gave rise to it. A sequence of happenstances coalesced into the full fruiting of the dynastic Restoration in Prince Aiguobasinmwin.

Aiguobasinmwin was a love-child, born by a woman who, during the period of her pregnancy, was nominally the wife of another man. The name: Aiguobasinmwin: "No subject-citizen disputes ownership-rights with the Oba of Benin", was given to the new-born baby by the cuckolded husband, in acceptance of, and acquiescence in, the wrong done to him. This

was in recognition of the lofty societal status of the philandering young man who had cuckolded him. The young man was the Edaiken, the Crown Prince of the Benin kingdom and Empire, Idugbowa, later Ovonramwen, Oba of Benin.

Largely because of the above mentioned circumstance of his birth Aiguobasinmwin, as an adolescent, was side-lined for the throne, in favor of his junior half-brother Prince Usuanlele. He left Benin City with his mother Dame Eghaghe to his mother's ancestral village of EHOR in the ISI district of the kingdom. In common with the other young men of his age he learned to be a subsistence farmer and an oil-palm fruit harvester. These activities helped to augment his and his mother's living expenses.

Later some untoward incidents occurred in the Palace of Oba Ovonramwen in Benin City. To bring about a resolution of the problems, the Oracle decreed the recall of Aiguobasinmwin from Ehor village, and his re-instatement to his rightful position as the Edaiken, the Crown Prince of the kingdom. Prince Usuanlele was, by that same token, demoted to the second position in the line of succession. Royal messengers were dispatched to Ehor.

When Aiguobasinmwin arrived in state at the Palace of his father, bathed in the white chalk of sanctification and rejoicing, Ovonramwen, in a great public ceremony sat the Prince on his laps, and holding him to his breast pronounced him the heir to the throne of Benin. Not that Aiguobasinmwin was in truth the first male child fathered by Ovonramwen. He was not.

Ovonramwen's first-born son was Prince EHIGIE, later the Enogie of Uwaan village in the Ozoguor group of villages. But the circumstances under which the adolescent Prince Idugbowa fathered Ehigie were so casual that Ehigie was never at any time in any serious contention for succession to the throne. Ehigie's mother accepted this quite early and did not object to her son acquiring the Ikharo facial markings which Benin Princes did not wear.

When Crown Prince Aiguobasinmwin was confirmed in 1914 by the colonial authorities as the next Oba of Benin he went to Prince Ehigie and ritually "purchased" Ehigie's seniority from him. Ehigie formally surrendered it to him in a short ceremony. He then prayed for Aiguobasinmwin, wishing that the restored office would be a blessing to the “Oba-elect”, and to the kingdom. During the seventeen years which elapsed between the British conquest and the Restoration, Prince Aiguobasinmwin led the hardy life of just another Benin City citizen of those difficult days.

The experience in self-reliance which he had acquired during his adolescent years in Ehor village stood him in good stead during

9

this second period of privation which was to last for nearly two decades. The Prince, on his return to the City in 1899 from his two years of fugitive existence which he had spent dodging the British occupation soldiery of the Benin territories, built himself a house in Ogbe Quarters.

Once again he sustained himself and his household largely by subsistence farming. He farmed in the suburbs of Benin City, in the area now known as Evbareke Quarters, through which passes the Edo Textile Mill Road. Oba Akenzua II, Aiguobasinmwin's son, named the area "Evbareke" because the territory was an inheritance, a piece of real estate retrieved from the forbidding equatorial forests by a struggling, laboring father of, at that time, an indeterminate future.

The local colonial administration made efforts to accommodate Aiguobasinmwin in the changed circumstances of the Benin City of the first decade of the Twentieth Century. He was offered the District Headship of the Agbor territories in 1900. This gift led nearly to his losing his life when the Agbor people rose against him. Their grouse was that his father Ovonramwen had been on the verge of moving militarily against Agbor town when the Benin/British War aborted the expedition. The cause of the quarrel between Ovonramwen and Agbor had to do with the activities of the Royal Niger Company of Sir Taubman Goldie.

The Company regarded all the lands of the Niger river basin, including much of the present-day Northern Nigeria as its territory of operations. From the Company's base in Asaba its officials subverted the influence of Benin in the western Ibo territories in the hope of their physically occupying the territories by Treaty making with the known local kings or dukes. It then hoped ultimately to move on Benin City itself and seize the Benin territories from the Niger Coast-Protectorate Colonial Government in Calabar which had as yet not been able to make good, by physical occupation, its claims to the Benin territories. Had Ovonramwen had the time to move against Agbor he would have, in effect, inadvertently been at war with the Royal Niger Company.

Aiguobasinmwin undertook a Meet - the - people tour as the District Head of Agbor. An argument arose in the Council Hall over some matter of protocol which had to do with the seating arrangement between the Benin Prince and the Obi of Agbor, the traditional ruler of the town. Tempers flared and the people moved against Aiguobasinmwin and his entourage with cudgels and machetes.

As the Prince retreated from his attackers, dodging their blows as best as he could he stepped backwards - into the gaping mouth of an uncovered well. He made a great somersaulting leap

backwards, successfully clearing the chasm of the well. His awe struck attackers stopped their pursuit right then in their track. He arrived Benin safely, and the British authorities sent Chief Osula to take his place in Agbor. It was said that the ankle which initiated the great backward spring or back flip which saved the day grumbled periodically there after throughout the life--time of the monarch. There after Prince Aiguobasinmwin became a well-known Government Contractor.

He was one amongst those involved in the constructing the first roads in the Benin territories. Some civil works in the City were also awarded to him, like the filling up and obliteration of the AGBADO pond, the six hundred - year old body of muddy water near the walls of the old Palace. The pond was the scene of one of the struggles between the Princes Esigie and Arhuanran, sons of Oba Ozolua, four hundred years earlier. At least once, but probably twice did the British authorities in Benin scramble their occupation forces when alarms went out that Prince Aiguobasinmwin was on the verge of launching an attack on the British. He was said to have planned to drive the colonialists out of Benin to avenge his father's deportation.

In the episode of 1906 troops were moved again into Benin City, and army units in other places put on the alert. Investigations revealed the alarms to be false. The rumor of 1906 must have arisen because on the First day of January of that year Sir Ralph MOOR, the conqueror of Benin and the jailer of Ovonramwen in Calabar, lost power. He lost it to the Governor of Lagos when the British Protectorate of Southern Nigeria was amalgamated with the Lagos Colony and Protectorate.

Calabar became just a provincial headquarters instead of the capital of a country she had been for fifteen years. Moor returned home. To the Edos, the movement of the Government to Lagos and the exit of Sir Ralph must have seemed like a form of liberation, with the jailer walking away and leaving the prison doors wide open. On January 1 1914 the two Nigerias, North and South, were amalgamated under the Governor - Generalship of Sir Frederick LUGARD. Oba OVONRAMWEN died thirteen days later, on 13 January, 1914, in hospital in Calabar. Had the two Nigerias not been amalgamated it was likely that Benin would have permanently lost her monarchy, and therefore the memory of much of her past history.

The Government of Southern Nigeria was prosecuting the policy of the Direct Rule of the dependent peoples. This policy was in direct competition with the pre-colonial traditional institutions for the loyalty of the colonized peoples. It would naturally therefore seek to further weaken, rather than strengthening

those institutions. As it happened the headship of the newly created conjoined country of Nigeria was vested in Sir Lugard, the apostle of Indirect Rule.

Lugard had put this policy through its paces in his beloved Northern Nigeria which he had, like Uthman dan Fodio a hundred years before him, conquered. He saw that the policy worked, and moreover that it was cheap to run. Now that he was additionally in charge of Southern Nigeria he ordered the application of the policy across the board. His action was reminiscent of what the Obasanjo-Yar'Adua military Government did to Nigeria in 1978 with the Land Use Decree. The local officials in Benin, led by Resident James WATT, compelled to carry out an administrative policy which they did not see any need for, decided to eat their cake and still have it: they would abide by the new directive and yet maintain the status quo.

Chief Obaseki would continue to run the show in Benin, but

with a change of nomenclature, from "Chief" to "Oba".

It was here that Prince Aiguobasinmwin's strength of character, and the hardiness which had been built into him by all of his previous experiences stood him in good stead in the struggle he had to wage, so that the Restoration, which was now inevitable, was vested in the same Oronmiyan dynasty which had lost it seventeen years earlier. In his fight against the overwhelming influence and contrariwise disposition of James Watt Aiguobasinmwin reached outside Benin for help. He wrote to the Ooni of Ife. He wrote to the Alaafin of Oyo, his junior half - brother, born after Oronmiyan their father had walked out on Benin.

He wrote a letter, appealing to the British monarch King George V. Citing the fact that in England the son of the king is crowned as the king, and not a stranger, even as it in Benin

King George V

In Benin City itself the PACT which was made two hundred years earlier between Oba Ewuakpe and the Benin City chiefs: that the stool of the Oba of Benin would be occupied only by the First Son of the deceased monarch, to the exclusion of all others - came powerfully into play, and ultimately carried the day. Aiguobasinmwin was given the nod by the British, but on a probation period of one year. All the fears of James Watt the

Resident officer were written down as the do's and dont's with which the restored office was hedged round.

Effective power was left in the hands of Chief Obaseki, now re-titled the Iyase of Benin.

But what had been achieved proved sufficient for the good of Edoland, and of the near-areas of Nigeria running a culture derived from Edoland. It resulted in the encouragement of the codification of the seven centuries of the history of the restored Benin dynasty. Prince Aiguobasinmwin was crowned the Oba of Benin on 24 July 1914. July was the rainiest month of the year, and the new Oba had no Palace to move into, the Palace of his fathers having been destroyed seventeen years earlier during the British War. When, decked in his full regalia, he arrived that day in Benin City from his coronation venue in USAMA, the new Oba moved into the Prison farm which was the only portion of the old Palace grounds which had not been built upon by the colonial authorities. He spent the first night as the Oba of Benin in this scrub-land, under the open, raining skies. Some corrugated iron roofing sheets placed over forked sticks shielded the new monarch from the elements. The following day the building of the present Benin Palace was begun, with the Oba already in residence. Aiguobasinmwin was given two praise-names by his appreciative subjects, the Edo people. He was called: Ovbiudu "the Leopard - Hearted, the Brave One". A reference to his resolutely standing against the desires of the local colonial officials in Benin, and successfully wresting his patrimony from their unwilling hands.

The other praise - name was: Eweka n'Ologbe: "Eweka II,

the Re-Builder of the Ancestral Homestead".

He acquired this name with regard to his re-building of the Benin Palace. The two praise-names summarize very succinctly the trajectory traversed by the life of this Prince, and the significance of that life to the people whom, at a critical point in their history, he led as the Oba of Benin. He is truly the "Edo Man of the Twentieth Century!"

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ARTICLE TEN:

SLAVE SETTLERS IN

BENIN CITY (PT. 1)

Igbo Origins Of The Obaseki Family

It is on record that Crown prince Idubor the son of Oba Adolor who ascended the throne of Benin Kingdom as Oba Ovonranmwen, was the one who conferred the chieftaincy of Obaski to a certain

son of an Igbo slave called “Ogbeide Oyoo” from Ndokwa / Ubuluku in Delta state which the current Oyoo family (a.k.a Obaseki family), erroneously claims to hail from the royal family of the Obi of Ubuluku who is a direct descendant of the Royal family of Benin Kingdom.

Agho Obaseki-Oyoo

But in reality there is no evidential proof of such an adventurous claim by the Oyoo family neither has the royal family of the Obuluku dukedom ever confirmed that they are the kith and kin of the so-called Obaseki family who try to hide their Igbo ancestry by erroneously adopting the Obaseki title as a family name which ought not to be so. It is also on record that any one who finds himself living in Benin city before the advent of the British 1897 Invasion, must either be from the royal family or from one of the senior chiefs or war generals (Okakuo) of Benin Kingdom. While all other free-born Benin indigenes lived in the numerous towns, villages and communities scattered all over the kingdom. This means that all others who did not fit into this category was a SLAVE (OVIEN) in the kingdom of which they were in their thousands. For it is officially recorded by the Europeans that at a point in time, Chief Ezomo the Okakuo of Benin Kingdom had over 10,000 slaves who worked in his farms and served as “carriers” in the army of the kingdom, which he refused to sell to them because the Oba explicitly warned that none of his chiefs and generals should indulge in the slave trade as a kingdom policy. Likewise he forbade all the slave traders to never ever buy or sell any Benin Citizen as slave else they would incur his wrath and vengeance. Yet the lying British who championed slave trade in Africa, Europe and Caribbean for centuries before abolishing it turned around to brand Benin as the epicenter of slave trade and human sacrifices coining it the CITY OF BLOOD. Forgetting that they too were also burning people suspected to be witches or wizards on the stake as a human sacrifices. The same white men, back in those days in Europe were also burning Jews and Christians alive on the stake as ‘heretics” of the Roman Catholic Church and Christian religion. Benin Empire indulged in human sacrifices purely for religious purposes just like the idolatrous Gentiles and Israelites in Biblical times, but the Europeans indulged in human sacrifices for purely

10

punitive purposes which is worse and then turned around to condemned the Benins. A case of a kettle calling a pot black Now for any one with an unknown, strange and insignificant family name of “Oyoo” that is evidently not a typical Benin family name, cannot be a “free born” resident in Benin City except as one of the many Igbo, Yoruba, Nupe, Calabar, Hausa slaves and war captives who worked either in the Oba Palace or the compounds of the “Big Chiefs”. So for anyone to claim that Ogbeide Oyoo the son of Oyoo the “Igbo slave” who worked in the palace as one of the numerous “Umuadas” for Oba Adolor. Who was favored by Prince Idugbor for his service to him as a slave and servant while he was the crown prince and made him a palace chief is a true blooded Benin man of the royal family of Benin kingdom is a fallacy that cannot be proven both from the Royal families of Benin and Ubuluku. Until the Oyoo / Obaseki family can prove it to be so by telling us in detail their “Family Tree”, lineage and names of their forbears namely the father, grand father and great grand father of Agho Oyoo-Obaseki, as it is with all other true born Benin royal families they should stop peddling such false claims and fallacies to the gullible Benin people. Every true born Benin indigene is able to accurately “re-trace” the family roots and history of his forefathers even to their villages of origins and by their names you will be able to tell their Edo meanings and antecedents. The name “Oyoo” is the name of a slave, stranger and settler and not a typical Benin family name. It is not unusual that some times, some slaves eventually attain the status of freedom for their exceptional deeds in service for the kingdom or towards a Benin prince who later rewarded them when he became Oba of Benin. A popular example is Edo the slave of a Benin chief who saved the life of Prince Ogun and was killed by his master for doing so, but was later rewarded post humously when Prince Ogun became Oba Ewure the Great and renamed the Benin kingdom of Igodomigodo to Edo after the name of the slave servant who sacrificed his life to save him from death at the hands of some conspirators working for his brother Uwaifiokun who had earlier usurped the throne from him. Now if Edo was not killed, no doubt Oba Ewuare would have bestowed upon him a chieftaincy title as reward for his good deeds to him before he was enthroned as Oba. So also Ogbeide Oyoo was rewarded for his good deeds to Oba Ovonranmwen before his enthronement only to later betray him to the British who deposed him from the same throne and exiled him to far away Calabar. If he had but known he would never ever had bestowed such favors to such a slave servant who greatly desired his ancestral

throne and did all he could to usurp it but failed woefully. Now another one from this Traitor Oyoo Family wants to usurp the governorship seat of Benin Kingdom and continue with the same Anti-Benin Agenda his forebears started with and failed woefully to actualize. God Forbid! That is an Abomination! Awua! This conclusively proves that the members of the Family of Oyoo (a.k.a Obaseki) are most definitely not Benin Indigenes because they cannot name a single village or community in Benin Kingdom that their forebears originated from except to claim that they are from Ndokwa/Ubuluku in Delta State. The question here is: If Ubuluku is not in Benin Kingdom of Edo State, but in Anioma in Delta State why then are they not claiming to be Delta Igbos as their Aniocha kinsmen are claiming? After all if your paternal great grand father or grand father claim to be an Igbo man you his great grandson or grandson respectively are first and foremost most definitely an Igbo man even if your grand mother is from another tribe and you were born and bred in her native land. But your own nativity is undeniably Igbo. The same principle applies with all the Americans whose grand fathers and great grand fathers are immigrants from Africa and Europe. That is why till today they call themselves African Americans, Irish Americans, Italian Americans, Jewish American, Russian American and so on while the indigenous American Indians they met in the land distinctly call themselves Native Americans. Therefore no Obaseki-Oyoo Family member is a Benin Indigene but an Igbo Indigene and if any one of them wants to contest for state governorship, they should go to their native land in Delta state and contest for governorship elections there. This is Edo state and the mere fact that their grandfather Ogbeide Oyoo was bestowed a chieftaincy title by the grace and favor of Oba Ovonramwen does not make them to be indigenous Benin Natives as nativity cannot be bestowed upon a man, because it is by blood and birth. In order words just as the first son of the Oba is born an Oba and not made an Oba, so also you are born a Benin man and not made a Benin man. This surmise is not open for discussion or debate. I herewith stand uncorrected!

THIS IS THE TRUTH!

The Spirit of Benin will always defeat, disgrace or destroy the enemies of Benin Kingdom. From the days of our conquering virtually all our neighboring West African tribes and kingdoms from Calabar to Ghana, to expanding the kingdom into an empire from the 15th century for 500 consecutive years to the 19th century even to the days when the expanding Islamic Jahidists were crushed, defeated and driven back to the north in the 1850’s. In Africa, no Enemy of Edo (Oghian Oba) could withstand the fierce and fearsome mythical might of

Great Benin and it took a world super-power like Great Britain to finally defeat Great Benin in Battle for the very first and only time in the 2000 year old recorded war history of Great Benin Kingdom. Albeit the British for that victory had to pay a huge bloody price in terms of war casualties. Where is the so-called British in Benin today? They were driven out of the Nigeria they “created’ and ruled over, only about 60 years later by the “Parliamentary Motion” of a certain Esan man from the same Great Benin Kingdom called Anthony Enahoro with his famous call for an independent Nigerian state in the mid 1950’s which was eventually actualized only a few years later in 1960. Now this same Britain has been humiliated and disgraced out of the European Union they once lorded over only about 100 years later in the recently concluded 2016 BREXIT paving the way for the old enemy, namely the Germans to assume the driving seat and be in full control of the European Union which has always been their ultimate goal that provoked the 1st & 2nd World Wars. Even the so-called Vice Consul Ralph Moor that master-minded the invasion of Benin was disgraced out of his office and seat of colonial rule in Calabar the Capital city when Lagos was made the capital instead and returned to London deranged with insanity and committed suicide as a mad man. The question is can a mad man who reasons like an animal commit suicide, when it is obvious that animals are incapable of committing suicide? The categorical answer is NO! This is proof that the Spirit of Benin never sleeps and will sooner or later deal with all those who declare themselves by their words and acts to be Enemy of Oba, Enemy of Edo (Oghian Oba, Oghian Edo). It is needful to remind these Traitors of Benin that we True-born Patriots of Benin will rise up en mass to resist and remove by any means necessary whether physically or spiritually any TRAITOR who wants to bear rule in Benin Kingdom by subterfuge against the will of Benin Indigenes and sabotage the peace, progress and hospitality of Benin Kingdom that is now attracting all manner of foreigners, strangers and settlers from within and without the country to come and dwell in Benin Kingdom and Edo State. The hospitality of Benin Kingdom should not be taken for granted especially if such non-indigenes wants to tow the line, hook and sinker of these Traitors of Benin. They will eventually go the same way these traitors will go as the Enemy of Oba (Oghain Oba) just like the British their colonial slave-masters have gone for good.

BRITISH COME, BRITISH GO, BENIN REMAIN!

LET BE IT BE KNOWN TO ALL AND SUNDRY THAT NO

OBASEKI-OYOO FAMILY MEMBER IS ACCEPTABLE TO RULE OR GOVERN IN THE BENIN KINGDOM OF EDO STATE AND ANY EDO TRIBE THAT SUPPORTS SUCH TRAITORS OF BENIN SHOULD PREPARE TO DEPART FROM EDO STATE TO FORM THEIR OWN STATE AND CUT OFF ALL THEIR TRADITIONAL TIES WITH EDO STATE FOR GOOD!

YOU CANNOT DRINK THE POISONED CHALICE OF

TRAITORS AND CONFESS TO BE PATRIOTS!

YOU CANNOT TANGO WITH THE TRAITORS AND PARTY

WITH THE PATRIOTS!

YOU CANNOT BETRAY YOUR PEOPLE AND EXPECT

TO RULE YOUR PEOPLE!

YOU CANNOT IMPOSE A TRAITOR ON OTHERS BUT

ON YOUSELF! ***************************

ARTICLE ELEVEN:

SLAVE SETTLERS IN

BENIN CITY (PT. 2)

The True Origins Of The Slave-Settlers In Benin

It is on historical record that, after the British defeated Benin in 1897, they later freed all the slaves in Benin Kingdom in the year 1915 and proclaimed them as free citizens. Now these freed slaves went to “Ozolua’s Pole” in the palace ground in Benin City, to encircle it several times as Benin tradition demands for a slave to be made free. But instead of returning back to their own lands of origin which they know too well as they were brought from there to Benin, they remained in Benin city and started adopting the Benin names of their former masters as if that was their family name to hide the fact that they were former slaves. (Jacob Egharevba – A Short History of Benin).

For instance the Slave of Edobor (Ovien Edobor) would change his name to become the Son of Edobor (Owie Edobor). This is how thousands of these slaves, their children and grand-children of today became “settlers” in Benin Kingdom and consequently “citizens” of Edo State. But they are not Benin Indigenes. I repeat and stand uncorrected that they are not and will never be Benin Indigenes because “indigene-ship” is by blood descent, while “citizen-ship” is by

birth right. This explains why these slave-settlers in our midst today are never interested in the things of the Kingdom that every true Benin indigene is passionate about. Rather they tend to take sides with whatever or whoever is against the interest of the monarchy and people of Benin Kingdom. That is why when the true born BENIN INDIGENES are made aware of the treachery of the Obaseki family who keep on betraying our Benin King and Kingdom from generations of father to son and even grandson as well as the Ogiamien family who want to declare a fake and non-existent independent Utantan Kingdom in Benin Kingdom who we simply identify as the TRAITORS OF BENIN, they are incensed and offended by such acts of treason. But these slave born BENIN SETTLERS see nothing wrong in it as it means nothing to them, because they are strangers in our midst and NOT BENINS! We true born Benin Indigenes have had enough of the atrocities and activities of these Benin Settlers in our midst who believe that an Obaseki-Oyoo family is the right family in all of Benin kingdom to produce the next Benin Governor so to speak in spite of the fact that they know that such a fellow is NOT ACCEPTABLE to any true born Benin Indigene with Benin blood flowing through his veins whose loyalty to the Oba of Benin is sacrosanct and whose patriotism to Benin Kingdom is unquestionable. Yet they erroneously persist, thinking in their foolhardiness that NOTHING will happen! But surely SOMETHING will surely happen! Very soon we will begin to screen and sift them out, shunt and sideline them into the background of insignificance and irrelevance in the Benin Kingdom’s scheme of things whether traditionally, politically, professionally or otherwise. One very sure way of doing that is to introduce a Benin Kingdom “Traditional Family Book” a.k.a “Traditional Passport” that will be issued by the Benin Traditional Council. But ONLY to those Benin Indigenes who can prove that their PATRIMONIAL fathers, grandfathers and great-grand fathers are true born indigenes. That were living in the towns, villages and communities of Benin Kingdom before the advent of the controversial Benin-British Wars popularly coined INVASION 1987. That has prompted countless books, plays, dramas, musicals and movies from all the world (See next edition for more details of Benin Traditional Passport).

Original Benin Empire Flag in the British Maritime Museum

**********************

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ARTICLE TWELVE:

HOW GAIUS OBASEKI

FOUGHT AGAINST

OBA AKENZUA (PT.1)

The Owegbe Cult: Political And Ethnic

Rivalries In Early Post-Colonial Benin

By Joseph Nevadomsky

(Edited)

Gaius Obaseki

Gaius Obaseki slashed Oba Akenzua’s salary by 50% and decreed that the Oba cannot confer chieftaincy titles on any one in Benin Kingdom. The grading of the Traditional Rulers’ salary of the 1930’s shows that of the Oba at about £1600, which he reduced to about £800 in 1940’s as the chairman of the ruling Benin Native council. (See newspaper clip below)

By 1965 the Midwest House of Assembly had sixty-three NCNC members. The Action Group (AG) and the Midwest Democratic Front (MDF), which was a local constituent of the NPC, had one member each. The situation was more complex than these figures indicate. The NCNC was national; Benin Division was a special area in which the NCNC allied with the Otu-Ẹdo, a local and ethnocentric party whose name means “Benin Society.” Notionally fused with the NCNC, Otu-Ẹdo enjoyed autonomy as the Benin branch of the NCNC. The NCNC/Otu-Ẹdo represented the parochial interests of the Edo (mainly Benin), while the NCNC-Pure, as it was known, represented the interests of Igbo living in the Midwest Region and outside the fold of Otu-Ẹdo. To understand this alliance and its relationship to the Ọwegbe

Society, we need to discuss the Minority States Movement. Minority States Movement: the success of the Minority States Movement in the Midwest provinces resulted from crises in the Western Region: the split between Awolowo and his successor as premier, Samuel Akintola, and the investigation of the AG government’s illegal financial practices. By 1962 the AG had lost its political grip on the region. The Minority States Movement also benefited from popular sentiment in the Benin and Delta Provinces. Therefore Many Midwesterners, especially the Edo, felt that the AG had concentrated development in Yoruba West while neglecting them. They directed their hostility at the Benin branch of the Reformed Ogboni Fraternity (ROF), an exclusive society that had been founded by aspiring Yoruba in Lagos, the federation capital. In the Benin Division this included Edo men of repute. Ogbonis, as members of the ROF came to be known, controlled the markets, the tax system, and influential businesses. Ogbonis are reported to have violated the law with impunity, not difficult where civil law is weak. At first a revival of an old secret society based on a cult of the Yoruba gods, the ROF later evolved into an elite social club, with initiation rituals that mimicked those of the Masons. Eventually, the ROF transformed into a political organization that came to dominate the administration of Benin Division, much to the chagrin of its traditional ruler—the Oba of Benin, Akenzua II—and the people. The influence of the ROF spread among officials of the Benin and Delta Provinces, who sought membership to curry favor that advanced their mobility. Edo cringed under what they saw as Yoruba domination. Locals feared domination by non natives. Many feared a permanent AG majority in the Western House of Assembly, with the AG drawing its backstage support from the Egbe Omo Oduduwa, an organization that fostered pan-Yoruba unity in a region of religious and cultural complexity. The Egbe Omo Oduduwa (whose title literally means “body of the children of Oduduwa,” the presumptive progenitor of all Yoruba) manifested its public activities through the ROF by controlling boards of directors, commissions and corporations, and the magistracy and customary courts. Although the Willink Commission set up in 1957 to look into the fears of ethnic group minorities dismissed charges against the ROF as baseless, the popular belief in the validity of the accusations affected local attitudes.

By the 1950s, Ogbonism had become synonymous with oppression. That the AG still succeeded at the polls reflected that party’s control over the police, harassment of opposition candidates, preferential treatment for party candidates, and heavy tax assessments on non-supporters. Voters also turned against known Ogboni members rather than on the AG itself. Voting patterns focused on local rather than regional and national issues. The widespread influence of the ROF among chiefs and civil officers roused popular resentment in Benin City. This antipathy led to the formation of the Otu-Ẹdo, an organization that supported Edo cultural and commercial interests, the traditional form of kingship and the Oba, and independence from Yoruba and Ogboni influence. Members leaned toward the NCNC as a buffer. Otu-Ẹdo leaders hoped to wrest power from the AG generally and the Ogbonis in particular.

Chief Humphrey Omo-Osagie (B2) The founder of Otu-Edo and Owegbe and Hero of Midwest / Bendel State) Under the leadership of Chief Omo-Osagie, the Otu-Ẹdo affiliated with the NCNC, made more palatable because the Oba of Benin—no longer a member of Otu-Ẹdo and therefore no longer perceived as a patriot for Edo advancement— had accepted a position as minister without portfolio in the AG, thereby automatically becoming an AG member. The Oba saw many of his affluent chiefs aligning themselves with AG patronage. More germane, Omo-Osagie represented the loyal opposition, the traditional town chiefs versus the palace chiefs, a separation that had been a hallmark of the society for centuries. This arrangement often worked very well: the town chiefs offered useful governance on behalf of the citizenry and served to blunt the autocratic powers of the king in an elegant balance of power. The Oba appointed the Iyase, head of the town chiefs, and in ordinary circumstances this functioned both to support the king and allow for expression of popular sentiments and popular disapproval. But in times of extraordinary change, the delicate balance of power shifted from mutual accommodation to animosity. The Oba joined the AG, and also by implication the ROF, not in support of Ogboni class interests but to align himself with

whomever was in power and in opposition to Omo-Osagie. Like many other traditional rulers, the king felt insecure under colonial rule, especially because the British had sent his grandfather into exile after the Punitive Expedition of 1897. Although the kingship system was reinstituted in 1914, the lull gave opportunities for those savvy enough to take advantage of the conquest. See Richard Sklar, ‘The Contribution of Tribalism to Nationalism in Western Nigeria,’ Journal of Human Origins of Ọwegbe: Some secret societies grow to political prominence with deep cultural and historical roots. The Ogboni Society originated as a cult to the earth. Embedded in the fabric of Yoruba social life, it became a nexus of political influence and garnered allegiances that skirted colonial authority. The AG employed it as a means for political solidarity both before independence in 1960 and as Nigeria moved rapidly to parliamentary self-rule. Ọwegbe has a more recent, but murky, history. Its genesis can be traced anywhere from 1944 to 1954. In 1944 Chief Omo-Osagie brought together a consortium of native doctors to help him win a civil libel action. They concocted an assortment of protective medicines that were rubbed into body cuts—a series of X-shaped patterns made with razor blades or needles on the chest, back, arms, and legs of initiates. The concoctions of herbs were reputed to make individuals impervious to machete cuts and gunshots. Procedures included bathing in traditional Osun water, a fetid mixture of dead animal parts made of crocodile head, dead birds, and forest ingredients. Osun water was intended to ward off harm, while the “marks of Ọwegbe” served as a visible warning for others to beware. After the libel action of 1944, Ọwegbe survived as a secret cult. As independence neared and political rivalries intensified, Ọwegbe became a counter to the AG, which was backed by the Ogboni Society. As head of a new regional party, Omo-Osagie sought the premiership of the Midwest Region. Omo-Osagie’s seniority as a seventy-year-old chief, backed by the medicines of Ọwegbe and supported by the NCNC, engendered fear, and with a supernatural mystique base, he could directly challenge the ancestral. The author underwent this initiation and therefore has firsthand knowledge of the ritual aspects and the implications. Another origin story of equal credibility is that Otu-Ẹdo created Owegbe from a cult practice in Ishan Division, an Edo-speaking area to the north of Benin. Prince Shaka Momodu, who is known as the Lion of Ishan and was a Midwest Minister of Internal Affairs, denied he was a member of Owegbe but claimed that Ishan militant youths under his

employ had initiated into a cult offering invincibility greater than that offered by its offshoot, Owegbe . Prince Momodu insisted that, like Owegbe members, he was impervious to machete cuts and gunshot wounds. At the Alexander Commission inquiry, set up to investigate alleged Owegbe atrocities, the presiding judge remarked that even lions are not gunshot proof, to which Prince Momodu appealed that he was a special lion and offered to give a demonstration of his invincibility. The report of the commission notes that the tactful judge did not pursue the matter. Umẹwaẹn: Journal of Benin and Ẹdo Studies, Vol.1, 2016 powers of the Oba of Benin. How this challenge to the Oba could be played out became apparent in the pompous but effective number plate of his car. The plate could not be “B1,” reserved for the Oba, so Omo-Osagie took “B2,” a signature of power and a modern competitive advertisement. The Ọwegbe Society offered the Otu-Ẹdo a powerful weapon to effectively block inroads made by the AG and the Ogboni Society (ROF). The formal structure of the Ọwegbe Society consisted of thirteen enclaves covering Benin Province, with Benin City as headquarters. Influential villagers controlled the enclaves. Each was self-contained and met independently. With Ọwegbe’s autonomous structure, the center in Benin City exerted a kind of loose, amorphous control. The supreme authority for Ọwegbe existed in the form of the Divisional Executive Committee of Otu-Ẹdo, headed by Omo-Osagie. Below this executive committee and the enclaves were the individual chairmen of the respective branches, or ọgua (initiation shrines), constructed in all the wards of Benin Division and in many other wards in Benin Province’s other divisions. This structure mimicked the traditional hierarchy in the kingship system. At the center resided Omo-Osagie, in a position of authority not unlike that of the Oba of Benin, the traditional ruler. At the other end were local shrines and a system of village control by elders or influential villagers, such as the traditional enogie. Not all Edo belonged to Otu-Ẹdo or Ọwegbe. (One could belong to Otu-Ẹdo without belonging to Ọwegbe, but to belong to Ọwegbe, one had to belong to Otu-Ẹdo.) Some joined out of fear of reprisals, but others disliked the secrecy, the rituals, or Omo-Osagie and even when threatened refused to join. Others maintained their affiliation with the AG, the anti-NCNC Midwest Democratic Front, or, as with Chief Gaius Obaseki, who was head of the ROF. Some experienced a feeling of terror and insecurity, not as a result of Yoruba or Igbo domination but

12

because of Ọwegbe victimization against those suspected to supporters and adherents of Gaius Obaseki. Ritual Features of Ọwegbe: Ọwegbe leaders used shrine initiations and administration of oaths. The use of traditional forms of juju (i.e., magical medicine) established a cohesive political organization that obliged villagers to support particular candidates. Initiation also ensured an unquestioning obedience to the Ọwegbe Society.

Initiation Shrine

Common features of the membership induction included members’ being initiated at night at an Ogun shrine. Ogun is the god of iron and, by extension, of war. Ogun is a hot god, the patron saint of warriors, metalworkers, and blacksmiths. As testified to by one member of the Ọwegbe Society, devotion to Ogun called for (1) dog sacrifices, in which heads of decapitated dogs appeared as offerings; (2) other sacrifices, in which initiates paid between five and ten pounds sterling (British and Nigerian currency were equivalent in value) and animals such as chickens and goats were bled over the shrine and then cooked for feasting; (3) oaths of fidelity, which initiates swore over a stone vessel (akin to a large bird bath) dedicated to Osun (deity of the forest and herbs and leaves that offer protection), followed by ablution with the sacred and protective Osun water; (4) the initiate’s consumption of the heart of a cockerel; (5) ritual cutting, in which initiates stood on a large flat stone—indicating inviolability—and were marked with knife or razor blade cuts meant to render the initiates invulnerable to machetes or gunshots, after which gunpowder was rubbed into the wounds; (6) oaths of secrecy and obedience; (7) herb rituals, in which initiates lay on broken bottles with a mortar on their chests while herbs placed in the mortar were pounded with a pestle and the ground herbs later rubbed into the cuts; and (8) dancing on broken bottles. The Ọwegbe member further described the initiation as follows: For some of these people can have broken bottles all over the floor of any place and when they shoot their guns they dance on these broken bottles and they are not cut. Some of them among the “Ewaise” [medicine men]—they can have somebody lying on the ground—a mortar placed on his chest and they will be beating it—I mean many people will be pounding and pounding a pestle in a mortar while it is on his chest, a big mortar. Well, all these

terrified the Action Group / Ogboni faction and they feared for their lives. In a modern twist each initiate was given a fidelity ring that bore one of the following inscriptions, “V,” “BI,” or “CII.” The significance of these inscriptions could not be determined during the course of the inquiry into Ọwegbe activities, though such rings served as court exhibits. One guesses that “B” stood for “Benin” and “BI” for a new dynastic Oba-ship. “V” may have stood for “victory.” The meaning of “CII” is unknown. Ọwegbe Society Objectives: Besides resisting AG and Ogboni Society pressures, Ọwegbe served as a social services organization for “any member of Otu-Ẹdo in financial difficulties” and “to combat collectively, robbery, stealing and immoral practices” through a supernatural agency for the punishment of wrongdoers. Ọwegbe had not initially employed initiations and the taking of oaths (not to mention the fealty identity rings). This lack of supernatural sanctions led to “weather-cocking,” (i.e., carpet crossing, switching political affiliations). Initiation centers (shrines) soon opened in Benin City, spread to outlying areas, and terrorized those who failed to comply. An early reluctance to use rituals and large-scale swearing of oaths was due to fear that any outrageous attempts to create a subversive political interest group with a solid infrastructure of adherents bound by oaths of allegiance and cultic practices would have alarmed the government of the Western Region and possibly the federal government. An order in council (1959) had prohibited the worship or invocation of any Ọwegbe Juju.

Otu-Odoledo (EDF): Trado-Militia Wing

The main goal was to build up a strong base of supporters with unswerving obedience to Otu-Ẹdo leadership in Benin Division and other divisions where Ọwegbe influence was having an impact. The tempo of initiations, some of which included non-Edo, into Ọwegbe dramatically increased after its success against the AG and Ogboni in the Midwest Region. Initiations escalated following the installation of a new regional government in February 1964; by 1965 there were more than 300 initiation shrines, each with between 200 and 250 members, or anywhere from

60,000 to 75,000 members in Benin Division alone—a sizable and significant militant wing. By this time, too, Ọwegbe controlled the customary courts and had made inroads into other governmental agencies and statutory corporations. Ọwegbe maintained this influence after the need to recruit members to combat alleged persecution by the AG had disappeared. The initial impetus for the development of a militant arm had ceased, as the NCNC/Otu-Ẹdo alliance now effectively controlled the political apparatus of the Midwest State. Otu-Ẹdo, through the Ọwegbe Society, sought to increase its core of adherents, bound by ritual and oaths, to usurp power in the Midwest. For Chief Omo-Osagie, control of the government in Edo hands, with himself as premier, was an important personal goal. At 73, he was still politically astute and ambitious but complained that his lack of the premiership had denied him the fons et origio for the distribution of patronage. He felt unable to adequately fulfill promises made to “his people.” For the Edo—a very proud people who have an illustrious history and who were not far removed from ancestors that had held hegemony over a kingdom that included Lagos and part of the Yoruba west and Igbo areas to the river Niger—the lack of political control was frustrating. So long as outsiders did not figure prominently in the political, economic, and social landscape, no one cared, and there was little if any animosity. Personal contacts were remote, or instrumental, or unimportant. But in the ensuing struggles over new strategic positions of power (those involving taxation, public works, employment, and education), the Edo coalesced for mutual interest. As AG influence waned, Ọwegbe supporters rioted against the Ogboni, physically inflicting punishment on them to make up for years of oppression. Now the economic threats by the Igbo demanded action. Commentators argued that any tour of Benin and its districts would show that most were foreign natives (i.e., Igbo). Interviewees noted that the Igbo had tapped the resources of the state, especially rubber production. Leases of landed property to non-Edo were on the rise. The Igbo, instead of maintaining a subservient attitude and occupational relationship (as menials, or household servants) were becoming politically uppity. Worse, their economic inroads devastated the proud Edo. Ethnic articulation, by means of powerful agencies that employed supernatural means for political solidarity, served as a response to potential domination, from wherever it came. Analysis of Ọwegbe: In the politicized atmosphere of Midwest Nigeria, Ọwegbe allegiances provided an effective

political weapon that, by reconstituting and reinventing certain traditional features of Edo ritual practice, bound adherents collectively. However, to understand the Ọwegbe Society as a political interest group in which ethnicity was articulated as a political weapon rather than an atavistic arrangement in which endemic tribal animosities were carried over into the present, one must distinguish between the form and the meaning of Ọwegbe rituals. Not all Edo belonged to Otu-Ẹdo or Ọwegbe. (One could belong to Otu-Ẹdo without belonging to Ọwegbe, but to belong to Ọwegbe, one had to belong to Otu-Ẹdo.) Some joined out of fear of reprisals, but others disliked the secrecy, the rituals, or Omo-Osagie and even when threatened refused to join. The exploitation of ethnicity for political and economic interests explains the development of the Ọwegbe Society. Ọwegbe leaders made use of cultural idioms to morally bind members to the group’s political interests. Less an end in itself, ethnicity offered an expedient route to power. The Ọwegbe Society’s successes were due to disparities of power and conflicts of interests far more than to a gemeinschaft participation in a unified moral universe similar to a symbolic universe of primordial sentiments.

Otu-Odoledo (EDF):

Socio-Intelligentsia Wing Concluding Remarks: in the traditional sense Ọwegbe is a fortifying ritual for personal protection, involving body modification procedures that offer a kind of spiritual armor against physical harm and that are believed to make a person impervious to gun wounds or machete cuts. Ọwegbe is also socially transformative. As a group rite of passage, the political enterprise of Ọwegbe inducted entrants into a secret but (JMitchell, The Kalela Dance. 46. [33]). A client is typically offered this protection by a native physician, a sort of spiritual councilor. The X body markings are specific to Owegbe. The author is the recipient of such markings and other body transformations that include eyelid cuts for a sort of x-ray vision that allows one to recognize a potential enemy, parallel leg and arm cuts for protection from road accidents (and public signatures of Owegbe), and 201 (= an infinite number) scalp cuts that protect the head, the seat of a person’s wisdom, authority, and maturity. The tensions between the Oba and his Iyase—the king and senior town chief, respectively—that had

figured prominently in the configuration of local politics for hundreds of years resurfaced after colonial usurpation with the exile of Ovonramwen (Oba Akenzua’s grandfather), the latent fluidity of a seventeen year interregnum, and a new sociopolitical system. The historical changes over the last half century had led to new social and political formations.

Iwu Body Marks of

Identification Ọwegbe was one of those formations. With the Oba of Benin aligned as a token of the AG and its affiliate the ROF as well as continued Yoruba hegemony on the one hand and the NCNC party, dominated by the Igbo, on the other, Edo citizens of Benin found their traditional loyalties to the king and notions of identity conflicting with their allegiances to a bureaucratic modernism. With ethnicity as a salient political feature of the landscape, primordialism—rather than arising from an innate sense of kinship—had become politicized. In situations like this, ethnicity as cause and ethnicity as consequence are conflated, intertwined as expressions of both affiliation and interests. Ọwegbe has reemerged several times over the past twenty years, usually under extraordinary circumstances. Outbursts of Ọwegbe activity occasionally reappear when it seems that the very fabric of society is threatened either from inside (disputes between the Bendel State governor and the Oba, for example) or from outside (conflicts between Benin, Urhobo, Ijaw, or Igbo).

Joseph Nevadomsky (Family)

***************************

ARTICLE THIRTEEN:

HOW GAIUS OBASEKI

FOUGHT AGAINST

OBA AKENZUA (PT.3)

Benin And The 1963 Midwest Referendum

By Nowamagbe A. Omoigui

(Edited)

13

The results of the Referendum (Plebiscite) were as shown in the table [GE Longe: Results of the

Midwest Referendum, 1963. July 18, 1963. From D.A. Omoigui archives.] The title of my essay today is the story of “Benin and the Midwest referendum”. Why Benin? After all, two provinces (Benin and Delta), and many divisions (including the Benin division) in what became the “Mid-West” were involved in the “War” to create the Midwest region.

There are two reasons. First, the history of the Midwest referendum and events leading to it is exceedingly vast and cannot in all honesty be addressed in a single lecture without losing focus. Secondly, I found a curious excerpt in the report of the Henry Willink Commission:

“In general, it is our view that desire for the State is strong in Benin City and Benin division, the heart of the old Benin Kingdom, and that the idea has progressively less appeal as one moves outwards from this centre.” [Colonial Office: Nigeria - Report of the Commission appointed to enquire into the fears of Minorities and the means of allaying them. July 30th, 1958. Chapter 4, pg 31]

This prompted me to know more about why Benin came to be considered by the Minorities Commission as the epicenter of the Midwest State Movement and how she mobilized herself and others to join hands to prosecute the “War for the Midwest”. I shall conclude with two take-home messages:

a). Political parties come and go, but nationalities remain. b). Organized and united across traditional and contemporary forms of leadership, nothing can stand in the way of the peoples of the Midwest.

On the 24th of June 1963, by order of the Federation of Nigeria Extraordinary Official Gazette No. 43, Volume 50, the Supervisor of the Mid-West referendum issued Government Notice No. 1265. It declared that voting at the Constitutional referendum for the creation of the Mid-Western Region would proceed on Saturday, the 13th day of July 1963. The referendum question was as follows:

“Do you agree that the Midwestern Region Act, 1962,

shall have effect so as to secure that Benin Province including Akoko Edo District in the

Afenmai Division and Delta Province including Warri Division and Warri Urban Township area shall be included in the proposed Mid-Western Region?”

Hours of voting at designated Polling Stations extended from seven o’clock in the forenoon until six o’clock in the evening. It is important to note that a new Voters registration List was not compiled for the purposes of the Mid-West referendum. Only those listed four years earlier in the Federal Electoral Register of 1959 were entitled to vote. Those who wished to vote “yes” were to place their ballot papers in the “white box”. Those who wished “no” were to place their ballot papers in the “black box”.

The total number of eligible voters, being persons whose names appeared in the Federal Electoral register of 1959 was 654,130. Of this number the percentage that voted in the affirmative was 89.07%, well in excess of the required 60% (or 392,478) for the creation of the Mid-West region. The region that was born on August 9, 1963 as a result of the July 13th plebiscite remains the only major administrative unit of Nigeria created by due constitutional process.

FROM 1897 – 1933: As is well known, Benin City, capital of the independent Benin Kingdom and Empire, and traditional spiritual center of Edo speaking people fell to British troops on February 19, 1897. From that day onwards we became part of the British colonial system and whatever administrative structures its agents and latter day surrogates created. The last independent Oba, Idugbowa Ovonramwen N’Ogbaisi, was deposed and exiled to Calabar on September 13th, 1897, where he died in 1914. [Jacob Egharevba: A Short History of Benin. Ibadan University Press, 1968, p60] In the meantime, under Consul Ralph Moor, Benin was administered as part of the Niger Coast Protectorate, which later became the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria in 1900. From 1906 “Southern Nigeria” was administered as three main provinces, Western, Central and Eastern, along with the Lagos colony with which it had been merged that year. The Eastern province was run from Calabar, the Central Province from Warri,

and the Western Province from Lagos. The Central Province was also known as the Niger province. It consisted of the Aboh, Agbor, Asaba, Awka, Benin, Forcados, Idah, Ifon, Ishan, Kwale, Okwoga, Onitsha, Sapele, Udi and Warri districts. The protectorate of Northern Nigeria, on the other hand, was initially organized into 13 provinces (run by Provincial residents) before Ilorin and Kabba were merged into one. According to the “Anthropological Report on the Edo speaking peoples” by Northcote Thomas in 1910, Edo-speaking peoples were mainly located in the Central Province of “Southern Nigeria” and the Ibie and Ukpilla districts of Kabba province of “Northern Nigeria.” Meaning that the senatorial district now known today as “Edo North” had initially been “merged” into the northern region by the British colonial government, and would have remained so till date like Kogi state, if Oba Eweka II had not vigorously protested saying that they were not northerners but part and parcel of Benin Kingdom. Consequently he fought to “rescue” the situation and made sure they were brought back into the Benin province of Southern Nigeria to join their ancestral kith and kin. That was how the Ibie and Ukpilla districts of Kabba province of “Northern Nigeria” were merged with their kith and kin in the Benin province of “Southern Nigeria” in 1918. The protectorates and colonies of Northern and Southern Nigeria were later amalgamated on January 1st 1914 to create “Nigeria”. [FD Lugard: Report on the Amalgamation of Northern and Souther Nigeria, and administration, 1912 – 1919. H.M. Stationery Office, 1920].

Federick Lugard

Even in those early days, there were already stirrings of nationalism. In October 1923, Humphrey Omoregie Osagie, then only a 27-year-old clerk, delivered a political lecture in Lagos under Herbert Macaulay’s auspices and the Nigerian National Democratic Party.

Herbert Macaulay

The young man from Benin would one day become a Titan in the struggle for emancipation of his

people. [A. J. Uwaifo: Omo-Osagie and Party Politics in Benin, Department of History, University of Ibadan, May 1985]

Meanwhile, Oba Eweka II became increasingly concerned about the long-term implications of various administrative proposals for new regions that would ride roughshod over the unique history and independence of most of the peoples of the Central Province, which later became the Benin and Warri Provinces. Therefore, in 1926, he requested the British to bring all the Edoid and Anioma (Western Ibo) areas together in one region that would have a direct reporting relationship with the center. He argued that the people of the Benin and Warri provinces were predominantly of one linguistic, cultural, religious, chieftaincy and historical stock and had functioned in the same cultural system before the British came. [File BP 44,VOL 1, The Oba of Benin. National Archives, Ibadan].

To the best of my knowledge, therefore, Oba Eweka II, in 1926, was the first, following the dissolution of the old Central province, to conceptualize the consolidation of what later became the Midwest region of Nigeria in 1963. It was during his reign that the first pan-Edo association called the Institute for Home-Benin improvement emerged in 1932. Its mandate - according to its own documents - was to represent the "Edo speaking people of Nigeria viz: Benin City, Ishan, Kukuruku, Ora, Agbor, Igbanke, Sobe etc." [Uyilawa Usuanlele: The Edo Nationality and the National Question in Nigeria: A Historical perspective. In Osaghae and Onwudiwe. The Management of the National Question in Nigeria. PEFS. Ibadan 2001]

Unfortunately, Oba Eweka II joined his ancestors on February 8, 1933 and did not live to see his dream come true. It was, therefore, on the shoulders of his son, Oba Akenzua II, crowned on April 5, 1933, after overcoming opposition from his older sister that the spiritual and royal leadership of the future Midwest State Movement was to fall. [H Edomwonyi: A Short Biography of Oba Akenzua II. Bendel Newspapers Corporation, 1981.]

FROM 1934 – 1945: up until then Benin was represented by a Yoruba trader called Mr. I. T. Palmer who was living in Sapele. Gaius Obaseki became the first Edo speaking representative on the Legislative council in the early forties (Usuanlele op. cit.). Oba Akenzua II was distracted by internal problems in Benin like the Forest reserve dispute of 1934, the abolition of District Heads in 1935, Uzebu uprising and Benin water rate agitation of 1936 – 1940 [Igbafe, op. cit.] . It was not long, however, before the Richards Constitution of 1947 crystallized both groups of provinces into the Eastern and Western “regions” of Southern Nigeria, each with its own Regional Assembly. The old “Northern Nigeria” remained as one large region.

Professor P.A. Igbafe has discussed much of the dynamics of colonial rule and its impact on traditional Benin in his outstanding book “Benin under British Administration”. The late Jacob Egharevba also discussed tensions between Oba Akenzua, a few of his prominent chiefs (like Iyase Okoro-Otun) and the emerging Benin educated and commercial elite in his seminal book “A Short History of Benin.” Such tensions were driven by different agendas but manifested opportunistically from time to time. Nevertheless, these tensions - which undermined the Oba’s stature and even threatened his throne - were temporarily resolved after negotiated concessions following appeals from British officials and Traditional Rulers in other jurisdictions, like Warri.

During this era too, Oba Akenzua II, motivated by visions of a united Pan-Edoid Nation, agreed to the British proposal for transfer of large tracts of land from the Benin province to the Warri province as they British said for, “Administrative convenience”. Affected tenants, who agreed to continue to pay royalty in return, populated such lands, many of which had opened up after 1897, including places like Jesse, Ogharefe and other lands across the Ethiope River - which are now in the Delta State portion of the former Midwest / Bendel State. Up until now this so-called “ceded” Benin Kingdom land in what is called “Ethiope West” Local Government Area of Delta State is yet to be properly addressed by the Boundary Commission in spite of the efforts made by Oba Erediauwa in recent years (See: A cradle of Ideas – By Professor Osadolor).

In August 1942, the conference of traditional Obas and rulers in what was now the Western Provinces of Nigeria took place in Benin City. It is said that at that meeting, there was an attempt to speak Yoruba as the Lingua Franca, thus causing some irritation among delegates from the Benin and Warri provinces. The pro-independence National Council for Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) was formed by Herbert Macaulay in 1944. It attracted many young educated elite from the Benin and Warri provinces initially. Among them were men like Mr. Anthony Enahoro, TJ Akagbosu, Chief Gaius Obaseki, Arthur Prest, O.N. Rewane, Begho and Edukugho. [EA Enahoro: Fugitive Offender, London: Cassell, 1966].

Anthony Enahoro & President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana

14

AFTER WORLD WAR II: In 1945, two significant events occurred in Benin. Chief Humphrey Omo-Osagie, already mentioned earlier in this essay, retired from the public service and quietly returned to Benin. He was an ex-student of King’s College Lagos where he was a Schoolmate of Oba Akenzua. 1945 was also the year that Oba Akenzua re-established the Aruosa Church as the Edo National Church of God. He later wrote its catechism and published two volumes of liturgical books as well as a rule-book based on its constitution. In the same year, Michael Adekunle Ajasin and Obafemi Awolowo conceptualized founding the “non-political” exclusively Yoruba vanguard cultural group called the Egbe Omo Oduduwa (Society of Descendants of Oduduwa) in London. It would later be formalized in 1947 and metamorphose into Action Group political party in 1950/51. After the war, the momentum for independence began to gather strongly, led by Macaulay until his untimely death in 1946 when Nnamdi Azikiwe took over the leadership of the NCNC. By this time Obafemi Awolowo had begun staking positions publicly and was quoted in 1947 as saying, “Opportunity must be afforded to each group to evolve its own peculiar political institutions.” [Awolowo: Awo – The autobiography of Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Cambridge University Press, 1960]

Obafemi Awolowo

Indeed, one of the controversial issues of that era was the extent to which Edo based parties and groups should ally themselves with parties and groups outside the Edoid region. Oba Akenzua II was opposed to external alliances because he saw them as a threat to Edo National aspirations. In 1947, for example, there was a conference of delegates from the Benin and Warri provinces at the old Conference Hall in Benin City, where fears of domination in the West were articulated. On the other hand, some Edo speaking politicians like Anthony Enahoro and Gaius Obaseki, for example, became disillusioned with Nnamdi Azikiwe and the NCNC allegedly for Ibo leanings after Macaulay’s death. The Pan-Ibo Union had been one of the founding organizations of the NCNC. However, Azikiwe later assumed its Presidency in 1948.

Nnamdi Azikiwe

But back in Benin, Oba Akenzua II found himself once again in dispute with elements of the “new elite” even as he kept an eye on events at national level. Following the death of Iyase Okoro-Otun in 1943, efforts by the Oba in November 1947 to abolish the title of Iyase (“Prime Minister”) on account of his experience during the water rate agitation were strongly opposed. Opposition was mobilized by the new “Benin Community Tax-Payers Association” primarily formed to pressure the Oba to confer the title of Iyase on a literate individual. Thus he reconsidered his position, even though supported by a group of chiefs and prominent citizens including Omo-Osagie, Egbe Omorogbe, Ogieva Emokpae, J. O. Edomwonyi, D.E. Uwaifo, C.Y. Legemah etc. These chiefs and other men later created the Edo Young People’s party [Edomwonyi, op. cit.] . After an unsuccessful attempt to confer the title on Idehen, then the Esogban of Benin, Oba Akenzua eventually conferred it in April 1948 on Hon. Gaius Obaseki, son of the late Iyase Agho Obaseki, under intense and overwhelming pressure from the British authorities. In the next few years to follow, the Oba was subjected to humiliations such as a 50% DECREASE in his salary and a BAN from conferring titles without permission [Reported by CN Ekwuyasi: Benin Situation as it is today. Daily Times, April 26 1950, p8]. As the Iyase, Gaius Obaseki was executive Chairman of the newly re-organized Benin Divisional Council while Oba Akenzua II was the President. Obaseki was also the concurrent Chairman of the Benin City Council and its powerful Administrative Committee. In addition he was elected the OLUWO or Leader of the influential Reformed Ogboni Fraternity (ROF), a fact that would assume great significance in the politics of Benin. At the Benin provincial level, there were two conferences that year, both marked in part by growing rivalries between two prominent sons of Benin – Chiefs Gaius Obaseki and Humphrey Omo-Osagie.

Tafawa Balewa

At about this time, midwesterners barely took note of a new northern organization called the Jamiyya Mutanen Arewa, which was founded in May 1948. It would later evolve into the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC), a political party under the leadership of Tafawa Balewa, that was destined to play a critical role in the creation of the Midwest region after independence.

Anyway, having been forced to accept the Iyase situation, on October 16th, 1948, Oba Akenzua II addressed the inauguration of what was known as the “Reformed Benin Community”, formed by Chief Humphrey Omo-Osagie in Benin: He said, inter alia: “The aims and ideals of this new political body seem very laudable and there is no doubt that it will help develop usefully like its counterparts, the Egbe Omo Oduduwa of the Yorubas, the Federal Union of the Ibos and so on….In the scheme of things, all Benins should strive for a state or principality of Benin in the new Nigeria in the making…I believe Nigeria expects each of her states to do or mind its own business, though all states have one common business to perform, that is work together in order to achieve in a short time independence for a United States of Nigeria...I sincerely hope that the day will come when there will be a larger body to be known as the Federal Union of the Central or South West Provinces in which the Edo, Urhobo, Itsekiri, Ishan, Ora, Ivbiosakon, Sobe, Igbanke and so on will be principal members of the union…." [SOURCE: National Archives of Nigeria, Ibadan; File BP2647. Reformed Benin Community. ]. “This nationalistic vision of Oba Akenzua II for an independent and autonomous PAN-EDOID NATION is what is now known as GREAT BENIN KINGDOM and MUST be actualized with a REFERENDUM of Self Determination in this 21st century – Editor.” Meanwhile, the new Iyase of Benin, Gaius Obaseki, was waxing stronger, exploiting his unique concentration of powers. Jacob Egharevba wrote: “As a result of various differences, ill-feeling grew up between the Oba and the Iyase.” Professor Igbafe was more direct: “Like Cardinal Wolsey of Tudor England, Gaius Obaseki concentrated power in his own hands with ruthless efficiency and an uncompromising vindictiveness against known opponents…The Ogboni began to indulge in excesses. Gaius embarked on a vigorous membership drive. Those who held out were persecuted.” The result of this over-concentration of power in the hands of a single individual and the excessive exercise of that power vis-à-vis the Oba’s loss of prestige, stipend and power, produced an inevitable but opposite and equal reaction. There was bitterness against the Ogboni, which now began to dominate the councils and to infiltrate all walks of life in Benin. Progressive young men found the Ogboni influence a social menace and unacceptable to their way of thinking. Possibly the Iyase’s position in the council and in the Ogboni gave excessive political importance to this cult. Having struggled to place a “literate young Iyase” in a position of

power in order to “deflate” the Oba’s palace autocracy, the people found that the Ogboni cult was now too powerful and sinister for their comfort.” [Igbafe: op. cit.] At the Warri and Benin provincial conferences of 1949, all Edo-speaking people (including Urhobo) supported calls for a Midwest State [Files BP/2328, BP/2678/1, BP/742; WP/569/1 National Archives, Ibadan]. During this period opinion among leaders from Asaba division was predominantly in support of consolidation with the Eastern region or creation of a western Igbo province within the Western region. Asaba, western Ijaw, and an Itsekiri faction all opposed creation of the Midwest. When Benin and Warri delegates in favor of creation of the Midwest region attempted to raise the issue at the Western regional conference on Constitutional reform that year, they were prevented from doing so. Therefore, with Oba Akenzua in the lead, they walked out. Back in Benin, the fear and resentment of the Ogboni was amplified the suspicion that it was some sort of mechanism for the Yoruba infiltration and control of Benin society [Abiodun Aloba: It is a choice between Ogboni and Benin. Daily Times, October 1st, 1951, p8]. This later became the template for a popular uprising. Many who had tormented Oba Akenzua in the difficult days of the 1930s and early forties became royalist. The “Reformed Benin Community” noted above, later evolved, first to “Otu-Adolo” and then to “Otu-Edo” on March 15th 1950, specifically, according to J. Osadolo Edomwonyi, to “counter the excesses of the ill-motivated activities of the so-called Taxpayers Association cum Ogboni.” [Edomwonyi, op. cit] After a crack-down by Obaseki against local demonstrations, a delegation of leaders led by E. O. Imafidon was sent to Lagos to invite Humphrey Omo-Osagie back to Benin from a meeting in Lagos, to lead the Otu-Edo. The new party was dedicated to the “development of Benin and the unification of all Edo-speaking peoples of Nigeria.” In its constitution it also said it would promote “a sense of nationalism among the people of Benin” and combat threats to “the structures of our laws and custom” and “national unity.” [Orobosa Oronsaye: Cultural Organisation and Political Development – The case of the Otu-Edo. University of Ibadan, Department of History, June 1977.] It was in this context that the Otu-Edo party was formed in a crisis atmosphere, to support the Oba in his fight against the Taxpayers Association under Iyase Gaius Obaseki at the local level while mobilizing support for the Midwest State Movement at the provincial level. [Otu-Edo Union, File No.

1170/1 National Archives, Ibadan]. Gauis Obaseki emerged as the Vice President of Action Group for Benin Province, S.O. Ighodaro, as Treasurer, Anthony Enahoro as Assistant Secretary, while Arthur Prest and W. E. Mowarin emerged as Vice Presidents from the Warri province. However, Benin Action Group delegates, like D.N. Oronsaye, C. N. Ekwuyasi, S. O. Ighodaro, and others, who were not members of the Reformed Ogboni Fraternity, opposed Gaius Obaseki’s election at Owo. When they returned, the Benin Action Group dissociated themselves from Chief Awolowo’s Action group and later allied themselves with H Omo-Osagie’s Otu-Edo party in what was known as Otu-Edo/Benin Action Group Grand Alliance. Iyase Obaseki, now Vice President for the Awolowo Action group, moved immediately, some say ruthlessly, to consolidate his hold on Benin division [Oronsaye. Op. cit.]. The stage was set, therefore, for a bitterly fought council election, which took place in December 1951. The period preceding it was associated with waves of violence, including arson and murder, in an uprising against the Awolowo Action Group/Benin Taxpayers Association/Ogboni known locally as “Airen Egbe Ason”, meaning “people do not recognize each other at night”. Beginning in July, but with its high point on September 6th, it was allegedly triggered by actions of two members of the “Ogboni Action group”, namely Iyare and Obazee, at Evbowe in Isi district. [File 1818/6/B National Archives, Ibadan] Farmers who opposed the Ogboni were allegedly mobilized and concentrated at Eguaholor from where they proceeded to burn down the houses of leaders of the Ogboni in villages all over Isi district. The epidemic breakdown of law and order necessitated massive mobilization of Policemen to many parts of rural Benin province [File B.D. 1818/7. Benin Situation Report. National Archives, Ibadan]. Many were detained, subsequently charged to court, fined and even jailed. GCM Onyiuke, Charles Idigbe, and Mr. S. O. Ighodaro, then the Secretary of the Benin Action group, comprised the legal team hired by Otu-Edo to defend its members. Nevertheless, after the mayhem, with the Ogboni infrastructure broken in the rural areas, Otu-Edo, under Humphrey Omo-Osagie, with the Oba as its patron, came to power in Benin in 1952. Oba Akenzua had to preside over the residual bitterness that accompanied the recruitment drive for ROF, followed by the “Uprising of 1951” in Benin division. It tore families and communities apart. However, with no justification intended for the violence, had Chief Humphrey Omo-Osagie not come to power that year to align the “new elite” with the “traditional leadership”, the

15

subsequent unified role of Benin as the “heartland” of the agitation for the creation of the Midwest may never have seen the light. When the Western House of Assembly opened in January 1952, 21 out of 24 Midwesterners were allied with the NCNC while three – S.O. Ighodaro, Arthur Prest, and Anthony Enahoro - were allied with the Action Group. One immediate source of irritation was the government’s official pamphlet, which insensitively described the Parliamentary Mace with four ceremonial swords as representing the authority of Yoruba Chiefs. To aggravate matters, when the unicameral Western House of Assembly was formally declared open by then Lt. Governor Sir Hugo Marshall, the Alake of Abeokuta, rose to speak immediately after Sir Marshall and said: “On my right sits the Oni of Ife; On my left, the Leader of our Government, Obafemi Awolowo. The Voice of the West is complete.” [Hansard of Western House of Assembly: January 7, 1952]. In other words, as the delegates from Benin and Delta saw it, the “voice of the West” did not include those of the people of Benin and Delta provinces. To compound matters, Benin and Delta delegates later complained too about derogatory epithets that had allegedly been hurled at them, such as “KoboKobo”, used to refer to persons (or barbarians) whose diction cannot be understood. [File BP/2328/1 National Archives, Ibadan]. From this point on, the Oba of Benin, Akenzua II, supported by the Benin and Warri (Delta) legislative delegation, began openly touring Benin and other Divisions of Benin province as well as the Delta province to campaign for the Midwest (Central) region. According to Professor Michael Crowder: “In the Western region, as a reaction against the allegedly Yoruba-dominated Action Group, the Mid-West State movement was started, supported largely by non-Yoruba-speaking peoples and in particular the people of the old Benin Empire.” [M Crowder: The Story of Nigeria. 3rd Edition, 1972. Faber] One of the criticisms of the Western region government was the alleged decision to spend 225,000 pounds in Awolowo’s home province of Ijebu with a population of 383,000, as compared with 169,000 pounds in the Benin province with a population of 624,000. Subsequently, a subgroup known as the Committee of the Midwest Organization emerged under R.O. Odita. Before the end of 1952 another significant event occurred. It was the decision of the Action Group government based in Ibadan to restore the title of the ‘Olu of Itsekiri’ to ‘Olu of Warri’ as it had been known in previous centuries. Non-Itsekiris in Warri Province reacted violently, concerned that there was an implication of suzerainty

over the whole province. Thus a compromise was reached. In exchange for acceptance of the designation of the Olu as ‘Olu of Warri’, the province was renamed ‘Delta province’. [personal papers, Alfred O. Rewane]. In spite of this compromise, the experience soured the relationship between many Urhobo leaders of thought and the Action group leadership, which they felt, had been beholden to a powerful Itsekiri lobby. It served to drive Urhobos, already so inclined, further into the warm embrace of the Midwest Separatist Movement. Back in Benin, another one of the many clashes between H. Omo-Osagie and Gaius Obaseki was playing out. In 1953, Otu-Edo got Iyase Obaseki deposed as Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Benin Divisional Council allegedly for not attending meetings. His Orderly and Police escorts were withdrawn and monthly salaries stopped [Oronsaye, Op. Cit.]. However, the Oba did not cooperate in the ATTEMPT to strip him of his title as Iyase, allegedly for not performing the rites of the office. Thus Obaseki retained his title as Iyase – although he never really performed the formal traditional ceremonies of acceptance of the title in the first place. Nevertheless, the embarrassed British colonial authorities REMOVED the Resident in Benin province, Mr. H. Butcher for his compromising role he played during and after the controversial “Iyase of Benin” affair of 1948. In his address, Oba Akenzua II said, among other things that Midwesterners were seeking freedom, “not only from the white man, but also from foreign african nations…” He went on to state that, “Benin-Delta was a sovereign nation before the occupation of the country by the British.” Akenzua also said, “The divide and rule policy of the British Government had done much harm to the national solidarity of Benin-Delta Province in the past but as God now wants things to be what they were before the advent of the British Government, that is, the Yoruba State for the Yorubas and Benin-Delta State for the “BENDELITES”, that is, the inhabitants of the Benin-Delta Province, steps should now be taken without further delay or fear to move the British Government to repair the damage they have done by restoring the national status of Benin-Delta Province before they transfer power back to the Nigerians from whom they have taken it.” In 1954, Obafemi Awolowo became Premier of the Western region under the 1954 Constitution that created the Federation of Nigeria. At the same time Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh of Warri, representing the NCNC, became the Regional Minister of Labour and Welfare.

Festus Okotie-Eboh

The Action Group had in the meantime conceptualized a plan to seize political control of Benin by co-opting the Oba and destroying Chief H Omo-Osagie. According to testimony from Dr. Obas. J. Ebohon, “My father was the personal driver of Chief Omo-Osagie through out his political career and what both himself and B2 went through before, during, and after the creation of Mid-West is unimaginable and sometimes better than some of 007 epic films. My father once told me that the journeys to and from the Western House of Assembly in Ibadan was the type of journeys one makes to and from the battle field. Firstly, they never exceeded four people and they travelled by Bedford Lorry instead of a car to which his status demanded. The reason for this was security as his life was threatened openly by those enraged by his demands for Mid-West State. He said on approaching Ore, they would disembark and B2 would come out of the comfortable second row and climb into the back of the Bedford lorry and be covered with trampoline and that is where he would remain through the numerous roadblocks put out to hunt him down and, that is how he would remain until they arrive Ibadan. Sometimes, for the need to confuse his detractors, he would be hidden in lorries carrying plantain to Ibadan and guess where he would be sitting - buried among the plantain and that is how he remains until the outskirts of Ibadan and be transferred into the Bedford lorry again. On numerous occasions they escaped death with the skin of his teeth. My father indicated that when they are travelling, it usually was like preparing for a funeral at B2's house and those of his entourage and the worst is expected and, when they return unharmed, it was jubilation.” (Source: OJ Ebohon. Edo-Nation Egroup, July 5, 2002. RE: [Edo-Nation] The Last Edo Political Titan: Chief Humphrey Omo-Osagie)” Therefore, on June 14th, 1955, a legislator, M.S Sowole, moved a motion, seconded by JG Ako, a minister of state, which was carried in the Western House of Assembly titled “Creation of a Separate State for Benin and Delta Provinces.” Chief Awolowo’s curious reaction to this development on the floor of the House was to announce that “the Government adopts no official attitude whatsoever” towards the Sowole motion [Western House of Assembly Debates, 14 June, 1955].

Dennis Osadebay, for example, was of the opinion that the Sowole motion was little more than a vote catching gimmick to secure victory at the 1955 and 1956 general elections [Osadebay, Op. Cit.]. In time to come his suspicions would be confirmed when, after independence, Chief Awolowo openly said that the Sowole motion was not binding on the Western region.

Dennis Osadebay

In February 1956, Oba Akenzua hosted the Queen at the Benin Airport and made a point of emphasizing the uniqueness of the grand Benin-Delta reception. Suddenly and tragically, Iyase Gaius Obaseki died in April 1956, and was mourned by his supporters throughout the region as a man of great stature. [Egharevba, Op. Cit.] Meanwhile, Barrister SO Ighodaro had taken over the Ministry of Midwest Affairs from Anthony Enahoro, when the latter elected to go federal, having lost out to SLA Akintola who returned to the West to succeed Awolowo as the Premier. The 1960 constitution specified that for a referendum to take place seeking to establish support for a new region, two-thirds majority must approve it in the Federal House of Representatives and Senate, followed by majority approval in two-thirds of regions. Recognizing the key role which the governing party in the federal government in Lagos would have in initiating any legislative move toward the creation of the Midwest, Festus Okotie-Eboh and his mentor, Humphrey Omo-Osagie, were busy lobbying northern leaders. Eventually Festus Okotie-Eboh almost single handedly got Alhaji Muhammadu Ribadu and Alhaji Ahmadu Bello of the NPC to agree in principle to make an exception for the Midwest based on its unique history, knowing they were generally opposed to States creation. Without this crucial achievement on the part of Chief Okotie-Eboh, the creation of the Midwest would have been dead in the water. It was in recognition of this strategic feat that Festus Okotie-Eboh was given a chieftaincy title in Benin, the Elaba of Uselu. Chief Humphrey Omo-Osagie, the indefatigable fighter with whom Oba Akenzua II had had his ups and downs but whose firm resolve and loyalty to his people had stood the test of time, was conferred with the title of Iyase of Benin. [Egharevba, Op. Cit.]

(The Action Group Western region government, however, refused to confirm both titles until 1962 when there was an emergency administration in office at Ibadan). Finally on September 22nd, 1962 Chief Awolowo and many others were arrested for an apparent plot to overthrow the government of Prime Minister Balewa. Chief Anthony Enahoro initially escaped into exile in Ireland but was extradited back to Nigeria in May 1963 to stand trial. With the two “chief antagonists” of the Midwest Referendum Agenda completely and conveniently taken out of the game, namely “Gaius Obaseki” who suddenly died in 1956 and four years later “Obafemi Awolowo” was incarcerated in 1962, the Midwest Region struggle of Oba Akenzua II simply put, was FAIT ACCOMPLI! Thereafter, Oba Akenzua II resumed his tours of the Midwest to garner support for the “Yes” vote. He was quoted as saying; “Whoever does not drop his or her ballot paper into the WHITE ballot box will be condemned by future generations. Even those who die before the plebiscite takes place will be condemned in the other world, if they die with the bad intention of voting against or persuading people to vote against the creation of a Midwest Region / Bendel State.”

Midwest Region / Bendel State The creation of Midwest / Bendel / Edo & Delta States as they say is now history. While the Political Traitors like Gaius Obaseki fought bitterly to betray the noble cause, the Political Patriots like Humphery Omo-Osagie who fought ferociously to establish it. Today history is repeating itself, in EDO 2016 with the “Political Traitors” of Benin pitched against the “Political Patriots” of Benin in an epic power tussle in Edo State just as it was in the crisis of 1951 between the Ogboni and Owegbe Societies. Thus the Midwest Region of Bendel State was created on the 9th of August, 1963 after a REFERENDUM was conducted with an overwhelming majority YES VOTE of over 90%

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16

ARTICLE FOURTEEN:

GODWIN OBASEKI

CONDEMNS

OBA OVONRANMWEN

British Invasion: The Bini Rejected Obaseki’s Advice

By: Osemwengie Ben Ogbemudia from: The Nation, Newspaper January 04, 2016

Godwin Obaseki

A governorship aspirant of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Edo State, Godwin Obaseki, has said the Bini indigenes of the state suffered humiliation in the hands of British colonialists in 1887 when they failed to listened to the advice of his grandfather, Chief Agho Obaseki.

Obaseki recalled that when the British entered Benin Kingdom and attempted to do business with the Bini, his grandfather advised the then Oba of Benin, Oba Ovonranmwen Nogbaisi, to sign a treaty with the foreigners. He regretted that the Bini did not heed his advice. According to him, the result was Britain’s invasion of Benin Kingdom and the looting of its treasure.

Obaseki, who is also the chairman of the Edo State Economic Team, spoke yesterday in Benin, the state capital, when he hosted some of his relatives. The politician said he was ready to add economic value to Edo State. On why two Obasekis were seeking the governorship ticket of All Progressive Congress (APC) in this year’s governorship election, Obaseki said there was nothing wrong with the aspiration.

He added: “The Obaseki family is the largest in Benin Kingdom; even more Obasekis can join the race for the party’s ticket.”

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ARTICLE FIFTEEN:

OGHIAN OBA, OGHIAN

EDO - ENEMY OF OBA

IS ENEMY OF EDO!

Otu-Odoledo Rejoinder to Godwin Obaseki’s Press Release: British invasion- ‘The Bini rejected Obaseki’s advice’

OTU-ODOLEDO trado-cultural group categorically states that the recent Godwin Obaseki condemnation of our Great

Warrior Oba, Ovonramwen N’gbaisi‘s valiant act of defending his kingdom and people to the last in 1897, against Britain, a foreign colonial ggressor whose primary purpose was to enslave, exploit, impoverish and destroy the Benin people and civilization (as the time and tide of events has now proven), to be most despicable, disgusting and disparaging. For one who claims to be a Benin indigene, and desires to govern the Benin people, it is absolute unacceptable to make such comments against his Benin monarch and people. Except of course he is not a PATRIOT OF BENIN (OSIOBA), BUT A TRAITOR OF BENIN (OGHIAN OBA).

It is on record that the “Traitors of Benin” in their desperation to usurp the political power of Benin like their treacherous forebears, have now turned around to say that their forebears did the Benin people an unrequited FAVOR during their regency, and that their family has six chieftaincy titles bestowed upon them to cap it all up as a mark of their loyalty to the Oba. Let us analyze the historical facts of the hallmarks of their so-called achievements if they are PATRIOTIC ACTS or TREACHEROUS ACTS to the Oba as stated below:

1) It is an undeniable fact in history in 1897, that Agho Obaseki betrayed the Oba and Benin kingdom to the British, which they still deny instead of honorably accepting their guilt and openly plead for forgiveness. Since when did Benin Kingdom ever face military defeat in war? Since the days of Obaseki the Traitors of Benin!

2) It is an undeniable fact in history in 1914, that Agho Obaseki tried by every means possible to usurp the “Stool” of the Oba of Benin from the Crown Prince with the aid of Mr. James Watt the Colonial Resident.

3) It is an undeniable fact in history in 1914, that Agho Obaseki was forced upon Oba Eweka II to become the Iyase of Benin by the British colonial government.

4) It is an undeniable fact in history in 1948, that Gaius Obaseki the ninth son of Agho Obaseki born of the daughter of the Oba was also forced upon Oba Akenzua II by the British Colonial Resident Mr. H. Butcher, to become the Iyase of Benin like his father Agho Obaseki.

5) It is an undeniable fact in history in 1950, that Gaius Obaseki acting as the Chairman of the Benin Native council and leader of the Benin Taxapayers Association ruling party “slashed” the salary of Oba Akenzua by half in a bid to demote the Oba for opposing him and his colonial government policies against the Benin people.

6) It is an undeniable fact in history in 1951 that Gaius

Obaseki who was by virtue of his mother being the daughter of the Oba, was related to Oba Akenzua, yet he still had the guts to decree by virtue of the colonial authority vested on him, that the Oba had no right to confer chieftaincy on any one in Benin Kingdom, except with the express permission of the British colonial government he was put in charge of. Ostensibly because Oba Akenzua II refused to perform the traditional rites of the Iyase Title on him for obvious reasons.

7) It is an undeniable fact in history in 1952 until his untimely death in 1956, that Gaius Obaseki was assiduously working at the federal level as the honorable representative of the Benin District, to sabotage the Midwest Referendum for the creation of the Mid West Region / State. Because as usual, he was the “only” one the British colonialists saw and selected to represent Benin District at the national assembly.

8) It is an undeniable fact in the history of post colonial Nigeria, that it is only among the Obaseki family members that they have been appointed as a Justice of the Supreme Court (JSC), the Chairman of the Nigerian Football Federation (NFF), the Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) and so on. Since when did only one family have such monopoly of lucrative federal or national appointments in Edo State or other states for that matter, which we believe is heavily influenced by the British in appreciation and recognition of the loyal and faithful service of their grand father, Agho Obaseki for his betrayal of the king and kingdom of Benin? Since the days of Obaseki the Traitors of Benin!

This question must be asked? WHY IS IT THAT IT IS ONLY THE OBASEKI FAMILY THAT CAN BOAST OF SO MUCH AGGRESSIVE ANTAGONISM AGAINST THE OBA IN THE LAST ±100 YEARS?

Now that they want to scheme their way back into government house again, they turn around and openly claim that they have always been LOYAL to the Oba and people of Benin. A LOYALTY UNTO TREASON.

God forbid, especially as this same Godwin Obaseki, had the temerity and audacity to publicly say to the press inter alia: “Benin people suffered humiliation in the hands of British colonialists in 1897 because they failed to listen to the advice of his grandfather, Chief Agho Obaseki. That when the British entered Benin Kingdom and attempted to do ‘business’ with Benin people, his grandfather advised the then Oba of Benin, Oba Ovonramwen N’gbaisi, to sign a treaty with the foreigners but the Bini did not heed his advice, and the result was Britain’s invasion of Benin Kingdom and the looting of its treasure.” He added that : “The Obaseki family is the largest

family in Benin Kingdom; even more Obasekis can join the race for the party’s ticket.”

Is this the comment of a loyal subject of the Oba, who is insinuating that Oba Ovonranmwen should have signed away his own kingdom and people to the foreign Queen Victoria to become the colonial slaves of the British “Business Exploitation of Africa”. like the King of Ashanti, Jaja of Opobo and Nana of Itsekhiri before him. Most definitely not! Perhaps he should go sign away his wife and kids to a strange man to become the husband and father of his own family, before coming out to condemn our Oba for not doing the same thing. As they practice what you preach!

In Yoruba land, the Yoruba people would have long BANISHED such a family of traitors from their land; and in Igbo land such traitor family would be ostracized as OUTCASTS; let’s not mention what the Hausa people would have done to such a family of traitors as that would rather be best imagined instead of mentioned here.

We declare as fundamental, fiery and fanatic Benin born, Benin bred, Benin men in response to this is an insensitive, inciting and spiteful speech against the Oba of Benin and Indigenes of Benin by the enemy within and TROJAN HORSE called Godwin Obaseki. Who also falsely claimed that his so-called Obaseki Family is the “largest family” in Benin Kingdom when it is evident to all that the Royal Family is indeed undisputedly the largest Family in Benin Kingdom. This is his bid to secretly subvert with subterfuge the traditional authority, esteem and ruler-ship of the Royal Family of the Oba of Benin like his father and grandfather did before him.

Which is now playing out in such a crass disrespectful and despiteful manner in the same government house he is hoping that we the Benins will “supposedly” elect him into on polling day. How on earth he and his Grand-godfather Comrade decided to allow the election to be postponed to coincide with the Coronation Week of the Oba of Benin is a mystery the Benins are still trying to decipher, decode and decrypt. That these so-called “Edo indigenes” do not regard the Edo monarchy and people to such an extent where the governor of the state under pressure from his deputy over the matter is reported to be more concerned with how to win the Edo state election, and not the Edo tradition”. We the Edos will surely tell this “Anti-Edo Tradition” comrade that our primary concern is how to sweep him and his “Anti-Edo” Party of Traitors out of our “Tradition & Culture rich Edo State with our Benin majority vote on election day, even if they postpone it to October 1st to coincide with Independence Day. Which of course they would never have done because, they regard our

Nigerian constitution, while disregarding our Edo Tradition.

It is unimaginable and unthinkable for any incumbent northern governor to allow the schedule of a gubernatorial election to coincide with the “coronation” of the Sultan Sokoto. Neither will a Yoruba governor ever dare to commit such a sacrilegious act against the “coronation” of the Ooni of Ife. Even if INEC insists on that day, such a governor will not permit it to happen, because he would simply be committing “political suicide” for disrespecting and disregarding their tradition, due to the backlash from the loyal subjects of these traditional rulers.

Yet this insensitive comrade sees nothing wrong in perpetrating such acts against the Oba of Benin who seats on the stool of the greatest imperial monarchy and longest royal dynasty in Black African history, that has spawned so many traditional rulers, kings and kingdoms in West Africa, all the way from Calabar to Ghana and beyond. Our Great Obas and Ancestors (Enikaro) will be prevail on every true patriotic Benin man and woman to vote against the TRAITOR OF BENIN – OGHIAN OBA!.

As far as the Benin people concerned, in Benin Kingdom Custom & Tradition, the Oba of Benin is SUPERIOR to every human being on earth including the president or governor or king or whoever else. As it has always been in our Benin Tradition and Custom, from time immemorial dating as far back as over 2000 years ago, and nothing on earth will or can change that. Because as we say in the Edo language: Oba Edo, Edo Oba! Meaning, Oba is Edo and Edo is Oba for both are inseparably bound in an intrinsically spiritual bond.

We can see that the very first act of government done in favor of this proposed Godwin Obaseki and Phillip Shaibu treacherous combination is already yielding the counterproductive result of clashing with the traditional interest of the Oba of Benin, just as the aforementioned previous treacherous combination of Agho Obaseki and James Phillips that clashed with Oba Ovonranmwen and resulted in the invasion of 1897. Wherein a certain Benin Chief called OBASEKI, working with a certain British Consul called PHILLIP connived to overrun Benin and exile Oba Ovonrawen to Calabar.

We vividly recall that in 1897 it was Captain James PHILLIP secretly aided by Chief Agho OBASEKI that invaded the Benin Empire to dethrone our revered Oba Ovonramen. In 2016 the COMRADE has brought back the same combination of OBASEKI and PHILIP for Governor and Deputy Governor. The democratic way to stop the repeat of that unfortunate history is to VOTE THEM OUT OF EDO LAND!

OGHIAN OBA, OGHIAN EDO!