Pursuing a Thread: Benin Expedition

There is a long tradition of Sherlockian pastiche, stories not by Conan Doyle but using the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, or using characters who "stand in" for the famous pair. The most developed series of stories in the latter vein are August Derleth's Solar Pons stories. (Basil Copper continued the series after Derleth's death -- a pastiche of a pastiche?) I picked up The Chronicles of Solar Pons, a late volume in the series, with high expectations (and with some sense of state loyalty, since the prolific Derleth is one of Wisconsin's most celebrated authors), but found them disappointingly flavorless. The stories are set a generation after Holmes (and sometimes refer to him), but the Chronicles, at least, entirely lack the feel for an era and the rich atmosphere that distinguish Conan Doyle's writings. I think a linguistic analysis of the Pons tales would detect a poverty in the descriptive language as compared with the Holmes stories; the Pons tales are quite flat.

One Pons story caught my attention a bit more than the others. "The Adventure of the Benin Bronze" refers to an episode in African colonial history with which I was unfamiliar, the 1897 "Punitive Expedition" to the Kingdom of Benin (which was located within the modern nation of Nigeria, and is to not to be confused with the modern nation of Benin, formerly Dahomey, which is also in West Africa). The Punitive Expedition was a reaction to an ambush of a small British force (the "Phillips expedition") by defenders of the Kingdom of Benin who felt threatened by the impending "visit." This ambush left nine of eleven British officers dead (two escaped). The Philips expedition was a somewhat ambiguous effort; although clearly intended to make the King of Benin play the Britons' commercial game (or be replaced by those who would), it was launched without warrant from the home government and with manpower completely insufficient to force any sort of miltary conclusion. If, as some modern interpreters would have it, it was a genocidal power-grab, it was a fairly inept one; perhaps it is more fair to see it as reflective of the genocidal power-grab that was colonialism in general, but not really "out there" as a specimen of same. In any case, the deaths of the nine British officers ensured that the next steps by the colonizers would be more focused and horrible, and so they were. The Punitive Expedition captured the Kingdom of Benin, ousted its leaders, and established British supremacy.

In the wake of the Punitive Expedition, a mythology rapidly spread that the capital Benin City was a "city of blood" awash in human sacrifice. Derleth makes use of this lurid imagery in his Solar Pons story. Robert Home examines all the evidence in his excellent and fair-minded reconsideration, City of Blood Revisited (1982), and finds that there was certainly blood, from public executions of convicted criminals (there are photographs of "execution trees"), and there may have been some "human sacrifices" -- but this is hard to assess at this historical remove, and certainly not a phenomenon that British military were prepared to place in any sort of anthropological context.

Home's short book is a very compelling read that I might not have discovered were it not for Solar Pons (and my habit of pursuing a thread). Home is very good with the personalities involved, both English and African. There was no unanimity on the side of the Benin leadership as to how to deal with the British, and the British were not quite monolithic either. Home draws a sharp contrast between such as Ralph Moor, the head of the Niger protectorate who had little regard for the natives (and who later committed suicide after his career foundered), and others such as the more flexible Henry Gallwey, an Irishman who like others of his nationality had less emotional commitment to the racist imperatives of colonialism and therefore tended to "get on" with Africans much better.