The Making of 'Great Benin': Felix Norman Roth and Henry Ling Roth

The 1897 punitive expedition against Benin City was arguably one of the key events in the history of the British Empire and certainly pivotal in West African history. Ola Rotimi's tragic drama depicting the episode, 'Ovonramwen Nogbaisi (1974), is one of the best-known plays within Nigeria; there is also the pageant, 'Oba Ovonramwen' (1996), Emwinma Ogieriakhi's dramatisation of the fall of Benin. The story has been told variously by European as well as Nigerian historians (Egharevba 1960; Ryder 1969; Home 1982). This chapter, however, is concerned with the contribution to the historical and ethnographic record by Henry Ling Roth (1855-1925) and his brother Felix Norman Roth (1857-1921). They had a major influence upon late Victorian and early Edwardian British and European understandings of the history and culture of the Niger River peoples, the effect of which is subtly continuing. Felix worked with the Medical Service of the Niger Coast Protectorate, and took part in the sacking of Benin, while Henry was what we would now consider a 'salvage anthropologist', curator of the Bankfield Museum in Halifax (Yorkshire), and author (six years after the sacking) of an apparently exhaustive study of the traditional culture of Benin, which he wrongly believed to have been totally extinguished by the British invasion (HL Roth 1903[1968]).