Randa Abdelfattah
Appearances
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
it got so bad that the Oba would periodically shut down trade, frustrating the British. And so the British tried to fix this by proposing a treaty in 1892, which historians say... Undermined Benin sovereignty.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
In other words, the Oba would need British approval for dealing with anyone else. Yet, according to the British, the Oba signed this treaty, something historians like Wando Achebe call into question.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
The answer is still, to this day, unclear. But another perspective from historians is that the Oba only had one question on his mind as the British were trying to explain this treaty. Were they declaring peace or war? The British reassured the Oba that it was a peace treaty. And so the Oba might have signed the treaty in the hopes that it would quell tensions, that it might prevent an all-out war.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
By the late 1800s, the British Empire and the Benin Kingdom were on the brink of a conflict over control of key trading positions in West Africa. The British claimed that the Oba, or king, was violating a treaty they'd signed. The Oba, for his part, shut down trade whenever he felt the British were becoming a threat. Both sides were at an impasse.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
— Which meant his job was to oversee trade in West Africa on behalf of the British crown. He'd basically been raised to eventually have this kind of job.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
By his early 30s, James Phillips, like many other upper-class British bureaucrats, decided to pursue his fortunes overseas, working for the empire.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
By the way, this is Wando Achebe, a history professor at Michigan State University.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
And that propelling force would put Phillips in the center of a national scandal, a news story that would grip all of England in the late 1890s.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
But it wasn't just the lack of diversity among the students that felt alienating for Ore. It was everything she was surrounded by, the physical space itself.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
And he wrote the book. the Brutish Museums, which, among other things, tells the story of James Phillips and his crew, most of whom were African workers hired by the British.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Along the way, a royal agent of the Oba warned Phillips that any white man visiting the city would be killed.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Despite the warning, Philip's party continued working their way towards Benin City.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
They stopped at villages along the way to rest. In the afternoon, they were about 14 miles into their march when... Suddenly, a shot rang out a few yards behind us. Followed by rapid fire.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Over the next several weeks, some of the British press began running stories about what a horrible place Benin City was. They published disturbing accounts of human sacrifice and brutality.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Before we get started, we just wanted to let you know that this episode contains descriptions of human sacrifice. Now, on with the show.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
We should note here that there is historical evidence of human sacrifices being carried out at the royal court.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Ore went back and forth to classes and meals and activities, surrounded by these images of past school chancellors, donors, alumni. It just became part of the background. Maybe that's why, at first, she didn't notice the one object in the dining hall that would change the course of her life.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Benin City became known among many in England as the City of Blood.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
By February 1897, British forces sailed for Benin. Coming up, the battle for a kingdom begins.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Among the rubble in Benin City, the British forces found treasure beyond their wildest dreams.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
And over the next century, many of these artifacts, known collectively as Benin bronzes, ended up in museums.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
And others ended up in private collections and universities. Like the rooster statue that Ore Ogumbi first spotted in her college dining hall.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Until 2016, after Ore and her peers began organizing for it to be taken out of the dining hall and returned to Nigeria.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Ore and her classmates had done their research, and the college had even gotten a letter from the Nigerian government formally requesting the return of the rooster statue.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
But... nothing. And then, one day, sort of out of nowhere, the statue disappeared. But it wasn't clear what they were going to do with it. A spokesperson said at the time that the college and university would discuss and determine the best future for the Okoko, including the question of repatriation.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
But then, in 2019… Jesus College decided to return the statue. And a few years after that, Ore gets an email.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
All those years of fighting for the Benin Bronze to be returned to what Ore and her peers believed to be its rightful place was finally going to happen. It was going back to Nigeria.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
This is the video from the ceremony of Jesus College formally handing over the Benin bronze. The head of the college, the director of Nigeria's Commission for National Museums, and the younger brother of the sitting Oba are all in attendance. And center stage on a white pedestal is the rooster statue.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
And in the crowd were Ore and her fellow students watching what they had started six years earlier come to fruition.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Today, Benin is a country in West Africa. But Benin was also the name of a major kingdom that was located in what's now southern Nigeria as early as the 1200s, a civilization that produced incredible works of art, collectively known as Benin bronzes, like the metal rooster Ore was staring at in her dining hall.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
For institutions like the Smithsonian, the question of ownership and repatriation is a tricky process.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Thomas. She's the chief spokesperson at the Smithsonian Institution and was interviewed by NPR culture correspondent Chloe Veltman about how museums go about repatriation of artworks like the Benin bronzes.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
As for DeAdria's argument that descendants of slaves should have some form of ownership over the Benin bronzes, Linda declined to comment. Instead, she pointed us to the district court's decision where a judge ruled that DeAdria and the restitution study group lacked valid claims to challenge the Smithsonian's transfer of their Benin bronzes.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
But historian Wando Achebe does not agree with Deidre about where the Benin bronzes should be housed or who should really have control over them.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
For Diadrea, this is about more than just control over the bronzes.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
But it wouldn't take long for that feeling of embarrassment to turn into something else.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Irene Noguchi. Voice over work in this episode was also done by Aidan Crowe, Greg Hards, Felix Salmon, Jonathan Levin, Chris Springthorpe, and Ghislaine Cardin-Retti.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Volkl. This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
That rabbit hole would take Ore on a years-long journey to uncover how the rooster statue was looted, its journey to her college at Cambridge University, and the fight to return it to Nigeria.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
On this episode of ThruLine from NPR, the journey of the Cambridge Benin Bronze and the war over artifacts.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Located in what's now southern Nigeria, Benin City was the capital of a vast kingdom.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Wando says the Benin Kingdom's golden age was... Between the 15th and 19th centuries.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
And one of the kingdom's greatest feats was the walls that they built.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
The walls, which rivaled the length of the Great Wall of China, took hundreds of years to be built, requiring unfathomable hours of labor.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
These marvels are what greeted the first Europeans who came to Benin City in the 15th century.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
And the Benin kingdom's power and wealth would only increase as they started trading with Europeans. They would trade raw materials like pepper, ivory, and eventually rubber.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Firearms that help the kingdom conquer their neighbors and expand their territory.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
Like with any kingdom, there's almost always a dark side. The Benin Kingdom had long participated in the slave trade in West Africa. And when the Europeans arrived, the Benin Kingdom began selling them enslaved people too, making them a part of the transatlantic slave trade.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
In exchange for slaves, the Europeans would give the Benin kingdom... Brass manilas...
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
In 2015, she was in her first year at one of England's most prestigious universities.
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The Kingdom Behind Glass
starting with the Portuguese. And eventually, by the 1800s, the British became one of the primary trading partners with the Benin Kingdom.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
But there was still a big question about cruel and unusual.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
That comment came from William Smith, a representative from South Carolina.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
And then there was the most substantial comment from Samuel Livermore of New Hampshire.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
The Eighth Amendment was ratified in December of 1791. And for the next century, that was about it. Until the Supreme Court gave it another look. That's coming up.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
But there was something bigger buried in the Trope decision.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Here, the U.S. Supreme Court is committing to the idea that what we consider cruel and unusual not only does change, but that it should change, according to the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
But coming up... The political winds change.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
On January 17, 1972, attorneys argued three cases before the Supreme Court known as Furman v. Georgia. In all of them, Black men — two from Georgia, one from Texas — had been sentenced to death.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
When the Eighth Amendment was written, it didn't apply to Black people who were enslaved in the U.S. But a lot had changed. More amendments were passed, like the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery and the 14th Amendment that gave equal protection of the laws to all people in the U.S. And things were changing globally, too.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Cruel and unusual punishments. A term that was adopted from England and meant to protect the people from a tyrannical government. But what was cruel and unusual punishment?
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
And civil rights activists were paying attention.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
hundreds of people on death row were spared. All had their sentences reduced to life terms, and many of them were released on parole.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Nine justices, nine opinions. All of them suggested abolishing or limiting the death penalty in some way. But that also created confusion.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Two justices said the death penalty itself was unconstitutional. Another justice, William O. Douglas, said that any law that treats people unequally is unconstitutional.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
The court had also heard a death penalty case the year before. And in the end, many people believe the Furman decision came down to just two justices, Potter Stewart and Byron White, who changed their minds.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Still, the death penalty itself passed the evolving standards of decency test. The court noted that 35 states had enacted new laws providing for the death penalty, undercutting the argument that American society had outgrown it.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
And in recent years, advocates have argued for broadening our understanding of what's cruel and unusual even more, suggesting that things like solitary confinement qualify, forced labor or banning people from sleeping outside when they have nowhere else to go. Meanwhile, others have tried to enact harsher punishments for certain crimes.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
On the day of his execution, Wallace Wilkerson sat in a chair facing three guns about 30 feet away. He made a short speech and said he hoped God would forgive him. Then three concealed gunmen fired. He continued breathing for 27 minutes before being pronounced dead. almost 150 years later. The firing squad is still a legal way to execute someone in five states.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Support for the death penalty has been falling, according to Gallup polling. And there's still controversy around how it's applied. But a majority of Americans still favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder. And states are still passing laws that push the limits of the Eighth Amendment.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdelfattah.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Voiceover work in this episode was also done by David Katayama, Sarah Wyman, Anya Steinberg, and Devin Katayama.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. This episode was mixed by Jimmy Keeley. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes... Anya Mizani.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
The death penalty is still constitutional. But debates over what exactly is cruel and unusual are ongoing and wide-ranging.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
And I'm Randa Abdelfattah. On today's episode of ThruLine from NPR, the latest installment in our We the People series, where we look at the past, present, and future of amendments to the U.S. Constitution, why they were created, how they've been enforced, and why fights over their meaning continue to shape life in the United States.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
When the founders wrote the Eighth Amendment, they had a lot on their minds. They were building a completely new government. But they were also still very much influenced by continental Europe and by England. Because even there, things had been changing.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
England in the late 1600s, a century before the U.S. was founded.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
The king's own nephew, the Duke of Monmouth, a Protestant, wanted to overthrow him. So in the summer of 1685, he gathered a few thousand men It would be known as the Monmouth Rebellion. The rebels won a few small battles, but were ultimately defeated by the Royal Army.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
The Duke of Monmouth was led to the Tower of London, where he was executed. Then a series of trials began.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
The bloody assizes only added to the fear and hatred that many in England already had for King James II. And a few years later, he was overthrown in what's known today as the Glorious Revolution, in which the king's own men deserted him, leaving him to flee the country and die in exile. The seeds of democracy in England had been sown.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
The English Bill of Rights was established by Parliament, outlining civil rights and limiting the power of the monarchy. Included was language that would show up in the U.S. Bill of Rights more than 100 years later.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
A note before we get started. This episode includes descriptions and discussion of violent acts, including murder and execution.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
To separate themselves from the British and the monarchy, during the American Revolution, states started writing their own constitutions.
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We The People: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
It wasn't just Virginia. State after state adopted similar language around cruel and unusual punishment in their state constitutions.