Ramteen Arablui
speaker
199 appearances
7 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 13 Aug
Ramteen Arablui’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Hey there.
No problem.
So, you know we have to call her up.
Okay, awesome. First, how are you?
Cambridge is like the Harvard of England. Actually, it's much older. So I really should be saying that Harvard is like the Cambridge of the United States. It's this kind of old elite institution that for most of its history had a student body that came from England's upper classes, mostly male and mostly white. So when Ore arrived on campus, she felt out of place.
The thing she's talking about is a statue. A statue of a rooster, also known as the Okoko. That's at least 125 years old. A few months into her first year, a friend of hers told her where to look for it.
And underneath it was a plaque with a message written in Latin.
The origin story of this rooster is a tale of a clash between two major powers, one from Europe and one from West Africa. It's a tale of imperialism, betrayal, and the making of the modern world. And it will remind you that behind every artifact is a universe, a story that will change how you think about your own history.
And I'm Ramteen Arablui.
Manila is derived from the Portuguese word for bracelet. They often came in the shape of a horseshoe of various sizes, usually made of brass, bronze or copper. And they were used as slave trade currency throughout West Africa by European traders.
These manilas were used to fuel the kingdom's artistic traditions.
Sculptures like the rooster statue that Ore Ogumbi saw in the dining hall at Jesus College.
What Deidre now refers to as... Blood metal. Blood metal, meaning that the price for these works of art were the lives of enslaved West Africans sent into the abyss of the Middle Passage. And the principal purpose of creating these bronzes was in service of Benin Kingdom's royal family.
And at the center of the Benin royal family was the Oba.
The Benin Kingdom was ruled by a long line of Obas. They were like religious, political, and military leaders rolled into one. And for centuries, they enjoyed control over the trade routes in their kingdom. But all of this would begin to change when Europeans started making their way into the region's local economies and politics.
This was an era of massive industrial growth in Europe, especially in England. And so natural resources like rubber and palm oil were in high demand. And it turns out that many of those resources were in what's now southern Nigeria, the land the Oba ruled over. So throughout the 1800s, the British tried to insert themselves more and more into the rubber and palm oil trade.
It became a struggle over control of resources.
The Oba continued to exert control, even though the British claimed he was violating their treaty. This would set the stage for a confrontation, one that would change the course of West African history. Coming up, an unannounced guest.
This is from a letter James Phillips sent to the British Prime Minister in 1897, arguing that they should take action.
Basically, Phillips is like, look, if we want to efficiently extract resources like rubber and palm oil, things England needed to fuel its rapid industrial growth, we need to get the Benin kingdom's king, or Oba, out of the way.
Showing 41–60 of 199 · page 3 of 10
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