The Kingdom Behind Glass
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Okay, so several months back, one of ThruLine's producers, Lawrence Wu, came to a pitch meeting with this wild story. It was one of those pitches that immediately made all of us sit up in our seats and listen. It had layers that just kept getting deeper and deeper, and I don't want to ruin it for you, so obviously I will just say that it's about an object, a thing that just sat around on a shelf for decades, going pretty much unnoticed. But in 2015, that changed. And it changed because a first-year college student decided it needed to change.
Hi.
Hey there.
Sorry, give me a second.
No problem.
Sorry, I'm trying to untangle this headphones.
So, you know we have to call her up.
Okay, headphones on.
Okay, awesome. First, how are you?
I'm good, how are you?
Good. Her name is Ore Ogunbi.
I'm an Africa correspondent at The Economist, and I'm also a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge.
In 2015, she was in her first year at one of England's most prestigious universities.
I've lived between England and Nigeria my whole life. I was born in England, I moved to Nigeria when I was seven, and I've been back and forth between both countries ever since. And so university-wise, my dad always really wanted me to go to Cambridge. In his view, you know, the best place I could end up, which I understand why people see it that way.
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.
When I got there, it was not very diverse environment. So settling in in that first term was quite difficult because I just felt like I couldn't find people who I could relate with.
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.
You go to any college dining hall, you go to prestigious parts of the college, really historical parts of any college in Cambridge, and it's likely to be covered in paintings of old white men who have made some significant contribution to the culture. There's never going to be a black person on those walls.
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.
In the same way that there was art on the walls, there's things on shelves, there's a whole bunch of things kind of lying around, I didn't notice it. It felt very much like it was hiding in plain sight.
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.
But the second he drew my attention to it, obviously, I picked up on it the next time we went into the dining hall. It's not massive. It's not... too much bigger than your laptop. But it was sat on this shelf.
And underneath it was a plaque with a message written in Latin.
Which was basically, this art or this piece of art was bequeathed to the college by William Neville and was looted from Benin in the Punitive Expedition of 1897. Something to that effect.
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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Speakers
17 identified
Randa Abdelfattah 10 min
Ramteen Arablui 9 min
Wando Achebe 9 min
Sponsor Message 4 min
Ore Ogunbi 3 min
Dan Hicks 3 min
De'Adria Farmer-Pellman 2 min
Reginald Bacon 1 min
James Phillips 1 min
Naomi Kemp 1 min
British Officer 1 min
Linda Thomas 1 min
Email Reader
Narrator
Sunita
Jill McAfee
Historical Account