Which African kingdom was famed for its bronze plaques, later looted by British forces in 1897?

Benin, in present-day Nigeria - and the objects are misnamed twice over. Most are brass rather than bronze, and the haul was not only plaques: heads, figures, carved ivory and regalia, several thousand pieces, taken when a British punitive expedition burned the city and exiled the oba.

The technical standard was the problem. They are lost-wax castings of a thinness European founders struggled to match, made by a guild working for the court for centuries, and they arrived in Europe at a moment when the prevailing view held that West Africa had produced nothing of the kind. The response was to invent a foreign origin - Portuguese influence, or some vanished Mediterranean people - a position that took decades to abandon and was never supported by anything.

Much of the loot was auctioned to defray the cost of the expedition, which is why the pieces are scattered across Europe and America rather than held in one place. Returns began in earnest in 2021: Germany transferred ownership of over a thousand objects, and several universities and smaller museums have followed. The British Museum holds the largest single group and is constrained by a law preventing it from giving things away, so its discussions are about loans.