‘If it dies, it’s on you’: Saving Nigeria’s Benin bronze casting

Igun is changing. New trading plazas rise beside squatting bungalows. Tiled roofs overlook rusted zinc sheets. Smoothly plastered concrete walls stand alongside old clay structures. Across the street, the quiet concentration of art stores competes with music drifting from nearby bars.

Etinosa and Omoruyi Otasowie, both in their 30s and among the guild’s youngest members, see themselves as custodians of both tradition and change. Otasowie’s path into bronze casting was anything but planned.

One day, his father invited him for a chat. “I am travelling. I leave this business in your care. If it dies, it’s on you,” his father told him before migrating to Europe. That was how he inherited the family shop, with no interest and experience except reluctantly serving as an occasional translator between his father and foreign buyers. The other connection: the memories of watching his uncles and grandfather working in their forge.

Today, he believes survival depends on adaptation.

Instead of hawking the bronzes to markets across major cities and countries within Africa as their fathers did, Etinosa and Otasowie are turning to Facebook, WhatsApp, TikTok, and websites to reach new customers around the world.

They are building digital galleries while teaching older guild members how to market their work on the internet. These digital stores are ways of pushing their brands to the borderless global internet market of millions of art lovers. “The markets have changed,” says Otasowie.

Diversification has become part of his strategy, too. Otasowie’s store now stocks plaques, paintings, fibre, beads and wooden carvings alongside the bronze works. “All is a means to survive. Diversified art to survive,” he said.

The changes extend beyond marketing. Modern moulds have shortened production times. Iron pots have replaced some of the fragile clay vessels once used in metal casting.

“There are a lot of changes that are making the work easier. In the past, the stress was too much,” Otasowie said. “I have a lot of ideas that I will inject into this work to make it easier.”

The raw materials used in Benin bronze works have evolved over centuries. From manillas, a metal ring used as money in 16th-century West Africa, to old spoons and today’s mix of copper, tin and other metals. The cost of raw materials is surging, artisans say, as a result of inflation. A kilogramme of brass, sold for 500 naira (0.36) five years ago, now trades for close to 8,000 ($5.83), slowing profits and patronage.

“If you are not a lover of art, you cannot be a part of the bronze casters. If you want to be in it just for the business’s sake, you will enjoy it,” he said. “To survive this craft, you have to think beyond the money. Art is not all about money.”

Against these odds, both men have become success stories in their own unique ways. Etinosa began with less than a dollar but has gradually grown his assets to nearly $1,000. Otasowie turned what he describes as the scanty shelf of his father’s shop into a rich gallery of art collections while building a growing online presence.

Yet, both insist that the greatest rewards of the craft cannot be measured in money. It’s the patience, discipline, creative thinking, and self-mastery that the craft has developed in them. The Igun bronze casters are reformers of mind, character, worldview and vision, they say. When Otasowie signed up as a craftsman, for example, he was a man of short patience. Today, in his words and manners, he exudes calmness.

Sitting on the balcony beside his workshop, he reflects on what decades of bronze casting have taught him. Motorcycles occasionally rattle through the stillness below.

“Being into this bronze practice shapes your mind. It moulded me into who I should have become. The art speaks through you,” Otasowie says. “I was this kind of person who doesn’t like to slow down. But the flow of the art is helping me internalise patience. Only God knows why he gifted humans art.”

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