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“Let’s go. Let’s go. We’re casting,” Nosa says, grabbing three bronze works from the top of a log. He has just started to explain an important aspect of the art of bronze casting, a craft the 56-year-old has been engaged in for decades. That will have to wait. I pick up the last of the busts and follow him.

We cross the famous Igun Street, lined lengthwise in brownish-red paving stones. Just as I pace up to him, I’m curious to know which one of the kings I’m holding. “Oh, that’s Oba Ehengbuda—he was a very great native doctor in his time.” Crossing the street, we reach where three men, dressed in their work clothes and sweating from the afternoon heat, are piling freshly axed firewood into a wide but shallow semi-circular crater of clay. As they do that one of them rakes out the waste from a previous casting session.

With practiced care they lay in the next batch of jobs (which look like giant groundnuts, except that they are the colour of clay) with a four-foot tool. While this goes on Nosa joins me on the bench. “Can I take some photographs?” I ask, expecting nothing but a nod.

“You may have to pay,” he says, looking me in the eyes. “You know, this is not my own casting. It’s theirs and they will expect something if you want to do anything like that.” Like how much? “We charge five thousand naira, depending.” The other men worked on, adding more wood, scrap tyre and then Kerosine.

It is not unusual for natives, especially craftspeople, to charge tokens for divulging trade secrets; the thinking seem to be that whoever is asking (or video-recording) will make their money from end users. Even so, I couldn’t pay so much—not when all I need are a couple of shots, and answers to some questions. So I start to negotiate.

It becomes a conversation for both our ears only. A short while later we reach a bargain. “Okay, let’s go to my office. There you can ask me anything you want to know—I’ll tell you. Feel free.” Before we leave he poses beside the clay-and-wood collection. “Snap me, snap me,” he says, making it appear like it was routine. I take notice of his clothes for the first time: A pair of bathroom slippers and white T-shirt over faded jeans torn at the knees.

Back in his shop a young man in Navy blue top is adding final touches of red earth to a female figurine. He gets up a little later and positions the marshy figure in the sun. “There are about ten to eleven stages to bronze casting,” Nosa begins, seating down. “That is the first stage—the core.” He points to a collection of clay figures arranged on the table. Filing, he adds, comes last.

What happens is: the core is put aside to dry, after which it is doused with a coat of candle wax, which determines the thickness of the bronze to be used on any material. With the wax on, artisans carve out facial and bodily features—and where necessary, ornaments—with a rod.

Nosa reaches under the table and produces two waxed samples. “We now look for another red earth to cover this. That will take both the positive and the negative impressions. After that we now fix up the runners, which will extract the wax.” This is put aside for a few days so that the various features can set. How long depends on the season of the year but normally two or three days. With the wax out, the space it occupied is now free for the liquid Bronze metal (placed in a crucible surrounded with charcoal and preheated in a furnace for five to six hours, sometimes at 1000 degrees).

A re-enforcement wire holds everything together firmly. Thereafter, handling must be with great care—in the same way one would handle a newborn baby—to prevent either a distortion of the forms or, more severe, breakage before casting. “In those days we used bellows—it was a strenuous job. So we invented the new apparatus ourselves. It’s quicker with the help of battery.”

He is an eldest son and proud to be sustaining a heritage. His father taught him most of what he knows; he began learning the basics from when he was age 20. We move on to the shop, an airy gallery of bronze statues, almost all of them images of earlier kings—and royal women. To say the truth, they look like one person to me. “No they are not one king,” Nosa says as we view the collection to the left. “If you look at the way they dress, there are about three or four Obas here—there is Oba Ovonramwen, Oba Esigie, Oba Ozolua and so on like that.”

Everything on display, he confirms, is in very high demand (depending on dealer and size, prices range from eight pounds for the smallest works to as high as 800 pounds or more for the larger types). To get an idea of what a monarch looked like in his time, just about every member of the Guild of bronze casters goes to the palace, less than half an hour’s walk from Igun Street, to check archived materials (“In Benin we call it Ama”).

And today, shops fed full with all sorts of bronze and wood works line either side of the Igun.

Three, four centuries ago the kings decided what the casters worked on—plaques and body ornaments. They also gave permission to anyone who wore the bronze so produced. When the British soldiers pounced on the kingdom in 1897, there were literally thousands on ground, a good number of which ended up in the invaders’ country. And when Nigeria hosted the first Black Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977, the federal authorities picked on a commemorative bronze plaque (of Queen Idia) to be the choice emblem.

The clay soil in the area (Edo State, Southwest) is very well suited to the ancient craft. Nosa recalls that he had in the past attempted to work with clays from other cities like Abuja and Lagos, but they proved unsuitable. “Our red earth is starchy. It’s flexible and easy to manipulate,” he says in a tone tinged with passion and pride. “God knows what he is doing. He just gave this clay to us.”

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