The Bronze Caster of Benin City
A Novel of the 1897 Punitive Expedition

About this book:

In the quarter of Igun Eronmwon, the bellows breathe like a second heartbeat, coaxing copper and tin into the immortal faces of ancestors. Eseosa, master caster of the Oba's guild, shapes wax into history—court chiefs, queen mothers, leopards of royalty—while beyond the red earth walls, British consul James Phillips marches toward Benin City with six officers, a treaty, and a hunger no palm oil can satisfy. It is 1897. The Ague festival seals the palace in sacred silence. The white man does not wait for an invitation.

As warriors gather at the moats and the guild elders are ordered to melt their sacred bronzes into musket balls, Eseosa refuses. His furnace is not for killing; it is for remembering. Every plaque cast is a covenant with the dead that the kingdom existed, that it was beautiful, that it did not beg. But the guns at Ugbine fire many times in a single breath, and the red dust of Benin will soon drink blood and smoke. When the palace falls, the bronzes will be the only witnesses left standing.

*The Bronze Caster of Benin City* is a luminous act of literary restitution—a novel that does not merely recount the Punitive Expedition but inhabits the hands that made the art the world stole. With the tactile poetry of *Things Fall Apart* and the moral urgency of *Half of a Yellow Sun*, it asks what survives when empire comes for your memory: the fire, or the metal that endures it?