By Ellen Otzen
BBC World Service
Published 26 February 2015
At the end of the 19th Century British troops looted thousands of works of art from the Benin Empire – in modern-day Nigeria – and brought them home. One soldier’s grandson inherited two bronzes but recently returned them to their original home.
“It’s an image that’s deeply ingrained in my memory. The dead body seemed unreal. It’s not a picture you can easily forget,” says Mark Walker.
He was 12 years old when he first saw his grandfather’s diary – the photographs inside made a deep impression.
“They were very faded, but perhaps the most shocking one for me was a partly dried-up body being held up by two men on a pole.
“Clearly the people lifting the body didn’t actually want to touch it and that seemed to me to capture the feeling my grandfather also had about them. It was something so horrible you wanted to keep it at arm’s length,” says Mark.
The pictures were taken by his grandfather, Capt Herbert Walker, in West Africa in 1897.
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