IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 247

The objects known today as the Benin Bronzes are a collection of several thousand sculptures, plaques and carvings made for the royal court of Benin, whose capital, Benin City, lies in what is now southern Nigeria. The name is in one respect misleading. Although a few pieces are cast in bronze, most are made of brass, an alloy of copper and zinc, and the rest range from carved ivory and wood to coral and woven fibre. What unites them is not their material but their origin: they were produced over several centuries for the Obas, or kings, of Benin, and they include some of the most accomplished metalwork ever made in Africa.

The Kingdom of Benin emerged around the thirteenth century and grew wealthy on trade in pepper, palm oil, ivory and, later, enslaved people. Its rulers commissioned art on a remarkable scale. The most celebrated works, the rectangular plaques that once decorated the palace, are generally dated to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and especially to the reign of Oba Esigie, who ruled in the early 1500s. They were made by members of a hereditary guild of brass casters, who worked in a quarter of the city set aside for them and passed their skills from father to son.

The technique they used was lost-wax casting. A model of the object was formed in wax, covered in clay and heated so that the wax ran out, leaving a mould into which molten metal could be poured. Because the mould was broken to release the finished piece, every casting was unique. The brass itself was largely imported: Portuguese traders, who first arrived in the kingdom in the 1480s, exchanged the metal in the form of manillas, the ring-shaped currency of the West African trade, and these were melted down and recast.

The plaques were fixed to the wooden pillars of the Oba's palace, where they formed a visual record of Benin's history. They show kings and chiefs in ceremonial dress, warriors, musicians, leopards and crocodiles and, in a number of panels, Portuguese soldiers and traders with long hair, beards and firearms. Commemorative heads of former Obas, cast in brass and placed on ancestral altars, served a similar purpose. To later historians these objects have proved unusually valuable, because Benin kept no written chronicles of the kind familiar in Europe; the plaques, together with the oral traditions preserved alongside them, are among the principal sources for the kingdom's past.

That past was interrupted abruptly. Through the second half of the nineteenth century the British, who traded along the coast, pressed Benin to open its markets and sign a treaty. Oba Ovonramwen resisted, and in January 1897 a party of British officials and traders set out for Benin City under a colonial officer, James Phillips, despite a message from the Oba asking them to delay their visit. The party was ambushed, and only two of its members are said to have escaped alive.

Britain responded with a punitive expedition. In February 1897 a force of more than a thousand soldiers and sailors under Admiral Sir Harry Rawson was landed on the coast, and on 18 February it entered Benin City, which was then set on fire. Ovonramwen was captured, deposed and exiled to Calabar, in the east of the country, where he died in 1914. His palace was destroyed and its contents removed.

The artworks were shipped to Britain and sold. Some were bought by the British Museum, which now holds roughly 900 of them, others by museums in Germany, Austria, Sweden and the United States, and many passed into private collections. The auctions, held in London in the months that followed, made the objects famous, and their presence in European museums shaped the study of African art for the next hundred years.

In recent decades the objects have become the focus of one of the most prominent arguments about cultural property. Nigeria has asked for their return since independence, and the Oba of Benin, Ewuare II, has supported those requests. Around 2010, representatives of museums in several European countries began meeting Nigerian officials as the Benin Dialogue Group to discuss loans and cooperation. In 2022 Germany and Nigeria signed an agreement transferring ownership of the German holdings, and the Horniman Museum in London and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington both announced that they were returning objects. The British Museum has discussed long-term loans but has not transferred ownership, partly because legislation restricts it from disposing of items in its collection.

Return, however, has raised questions of its own. Some Nigerians argue that objects should go back to the palace of the Oba, as the heir of the kingdom that made them, while others maintain that they belong to the Nigerian state and should be shown in a national museum. A new institution, the Edo Museum of West African Art, is planned for Benin City. Meanwhile, scientific work on the plaques continues, and analysis of the lead in the brass has suggested that much of the metal began as manillas manufactured in Germany, a finding that complicates any account of the objects as purely African or purely European in origin.

Krakatoa, or Krakatau, was a small volcanic island in the Sunda Strait, the stretch of water separating Java from Sumatra, in what was then the Dutch East Indies and is now Indonesia. It had been quiet for two centuries when, in May 1883, earthquakes and columns of steam began to be noticed by the few people living nearby. Activity increased through the northern summer. On the afternoon of 26 August a series of violent explosions began, and at 10.02 the following morning the climax came: the northern part of the island, weakened by the emptying of the magma chamber beneath it, collapsed into the sea. The eruption is rated 6 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, the scale used to compare the size of such events.

The explosions produced what is often described as the loudest sound in recorded history. It was heard on Rodrigues, an island in the Indian Ocean more than 4,000 kilometres to the west, and across much of Australia; on ships hundreds of kilometres away, sailors reported a noise like distant gunfire. Barometers in Europe and North America recorded the pressure wave as it travelled outward, and the wave was observed to pass around the globe several times. Ash fell on vessels far from the island, and rafts of floating pumice, some of them carrying trees, drifted in the Indian Ocean for months and became a hazard to shipping.

Close to the volcano the destruction was total. Pyroclastic flows — fast-moving clouds of hot gas and rock — swept across the strait, and the collapse of the island sent a series of tsunamis towards the coasts of Java and Sumatra. In places the waves reached heights of around 30 metres or more. More than 160 villages were destroyed, and the official Dutch figures put the death toll at over 36,000, the great majority of them killed by the water rather than by the eruption itself. The Dutch gunboat Berouw was carried inland by a wave and left stranded; her whole crew died.

Two features of the coastline made the waves unusually deadly. The most heavily populated districts lay on a low, flat coastal strip, with little high ground to reach in a hurry. There was also no warning system of any kind, and the first great wave arrived within minutes of the explosion that caused it. The wave was powerful enough to be detected thousands of kilometres away, where tide gauges on the other side of the world registered it as a rise of a few centimetres. Because Batavia, the colonial capital, was connected to the international telegraph network, reports of the disaster reached Singapore and then Europe within days.

The eruption also changed the weather. The sulphur it threw into the stratosphere formed tiny droplets of sulphuric acid, which reflected sunlight back into space, and average global temperatures fell by about half a degree Celsius in the following year before slowly recovering. Dust and droplets high in the atmosphere produced spectacular red and orange sunsets for months, seen in Europe, North America and Asia; in London, an amateur artist made several hundred colour sketches of the evening sky, and these were later used to trace how the veil of dust spread. The cooling was small but measurable, and it was one of the first volcanic effects on climate to be recognised as worldwide.

The event was investigated by the colonial authorities, who commissioned a detailed survey. The central figure was Rogier Verbeek, a Dutch mining engineer who had visited and mapped the island a few years before the eruption and who compiled the official report. Drawing on measurements of the ash fall, on ships' records and on the accounts of survivors, Verbeek reconstructed the sequence of the eruption and argued that the tsunamis had been caused by the collapse of the island rather than by the explosions alone. His report remains one of the foundations of volcanology, and much of what is now known about the eruption still rests on his measurements.

Not everything could be established at the time. Seismology was in its infancy, and no instrument stood close enough to record the eruption itself; the evidence came instead from barometers, tide gauges and eyewitnesses, each of which gave a partial picture. The theory that a whole volcanic cone could collapse into an emptied magma chamber was new and not universally accepted, and it was only with later eruptions elsewhere that the process became properly understood. The magnitude of the sound, too, was difficult to measure, and claims about it rested on how far away it had been heard.

The island itself was never rebuilt. Of the three peaks that had stood before 1883, only the southern remnant, Rakata, survived, and the sea filled much of the space between. In 1928 a new cone broke the surface of the water in the middle of the old caldera; it was named Anak Krakatau, 'child of Krakatoa', and it has grown steadily since. In December 2018 the flank of that young volcano slid into the sea, and the resulting tsunami struck the coasts of Java and Sumatra with almost no warning and killed several hundred people. The volcano is now monitored continuously, but the event was a reminder that the hazard had never gone away.

Every few years a review of the school curriculum reopens the same argument. On one side are those who believe that children should begin with the history that lies closest to them: the street, the town, the country. On the other are those who insist that young people need a world perspective from the outset, because the parish, the nation and the planet are now so entangled that to begin anywhere else is a form of deception. Both camps accuse the other of being parochial. In my view the question, as it is usually posed, is the wrong one, but each side deserves to be taken seriously.

The case for starting close to home is partly psychological. Children acquire a sense of historical time gradually, and it is easier to do so with things that can be seen and touched: a building they walk past every day, a gravestone carrying a familiar surname, a photograph of a grandparent. The local also makes possible a particular kind of lesson, in which pupils learn that history is a method of asking questions of evidence rather than a list of dates to be memorised. A class that spends a term working out who lived in a row of terraced houses learns more about historical method than one that recites the names of dynasties.

The opposite case begins from the fact of connection. Trade, migration, empire, disease and ideas have never respected borders, and a national history presented as a self-contained story distorts the past it describes. The industrial cities of northern England cannot be explained without the cotton that came from the Americas and the markets that took the finished cloth, and the same is true of most countries. There is an ethical argument as well: a curriculum that leaves children ignorant of the wider world ill prepares them for work and for citizenship, and it leaves crude stereotypes unexamined.

Yet both camps tend to assume that the local is simple and the global is complicated, an assumption that does not survive much contact with reality. A parish church may be built of stone brought from another country; a merchant's house may have been paid for by sugar grown on Caribbean plantations; a village war memorial lists men who died on the other side of the world. Taught well, the history of a single street turns out to be a history of trade routes, migration and conflict. The local is not an alternative to the global; it is one of the places where the global becomes visible.

The version of the past that causes most concern, however, is neither local nor global but national. It is at the national level that identity claims are made and that selection does most political work. A story that runs from an ancient charter of liberties to a modern welfare state, with imperial trade and colonial violence mentioned as a footnote, teaches a flattering narrative, and children are unlikely to notice the omissions. National history need not be triumphalist, but it is the level at which the temptation is greatest.

The opposite failure is just as common. A world history taught as a tour — a fortnight each on Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, China and the Maya — becomes a procession of unconnected wonders. Children remember the mummies and forget the chronology, and the deeper lesson, that societies solve similar problems in different ways, is lost. Depth and coverage pull against each other, and the survey course usually sacrifices the first to the second.

Behind the argument lies a shortage of time. History occupies a small part of the primary week, and primary teachers are generalists who may have studied no history since school themselves; a curriculum is therefore written as a sequence with a single starting point, because there is no room for two. It is worth noticing that in England the national curriculum for the youngest pupils already asks teachers to cover both events of national or global significance and significant people and places in the pupils' own locality, which suggests that the two need not be in competition.

What I would argue for is not a sequence but a set of scales used together. A topic should begin wherever there is good evidence and genuine interest — often, but not always, close to home — and should then be pushed outward by a question. A study of a local mill leads to the crops it processed, the workers who came from elsewhere and the markets that bought its cloth. By the end of compulsory schooling, a pupil should have a framework that includes the wider world, but a framework is built from cases, not from a hurried tour of everything.

The real question is what we want children to be able to do. I would say: to ask sensible questions of evidence, to recognise that people in other times and places were neither fools nor exotics, and to see their own community as one place among many. The local is the best place to learn the method; the world is the subject to which the method should be applied. I am not arguing that national history should be abandoned, only that it should be taught with its connections visible. The choice between local and world history is therefore false; the danger is not which scale we begin with, but whether we ever move.