Oxford curator: give bronzes back to Benin
Professor says museums are not doing enough by contextualising artefacts looted by British troops
BRITAIN must return the Benin Bronzes to Africa instead of just putting new labels on the artefacts and moving them around galleries, a University of Oxford museum curator has said.
Dan Hicks, a contemporary archaeology professor, says ongoing dialogue on the restitution of objects looted from African countries must “give way to action”. The curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum, which holds the university’s Benin Bronzes collection, has traced the estimated 10,000 objects taken from Benin City in 1897 for a book.
In an online article for The Telegraph, Prof Hicks says: “Facing up to violent histories, it’s time to do more than just shuffle objects around the galleries, or rewrite the labels, or use objects merely to point a virtuous finger at the history of the empire yet again. We must start by returning the Benin Bronzes.”
His comments will be seen by many as criticism of the British museums and cultural institutions that amended their displays to showcase the colonial history and provenance of artefacts in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. In September, the British Museum, which has a collection Benin Bronzes, said it will not remove controversial objects from display, but will “contextualise” them instead.
The Pitt Rivers Museum said it holds 145 objects looted from Benin. Some are on loan from private collectors, but many are owned by the university.
Prof Hicks said the museum plans to audit scores of acts of dispossession from multiple African countries, but it is unclear if these will be returned to their home continent. The process would require the Royal Court of Benin to make a claim to the board of visitors, who are responsible for the museum.
Any decision must then be approved by the University Council, the university’s executive governing body.
Dr Laura Van Broekhoven, director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, said the university has agreed procedures for the return of cultural objects. “As a member of the Benin Dialogue Group since 2018, the Pitt Rivers Museum has been working closely with the Court of Benin for several years and these discussions are still ongoing,” she said.
Last year, the Royal Court of Benin successfully claimed for the return of a looted Benin bronze cockerel from Jesus College, Cambridge.
Earlier this year, Bristol Museum said it was open to sending a cast bronze bust back after hearing Prince Edun Akenzua, of the Royal Court of Benin, call for its return in an episode of the BBC’S Inside Out West. The prince said the sculptures “were not originally made as museum objects.”
Some have argued that African museums are insufficiently resourced to care for their own cultural treasures, and that they are safer in the UK, but prof Hicks said that with the new Royal Museum in Benin City “the case for return has never been stronger”.
The Benin Bronzes are a group of sculptures that include plaques, commemorative heads, animal and human figures, items of royal regalia, and personal ornaments. They were taken by British troops during reprisals for the killing of nine of their countrymen in a trade dispute between London and the Benin monarch.
Gen Augustus Pitt Rivers, the museum’s founder, owned the “single most significant collection” of Benin art, 267 objects, although these were largely auctioned off to private collectors.