The Battle for the Benin Bronzes
Benin City’s looted bronzes are coming home — but the British Museum hasn’t got the memo, writes
In the Edo language, spoken in Benin City, southwestern Nigeria, the phrase sa-e-y-ama means two things: to make a bronze cast of a motif and to remember. Moulded metal is the medium of the Edo imagination. In centuries past, to cast an image in bronze or brass was to render power — divine, political, visionary — in material form.
In his brilliant book on the Benin bronzes Loot, Barnaby Phillips reports on the flourishing guild of bronze casters in Benin City, who work today on Igun Street, where their precolonial forebears worked, using the same lost-wax technique.
But today’s Igun Street bronzes lack the visionary refinement of classical Edo art. They are tailored for tourists, not for gods.
And the casters’ prodigious output cannot fill the gaping hole in the heart of Benin City — the absence of 4000 masterpieces looted by conquering British troops in 1897. Most of them remain scattered in museums across the Western world.
Patrick Oronsaye, a Benin City artist, mentioned to Phillips an Edo saying dating back to the fall of the city: Ébò rhìa ótò, rhìa úkhùnmwù kèvbè èmwí hìa rá. “The British man has spoilt the earth and he has spoilt the skies — he has ruined everything.”
This is the shadow of “Britannia rules the waves”, the epic toll of British violence against all the nations it subjugated. That shadow still lurks within the huge walls of the British Museum, where the largest collection of Benin bronzes — about 900 objects — is kept. The museum took in the pick of the haul within months of the city’s sacking.
Now, there is intense pressure to give these treasures back. Every other week, a major museum announces it will be repatriating its Benin holdings to Nigeria.
But the British Museum is holding out, citing a 1963 law which bars it from “disposing of, or de-accessioning, any part of its collection, with a few limited exceptions”. As critics have noted, one cannot imagine such a musty law being held up as an excuse not to return artworks that were looted by the Nazis.
On its website, the museum’s official position is this: “The Museum is committed to active engagement with Nigerian institutions concerning the Benin bronzes, including pursuing and supporting new initiatives developed in collaboration with Nigerian partners and colleagues.
“This includes full participation in the Benin Dialogue Group and working towards the aim of facilitating a new permanent display of Benin works of art in Benin City, to include works from the British Museum’s collections.”
In other words, the museum can envisage a scenario in which some of its Benin collection can be housed in Benin City on permanent loan. But as for actually, unequivocally, giving it back?
No comment, which means “no”.
The Benin kingdom emerged around 1 000 years ago. By the 16th century, it was a flourishing urban civilisation, when Olfert Dapper, an Amsterdam doctor, described the Oba — ruler — of Benin’s palace, reporting eyewitness accounts of Dutch travellers to the Edo capital.
“The king’s palace or court is a square, easily as large as the town of Haarlem and entirely surrounded by a remarkable wall, like that which encircles the town.
“It is divided into many magnificent palaces, houses, and apartments of the courtiers and comprises beautiful and long square galleries, about as large as the Exchange at Amsterdam, but one larger than another, resting on wooden pillars, from top to bottom covered with cast copper, on which are engraved the pictures of their war exploits and battles.”
The earth walls of Benin City were connected to hundreds of circular walls around nearby settlements and stretched five times longer than the Great Wall of China, by one estimate. At its height, the Oba dominated 600km of coastline.
There were ebbs and flows in Edo glory; spells of internecine strife brought economic decline in the 1600s and again in the late 1800s.
Even at the best of times, this was no utopia. Slavery was a part of Edo life long before the transatlantic trade and continued right up until its sacking, decades after the British banned it. Slaves and captives were sacrificed in Benin City, either as a funeral rite for nobles or as placatory offerings to the god of death, Ogiuwu.
Many scholars believe these killings were rare but spiked in times of disorder or vulnerability. In the days before the 1897 raid, Benin’s rulers sensed the coming attack and resorted to a wave of sacrifices in desperate pursuit of divine protection. Lurid reports of these in Britain served as retroactive justification for the conquest.
But it wasn’t human sacrifice that doomed Benin City, it was palm oil, or the lack thereof. British industry needed vast quantities of the oil as a lubricant for factory machines.
In 1892, the crown sent diplomat Henry Gallwey to Benin City, who pressed the new oba, Ovonramwen, into giving British traders exclusive rights in Edo territory. The language barrier meant the contract wasn’t clear to Ovonramwen, who kept asking, “Is it peace or war?” to which Gallwey answered, “Peace.”
Five years later, the oba was still blocking palm kernel exports. An unarmed colonial delegation, led by a hothead called Captain James Phillips, marched towards Benin City to demand compliance. A delegation of Edo chiefs met them at a satellite town, urging them to stop. They refused, only to be ambushed and massacred by Edo troops. Only two of eight British officers escaped, and dozens of their Itsekiri carriers were killed or captured.
For Ovonramwen, the Phillips incursion was an act of aggression, in keeping with the removals of nearby kings who hadn’t done the British queen’s bidding. He knew what it portended. Even so, the ambush surely hastened the end of a 1000-year-old polity.
Enter Harry Rawson, a portly admiral adept at obliterating coastal African kingdoms. Rawson led 1 500 troops on Benin City, armed with the brutal new Maxim machine gun, which rendered irrelevant the prowess of the Edo defenders. Thousands were probably killed. The Oba fled into the forest; defiant chiefs and warriors were executed.
Once the treasures of Benin had been looted, with most set aside for the Foreign Office, the city was burnt to the ground.
Gallwey described the aftermath in a letter to his superiors: “Their King removed, their fetish Chiefs executed, their Ju-ju broken, and their fetish places destroyed … and all-around evident signs of the white man’s rule — equity, justice, peace and security.”
It was French president Emmanuel Macron who broke ranks. This might be surprising, as Macron is big on French exceptionalism and geopolitical muscle, but he showed some progressive balls in 2018 in Burkina Faso, where he vowed France would return all stolen treasures to former colonies and commissioned a report on the details.
Written by Bénédicte Savoy of France and Felwine Sarr of Senegal, that report recommended all objects removed from Africa without consent and sent to France should be returned, if asked for.
As a first step, the Musée de Quai Branly in Paris, which holds the bulk of precolonial African treasures in France, announced the repatriation of its 26 Benin bronzes.
Since then, the new Quai Branly director, Emmanuel Kasarhérou, who is of indigenous Frenchpolynesian background, has attacked the Savoy-sarr report as “very militant”.
Kasarhérou said most of the Quai Branly’s artworks were legitimately bought, or received as gifts, before they left their countries of origin. Each object’s provenance should be investigated, he said .
This doesn’t wash with Professor Chika Okeke-agulu, Director of Princeton University’s African Studies Program, a leading activist for repatriation.
“If Kasarhérou were able to say the entire collection was acquired legally, that would be a great argument,” Okeke-agulu tells me. “But what does ‘most’ mean for a museum with tens of thousands of objects? It implies thousands of objects were stolen. So that argument is neither here nor there.”
Perhaps Macron’s leap was politically easier to make than the leap the British Museum is failing to make. The stakes are lower in France because a far smaller proportion of the African treasures in its museums were originally taken by military force than is the case in Britain.
The momentum of Macron’s move was boosted by the Black Lives
Matter movement of 2020, which compelled reflection about the West’s history of racist violence and its legacy in present-day injustices.
There is now near-consensus in the museum world that the bronzes must come home. British universities — Cambridge, Oxford and Aberdeen — have led the way by announcing the repatriation of their collections.
And, this year, five German museums together gave up their Benin holdings: 1130 objects. Such a vast collection could form the basis of a true restoration of the Benin legacy, on Nigerian soil.
Enter the governor of Edo state Godwin Obaseki, who is backing a compelling plan to reunite all the bronzes in Benin City. The proposed Edo Museum of West African Arts is overseen by a non-profit called the Legacy Restoration Trust, with the support of Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments.
Governor Obaseki has clout and a budget of $4-million has been raised for an archaeological project on the museum site. A magnificent building and precinct have been designed by the Ghanaian-british architect, David Adjaye (see sidebar).
Intriguingly, the British Museum is a partner in the Edo Museum project, with a view to loaning Benin bronzes to the new museum, possibly on a permanent basis.
The British Museum, it seems, sees this as an opportunity to resolve the ethical crisis surrounding its Benin holdings by physically, if not legally, transferring some or all of them to Nigeria. It would also offer a way to retain control of their collection by sharing expertise while imposing loan conditions.
A fairly important spanner in the Edo Museum works is the current Oba of Benin, Ewuare II. Last June, the traditional ruler demanded the federal government take custody of the 1 130 pieces from Germany.
He wanted them housed in a planned Benin Royal Museum within the oba’s palace and claimed the Legacy Restoration Trust had no right to take control of his royal legacy. The Oba’s power is ceremonial but his symbolic clout is all too real.
Since then, Obaseki and Ewuare seem to have patched up their differences — at least in public. But it remains unclear how the hoard will be divided between the two museums, if at all. Meanwhile, the 1130 bronzes remain in Germany.
For Okeke-agulu, the uncertainty over Nigeria’s plans is no excuse for Western museums to cling to their hoards.
“Frankly, the Nigerian debate about where to house these objects is no business of European or American museums.
“Imagine if you stole a car from your neighbours, and they were arguing, and you said, ‘Well, I can’t return the car, because they’re arguing.’ That’s what it sounds like.”
IN time, the German hoard will come home. But the British Museum’s 900 pieces are staying
put, and that means a showdown is looming. The Legacy Restoration Trust and Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments might be satisfied with long-term or permanent loan deals, but the zeitgeist might not.
The British Museum has form when it comes to hoarding ill-gotten treasures, ostensibly in the name of a mandate to universality. This, its directors argue, is a place where all civilisations are preserved, for a vast audience.
Okeke-agulu sees that claim as inseparable from imperialist logic.
“There’s an ideological gene, if you will, that continued from the ambitions of the imperial era to the ambitions of colonial museums in the post-colonial age. There is nothing universal about these museums other than that they once found a way to expropriate heritage from many other places, often by force of arms or subterfuge.”
However, some Nigerians do see the value in leaving the bronzes in a world capital, such as London, where their majesty is more visible to the world.
The Lagos-based writer Adewale Maja-pearce, writing in the London Review of Books last year, makes a case for moving the legal title of the treasures, if not the treasures themselves.
He questions the Nigerian state’s poor record on safeguarding heritage, while noting the British Museum has no moral right to keep
owning the bronzes. Maja-pearce cites how poorly Benin City is looking after its ancient walls, which are badly littered and neglected.
“I worry that, if people in Benin City are trampling the remains of a
heritage site under their feet, heritage in Nigeria doesn’t have the meaning some of its citizens would wish,” writes Maja-pearce.
“It is understandable to want back what was stolen but to do so while
neglecting what you still have suggests a sentimental exercise in the service of wounded pride. Meaning may be even harder to repatriate than the objects themselves.”
He could be right. But there is only
one way to find out — repatriate the objects.
This story was made possible by the
Guardians Project in partnership with the Adamela Trust.