Tug of war awaits Benin bronzes after their return to Nigeria

THE Benin bronzes belong to our king and no one else, tribal elders have said, in a row over who will care for the artefacts when they are repatriated.

The universities of Oxford and Cambridge have pledged to return hundreds of bronzes, a collective term for artworks looted from the Kingdom of Benin – now part of Nigeria – but questions over their eventual ownership are stoking tensions in the country.

The country’s most senior tribal chiefs have warned that their king, or “Oba”, Ewuare II, right, is their rightful owner, dismissing alternative plans for the artworks once they have been returned.

The dispute over a permanent home for them has prompted concerns that their repatriation will become a “fiasco” in which there is “no certainty that they will be kept safe or accessible”.

The Nigerian government is poised to take control of collections, but Benin’s chiefs have insisted that the Oba alone must be allowed to decide what happens to his ancestors’ artworks.

Chief Sam Igbe, the “Isaye” or prime minister to the Oba, said: “They were taken from the palace, and they should return to the palace. We do not recognise any other place. They belong to the Oba and in the palace. It is that simple.”

Chief Stanley Omoregie Obamwonyi, a senior member of the Oba’s council, said: “The British took the artefacts from the Oba’s palace. They must be returned to the Oba’s palace.” But Lai Mohammed, Nigeria’s culture minister, has said the federal government owns the bronzes.

The bronzes were made for the rulers of Benin and kept at their palace in Benin City until 1897, when it was sacked by a British military expedition and the pieces looted and sold to museums around the world.

Oxford’s Pitt Rivers and Ashmolean museums are to hand over 97 objects, and Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology 116, pending the approval of the Charity Commission. London’s Horniman Museum will also hand over 72 Benin artefacts, to the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, which is handling Nigeria’s repatriation claims.

The NMCC has suggested no definitive location for them in Nigeria, which has limited museum capacity, so many may be loaned back to UK institutions. But in the modern-day Benin City many say the artefacts looted from Oba Ewuare II’S great-great grandfather, Ovonramwen, are a birthright that should be returned to him. Many people are more concerned about that than plans to display them in a museum.

A Benin Royal Museum under the control of the Oba has been suggested by the palace, but this is far from being built so, if the chiefs get their way, items that have long been on public display in the UK could remain out of sight in the royal compound.

Prof Robert Tombs, a Cambridge historian, criticised “virtue-signalling” museums and universities for handing back valuable objects without any certainty they would be kept safe or accessible. “This is a betrayal of their duty to the objects and to those who made them,” he said.

He added that as Benin was involved in the slave trade, handing over pieces to the ownership of its descendants was “morally and culturally outrageous”.