THE BRUTISH MUSEUMS
THE BENIN BRONZES, COLONIAL VIOLENCE AND CULTURAL RESTITUTION
DAN HICKS
Pluto Press, 298pp, £20
Dan Hicks makes a powerful argument for the repatriation of beautiful bronze and ivory artefacts stolen from the Nigerian kingdom of Benin by the Royal Navy in 1897. Hicks has first-hand experience of many Benin bronzes because he is a curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, which has 150 of them. In 1938, two coral crowns were returned to the Oba (king) of Benin but tens of thousands are still languishing in museum storage or unknown private collections. Hicks told the Art
Newspaper: ‘I wanted to interrogate the stories we tell ourselves, and those we don’t tell ourselves, about Britain’s role in the so-called Scramble for Africa.’
The Guardian’s Charlotte Lydia Riley praised a ‘beautifully written, carefully argued book’, pointing out that ‘museums are battlegrounds’ and the debate over repatriation urgently overdue in the age of calls to decolonise public culture. The argument that non-european museums haven’t the resources to care for their own treasures is overturned by Hicks who notes that, in Benin, artworks have been carefully looked after for decades. Shockingly, only 1 per cent of the African objects in UK museums are on display.
On the Al Jazeera website, Aditya Iyer observed that the Oba’s treasures represent a ‘royal, sacred landscape’ desecrated by invaders. And Richard Morrison in the Times welcomed news that an Edo museum is to be built in Benin, designed by the British-ghanaian architect David Adjaye. It intends to house the world’s largest collection of Benin bronzes, retrieved, it is hoped, from all over the world.