American museum returns Benin bronzes to Nigeria
Several Benin bronzes that have been in Washington museums for decades are finally headed home to Nigeria — 125 years after British troops plundered them from present-day Nigeria, 62 years after Nigerian independence brought calls for their return, and two years after a nationwide reckoning with institutional racism gave renewed attention to those calls.
at a ceremony on Tuesday at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of african art, officials of the museum transferred ownership of 29 bronzes and the National Gallery of art handed over one to representatives of Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments. Nine will remain in Washington on long-term loan.
“The Smithsonian is humbled and quite honoured to play a small part by transferring ownership to helping to bring longdelayed justice, long-delayed visibility, long-delayed objects brought back to
Nigeria,” Smithsonian secretary lonnie G Bunch III said at the ceremony. “We realise as an institution that we are shared stewards of these collections. We are not owners.”
Bunch highlighted the Smithsonian’s new collection policy, which authorises repatriation of objects for ethical reasons — the first significant update to the 176-yearold institution’s collections management since 2001.
“We hope that today’s ceremony sets an example for all cultural institutions,” he said.
Ngaire Blankenberg, director of the National Museum of african art, which removed the Benin bronzes from view last fall, said the moment reflects a shift in the museum’s practices.
“This return sparks the beginning of a new era in our relationship with the royal court, with Nigeria and with africa and africans writ large,” she said, calling it “one of many steps” toward creating “more equal power dynamics concerning who owns and who interprets.”
lai Mohammed, Nigeria’s Minister of Information and Culture, praised the move.
“By returning the artefacts,” he said, “these institutions are together writing new pages in history.
Their brave decision to return the timeless artworks is worth emulating.”
The Benin bronzes have become an international symbol of the fraught, colonialist histories of Western cultural institutions — from Boston to Berlin. They are at the centre of a worldwide movement calling for the return of looted and dubiously acquired artefacts — the elgin marbles, the Gilgamesh tablet, the easter Island Moai statue and others — to their places of origin.
Tuesday’s ceremony echoed similar ones in europe in 2021, when Cambridge University and the Quai Branly museum gave up their bronzes. With this latest move, the high-profile Smithsonian — the largest museum system of its kind in the world — hopes to inspire other museums to follow suit.
Tuesday’s ceremony was just one step on a long, complicated journey — the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History still has 20 Benin bronzes, which have been placed under review, and the institution has many other objects with controversial origins, including thousands of human remains.
Bunch says there are no plans for a comprehensive review of the full collection of 155 million objects. Blankenberg said that her museum is working through a list of objects, but declined to give specifics.
Bunch said in an interview after the ceremony that he envisions the return encouraging international accountability.
“Benin bronzes” is a catchall term for a wide body of artefacts that date to at least the 16th Century.
It includes thousands of items made of different materials and depicting various subject matter — for example, commemorative busts of kings and animals from folklore. It is estimated that between 3 000 and 10 000 such objects were stolen by the British, many ransacked from the Kingdom of Benin (present-day Nigeria) in 1897 during a retaliatory, deadly British invasion now known as the “Punitive expedition”. The largest group of stolen works — about 900— remain in the British Museum.
a recent Washington Post review of 70 museums found that of the 56 that have Benin pieces, 16 are engaged in a repatriation process. Critics of the repatriation movement have questioned how far museums will go and raised concerns about the care of objects once returned.
Speaking at Tuesday’s ceremony on behalf of the oba (ruler) of the Kingdom of Benin, Prince aghatise erediauwa called such criticisms “archaic”.
“The truth is that no argument can change looted works into unlooted works or stolen works into unstolen works. There is simply no moral or legal basis for persistently retaining cultural property which was looted during military expeditions or in unequal negotiations, for that matter. This demand by a few art historians and curators serves no purpose other than their own self-interest,” he said. “We are grateful to you and others who are on the side of truth and acknowledge where these works truly belong.”
Blankenberg echoed this sentiment after the ceremony.
We are not the guardians of the world. Western museums are not the custodians of all things of the world,” she said. “There is so many false premises around the debate. People are like, ‘Oh, no, if you give everything back, there will be nothing in this museum’. Honestly, we have 12 000 (objects in our) collections. and if our whole museum is based on stolen objects, then frankly we shouldn’t exist.”
Blankenberg declined to comment on other museums’ progress in ethical collecting but said the process to return the artefacts was smooth.
“You don’t de-accession anything in a museum easily, nor should you. and the process is a pain. But there was no resistance or debate,” she said. “It’s the entire institution that is really committed to figuring out what the right thing is.”
The bronzes will head back to africa in the coming weeks. — Washington Post.