The West Is Returning the Benin Bronzes. Should It?

The West Is Returning the Benin Bronzes. Should It? - The Atlantic

"The name given to the works—“the Benin bronzes”—attests to their significance. Very few of the pieces are made from bronze. Some are carved from ivory; most are cast in brass. But the two artistic traditions most admired in 19th-century Europe—those of classical Greece and Renaissance Italy—both favored bronze for their statuary. The misnaming mingles respect and condescension: It salutes the pieces’ greatness by misidentifying them to fit European preconceptions...

Even as Western museums hasten to disencumber themselves of their Nigerian holdings, the fate of the artworks returned to Nigeria has abruptly been plunged into uncertainty. ..

I reported on a three-way power struggle within Nigeria that would determine whether and where repatriated Benin artworks would be put on display. That internal power struggle has now been resolved, but not in the way hoped for by the Western museum community. We know who will control the objects that are returned to Nigeria. But we still don’t know what will ultimately become of the returned objects. It seems much less likely, now, that a proper museum for them will be built in Nigeria, or that the public will have much access to them in their land of origin...

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari completed his second term on May 29 of this year. Shortly before he exited office, Buhari issued a decree recognizing the current oba of Benin, Ewuare II—the direct heir of the former ruling family—as the owner of any Benin artworks returned to Nigeria. The oba can decide where the pieces will be displayed, or if they will be displayed at all. The president’s decree explicitly allowed the oba to keep returned pieces in his walled palace compound. The oba has no obligation to show them to anybody. There seems little to stop him from selling them if he wishes, although the Nigerian federal government can impose export controls. The art will be, in almost every sense, the oba’s private property.

President Buhari’s decision rejected the two rival claimants to the pieces. One was Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments, whose director had proposed in January 2022 a Benin museum in Abuja.

The other defeated claimant was the one in which most Western museums and governments had invested their hopes: a group planning to build a world-class museum in Benin City, the former capital of the Benin kingdom and now the capital of Edo State, one of Nigeria’s 36 federal states.

The independent museum project—formally known as the Edo Museum of West African Art—debuted to instant enthusiasm in 2020, heightened by the building design drawn by the British Ghanaian superstar architect David Adjaye. Adjaye’s previous accomplishments include the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C., whose facade pays homage to the metalworking traditions of West African cultures. (Earlier this month, Adjaye was removed from a number of his projects amid allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault, which he denies.)

Proponents imagined the Edo Museum as more than just a single building. They imagined a large cultural zone where students would study art and where archaeologists would excavate the elaborate walls and moats that had once surrounded the city. An independent board of trustees would ensure the proper management of the museum and the protection of its collection.

The independent museum was politically backed by the dynamic governor of Edo State, Godwin Obaseki, and headed by Phillip Ihenacho, a financier of African energy initiatives. The project responded to deep and long-standing doubts about Nigeria’s government-managed museums. When the country gained independence, in 1960, the British-created museum in Lagos was endowed with hundreds of important art pieces, including some 90 from Benin. More than half of them had been transferred from the collections of the British Museum. Over the next six decades, that collection would dwindle—by how much, nobody seems to know. I counted only about 20 Benin pieces on display during my two visits to the museum in 2021. The Lagos museum building has fallen into ruin, with only intermittent electricity and few visitors.

Benin artworks are both enormously valuable and easily portable. The public market for Benin art has dried up as ownership has become more uncertain. But the British journalist Barnaby Phillips reports that one famous head changed hands in a private sale in 2016 for almost $14 million. Important Benin pieces could easily fit inside a carry-on bag. Meanwhile, Nigerian cultural officials are poorly paid, their salaries sometimes falling months into arrears.

During an audience that he granted me in 2021, the oba of Benin spoke of creating a royal museum in Benin City. The pieces he recovered, he said, would be displayed in a site he selected and in a building he approved. But the oba has many obligations. He supports five wives and many children, maintains his palace in the center of Benin City, and employs a retinue of courtiers and staff. His grant from the state government is not large, and his personal resources are reputed to be not much larger.

Modern museums consume money, a lot of it. The Adjaye-designed museum in Washington, D.C., cost more than $500 million to build. The smaller Chinese-designed and -funded Museum of Black Civilizations, in Dakar, Senegal, cost at least $34 million. Operating costs for any secure, climate-controlled museum run in the millions. In a country where nearly two-thirds of the population live on less than $2 a day, ticket sales won’t do much to cover them.

The Obaseki-Ihenacho-Adjaye group had imagined raising construction funds from international donors and corporations seeking business in Nigeria. Their governance plans were designed to assure foreign funders that the money would be properly used.

Raising international funds for the oba’s concept of a family-owned museum, operating without international oversight, would, however, seem more challenging. The oba has mused about obtaining the necessary funds from the Nigerian government, but Buhari’s statement granting him the art said nothing about this. Buhari instead held the oba “responsible for management of all places” where the objects are kept. The Nigerian government spends almost all of its revenues servicing its immense public debt; state support for a museum owned and overseen by the oba seems unlikely.

But then, perhaps government funding will not be needed. The Benin artworks that are coming into the oba’s possession will make him a wealthy man. Could he sell some of the pieces—to private buyers or museums in, say, the Persian Gulf—to build and operate a private museum in Benin City or meet other needs? The director of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments says no: “The artifacts of course can’t be sold, because in Nigeria it’s forbidden to sell Nigerian antiquities.” But the commission has been outplayed by the oba at every turn of this game, and Nigerian export controls have seldom worked in reality as they are written on paper.

Even if the present oba—who has a strong sense of royal and religious vocation—does not sell, his heirs will someday inherit these assets and face claims and needs of their own. It’s possible that the returned Benin works, having left old homes in Europe, may touch down for only a relatively brief interval in Nigeria before proceeding to new homes elsewhere.

Even as the oba was enjoying his victory over the Obaseki-Ihenacho-Adjaye group and the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, another challenge to his claim was forming, and from an unexpected direction.

The ancient Benin kingdom got the brass for its art by trade. What it most lucratively traded was enslaved human beings. Deadria Farmer-Paellmann is a descendant of some of those enslaved human beings...

In law school, Farmer-Paellmann had studied the slave-selling history of the Benin monarchy. As technology became available to trace genetic ancestry, she researched her own enslaved origins. DNA testing indicated that some of her antecedents lived in areas controlled by the Benin kingdom at its apogee.

As the debate over the Benin artworks intensified, Farmer-Paellmann became progressively more outraged. If it was wrong for Aetna, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wachovia to retain wealth from insuring and financing slave trafficking, why was it right for a royal African family to regain wealth from selling slaves in the first place? The art of the Benin kingdom, Farmer-Paellmann contends, represents the proceeds of a crime against humanity. The oba should not profit from the part his ancestors played in the crime.

In December 2022, as director of the Restitution Study Group, Farmer-Paellmann brought suit in federal court to enjoin the Smithsonian from transferring the artworks...

She was preparing to leave for the Cannes Film Festival to present a film she had made about the slave-trade origins of the Benin artworks, They Belong to All of Us. “It feels like we are being sold all over again,” she wrote to me after we had spoken. “Western politicians and museum directors are grandstanding and preaching morality from the pulpit of decolonisation while completely ignoring that there are Black slave descendants in their own countries whose rights to these objects they have just waived without any thought or care. To be clear: it is not for them to waive our rights. It is not for them to make decisions without having engaged with the descendants of those who gave their lives so that these bronzes could be made.”

While there has never been serious doubt about the Benin kingdom’s complicity in slavery, the details are intensely debated by historians...

In the immediate aftermath of decolonization, many historians were eager to minimize the role of African ruling classes in the transatlantic slave trade. Open a book on the subject, and you will again and again encounter sentences, paragraphs, and whole chapters carefully written in the passive voice: captives without captors, sales without sellers...

The brass had originated in Europe. It had been shipped to Africa by Portuguese merchants to be exchanged with the kings of Benin for plantation-bound human beings.

Farmer-Paellmann argues that the objects resulting from this exchange should be accessible to the descendants of the people enslaved and sold, not only the descendants of the people who did the enslaving and the selling...

Some proponents of repatriation argue that whatever happens next to the Nigerian treasures is nobody’s business but Nigeria’s. The New York Times reporter Alex Marshall recently quoted a spokesperson for the Smithsonian: It was, the spokesperson said, “none of the Smithsonian’s business” what Nigeria did with the Benin pieces. Nigerians can “give them away, sell them, display them … In other words, they can do whatever they want.”

It’s an argument that resonates with many in the West, especially if they do not linger too long over it. It depends on reading “Nigeria” as a single entity, erasing individuality from the story. It’s not going to be “Nigeria” that makes the choice to sell or to display the Benin bronzes. It’s going to be one person and one family, who prevailed in a fierce political contest for control of art assets together worth hundreds of millions of dollars or more. Among those parties fighting for control of the objects, there were few true innocents...

I believe in Western museums and their purposes. I hope someday to see secure and accessible museums spread to places where they are sparse, sharing and swapping collections that each institution views as a trust for the common benefit of all people everywhere.

But there is something else my parents believed, and that may be the most fundamental issue of all here. They believed that African art is world art, fully as much as Chinese Ming vases or European medieval sculpture; that it deserves to be seen, studied, appreciated, and protected on equal terms. Art is often shaded by dark history. The Ming vase in a British museum may have been traded for opium. The medieval sculpture on view in New York may have been pillaged from a ruined monastery by Napoleon’s soldiers. Justice to the past is a strong imperative. But the future also has claims upon the present.

African art suffers from a unique vulnerability to nonartistic agendas—which puts the art at risk in ways that would never be tolerated with the art of China or Europe. In the name of reversing old wrongs, modern decision makers are in danger of committing grave new ones. The Nigerians of tomorrow will not thank us for dissipating their cultural patrimony today."

 

The left hate monarchy - but only if it's white.

Related:

Berlin’s Benin bronze return a ‘fiasco’ as artefacts vanish - "A group of the Benin bronzes that Germany handed back to Nigeria have vanished into a private collection instead of being exhibited in a museum as promised, prompting some observers to describe the restitution as a “fiasco”... Over the past two years various institutions have begun returning the sculptures to Nigeria, as western museums and nations become more open to the idea of giving back looted artefacts. Shortly before Christmas Annalena Baerbock and Claudia Roth, respectively the German foreign and culture ministers, travelled to Abuja, the Nigerian capital, to hand over 23 of the bronzes, on the understanding that they would be shown in a new museum. Germany has also formally transferred ownership of more than a thousand other treasures from Benin to the Nigerian state, although some will remain on loan and others will travel in exhibitions. At the time Baerbock said the bronzes were being returned to where they belong. Instead, the outgoing President Buhari of Nigeria has passed them on to Ewuare II, the Oba, or king, of Benin, who will now determine their fate. This has caused some observers in Germany to ask whether there was any point in restoring the bronzes in the first place. “What politicians thought of as the return of cultural heritage to the ‘Nigerian nation’ has instead turned into a present to a single royal family,” Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin, professor emerita of anthropology at Göttingen University, wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The British Museum and other institutions in London have so far resisted pressure to give up their Benin bronzes. They are likely to take note of this precedent."
Obviously the rest of the Benin Bronzes need to be returned, so Africans can benefit from them being locked up and/or seized, and colonialism was evil. All Africans are the same, so benefiting a Big Man helps all Africans. Contracts are a foreign, evil, white invention, so black people don't need to follow them

(previously posted on 30th November 2023 but moved to this one)
Nigeria Benin Bronzes: Buhari declaration 'blindsides' museum officials - "Nigeria's outgoing president has issued a declaration over the Benin Bronzes that could have significant consequences in the campaign for the return of these great cultural treasures... Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari made a decision which has caused a mixture of delight, concern and confusion.  His declaration of 23 March, made public last month, unequivocally recognises the Oba, or king, of Benin, Ewuare II, as the owner of the famous Benin Bronzes... The Nigerian president's declaration says any repatriated Bronzes must be "handed over to the Oba", who is "responsible for the management of all places" where they will be kept.  This could include the Oba's palace, or anywhere else he and Nigeria's government consider secure... Ewuare II has been given sweeping powers.  These appear to come at the expense of the Nigerian government's National Commission for Museums and Monuments, (NCMM), which has handled many of the negotiations over the return of colonial-looted artefacts... for the NCMM, supposedly in charge of the country's heritage and yet not even mentioned in the president's declaration, this has come as an unwelcome surprise.  "We were blindsided… this is not practical nor compatible with existing Nigerian law [and] it was written by someone who doesn't understand how museums work," one official said... Nigeria's contradictions and fragilities - its many ethnic groups were carelessly thrown together by the British in 1914 - are never far from the surface.  One of the NCMM's concerns is that President Buhari has, inadvertently, undermined the rationale for any national collection.  If the Oba's ownership of the Bronzes moves beyond the theoretical to the practical, does this not mean that every Nigerian traditional ruler or community is in charge of the treasures made by their ancestors?  The NCMM aims to build a Museum of National Unity in the capital, Abuja, which would, presumably, contain objects such as the Benin Bronzes. That ambition could be harder to achieve now.  Oba Ewuare II and his advisers are more focused on local politics... European museums, perhaps understandably, are confused.  The German government, which has taken the lead on the return of Benin Bronzes, says these are internal matters for Nigeria. But some diplomats are worried.  "We negotiated with the Nigerian government to return Bronzes to the NCMM, and signed contracts with the NCMM," says a key German official, "so who are we giving them to?""
If they go missing or are damaged, it will be the fault of white people for taking them in the first place

Addendum:

Where are Nigeria’s Benin Bronzes? - "Authorities in Nigeria have for years been demanding the repatriation of ‘Benin Bronzes’. But many of those they already had seem to have disappeared or been stolen"