Return of the Bronzes.

Ile–Ife is the oldest Yoruba city in the southwestern part of Nigeria, West Africa and Benin is known as perhaps its oldest Empire. Ife is the spiritual heartland of the Yoruba people and their countless descendants that spread across the world. The city of Ife and the Benin Empire are both very important to the historical and cultural heritage of the people of Nigeria. The city of Ile-Ife is very rich in artistic culture, dating as far back as 500 C.E., and the Benin Empire was one of the oldest Empires in western Africa before the British annexed it in 1897. Ife, as it is popularly called, is referred to as the source of creation; the name “Ile-Ife” literally translates as “place of dispersion.” It is the very place where the gods chose and settled to create the world and everything as we know it… or so its citizens say.

Ife, at the turn of the 8th century C.E., began to develop as an artistic center and by the 12th century C.E., its artists were creating spectacular sculptures out of bronze, stone and terracotta. However, the citizens of Ife have been robbed of the presence of these historic works of art in their homeland; today, they can be found largely in the British Museum. Was it the myth surrounding Ife and the Benin Empire that brought the British attention to its art and culture? Or was it just part of the British Empire’s seemingly insatiable need for acquisition of heritage to claim world culture as its own national and imperial heritage? The British Museum is known to be filled with artifacts of diverse cultures, many of which were not acquired by the most orthodox means. My essay explores the scholarship on the bronze heads and other Benin/Ife works of art, and whether these objects should be returned to their places of origin.

Firstly, both the origin and legitimacy of the Ife/Benin artifacts have been questioned. When one of the bronze heads known as the “Ori Olokun” was taken, western curators proclaimed that the head was so exquisitely done that the “indigenous” people of Ife could not have had the technological advancement to create that type of work; it could only have been created from an early contact with an European civilization, they speculated (Akbar, 2010). However, Charles Read, who was a British Museum curator of medieval art when the Benin bronzes were first exhibited, there was not a single piece that showed the influence of Europeans (Barken, 1997, p. 38). Although a large number of Benin ivory sculptures were ornamented with European designs, Read speculated that the Benin people must have made them for trading with the Portuguese who visited and lived along the West African coast. That was before the British’s punitive expedition of the Benin Empire.

Our study abroad class this semester has studied in depth the case of the Parthenon Marbles, and the questionable circumstances under which the British Museum acquired the marbles. We find the British in a similar situation with the Ife and Benin Bronzes. In “Who should have the Benin Heads?” Megan Sweet shares the history of how the British Empire came to acquire the Benin artifacts (Sweet, 2014). In 1892, the British Captain Gallway met with the Oba (ruler) of Benin with the hope of annexing the independent city of Benin under the control of the British Empire. The Oba, although skeptical, agreed to meet with the captain and agreed to sign a treaty written in English, a language he did not understand; apparently he was hoping that it was to create a friendship and trade agreement between the two empires. However, after finding out that the treaty was a ruse to make Benin a British protectorate, the Oba annulled the treaty, banning British officials from entering the city in the process. British Commissioner Ralph Moor declared the treaty still valid and decided to take control of the trade routes of Benin, forcefully, without the Oba’s permission. And seeing that the Benin people would not give up their kingdom easily and would protect it from the British invaders, Admiral Rawson, haven gotten the order form the British government, led British forces on an attack against the city, subdued it and looted its artifacts. It was during this siege of the city by the British that most of the Benin bronze heads and other Benin artifacts were taken.

Knowing how these artifacts were acquired, should they be returned? Sweet shares the opinion of the late Bernie Grant, a British politician and Member of Parliament who pointed out that the religious and cultural objects looted from Benin City during the expedition were “an act of appalling racism” (Sweet, 2014, para. 2). He stated that it is one of the most distasteful injustices of European colonization of Africa, and on that ground, he campaigned for the return of the bronzes to their rightful place. Grant is not the only one who feels that the Benin and Ife artifacts should be returned. Medeme Ovwe, a Nigerian writer, gives her opinion on why the artifacts should be returned as well (Ovwe, 2011). Although Britain invaded Benin in 1897, it never formally declared war on the city. Therefore, Ovwe claims, whatever may have been the rights of the victor in a war never applied to that situation. Ovwe points out that prior to the invasion of 1897, it had been accepted by many European states that cultural objects of enemies were to be protected in case of military conflict and left intact. Thus, carrying off the cultural objects of the Benin Empire was well against the established norm. Ovwe further points out that it was never allowed by the laws governing nations of the African continent that the cultural objects of one nation—whether in peace or war—be taken by another because the people of those nations are so intimately connected and deeply rooted with their cultural objects, it is widely believed that these objects cannot be simply transferred to another people as possessions (Ovwe, 2011, para. 14).

Moreover, for those who are not familiar with the Ife and Benin people or with Nigerians as a whole, culture and heritage are held in highest esteem. The Benin/Ife artifacts in question (copper or terracotta in some cases) are more than mere objects to them; they are history, records, and even items that represent spirituality and religion. For example, the copper head of Obalufon, the Oba of Ife, commemorates his reign, while the bronze head of Olokun, the sea god, was made to honor this important deity. This makes the sculptural heads of Obalufon and Olokun deeply significant objects celebrated in the festivals held in Nigeria. To keep these heads away from their rightful place among the Ife people is to withhold a very important part of their culture and heritage from them.

Cultural heritage is held in such high esteem that Nigerians are willing to fight and die for it. This is evident in a book written by Professor Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian playwright, poet and a Nobel Prize winner. In the book You Must Set Forth at Dawn, Soyinka narrates how he came about one of the bronze heads in Brazil (Ekenyerengazi, 2014). Soyinka explains that he became aware of the existence of the bronze head in 1978 in a private collection. Soyinka recalls, passionately, how he was driven by cultural duty and loyalty to his Nigerian heritage. With the knowledge of the Nigerian authorities, he mounted a raid with his group of friends to collect the object from the apartment where the head was located. This act, he states, was done in the spirit of cultural duty.

In many occasions, the British claim that the reason they hold onto many of the artifacts is because their places of origin do not have sufficient infrastructure to care for them. In the famous case on the Parthenon Marbles, the British have long claimed that the Greeks were not capable of safeguarding their marbles. Yet, that was before the Greek built the Acropolis Museums with a space created specifically to house them. Similarly, in the case of the Ife and Benin people, the Nigerian Museum of Art is one of the biggest collectors of Art in West Africa; however, the Ife and Benin artifacts remain in the British Museum. One of the more pressing arguments made in support of returning the Nigerian artifacts is the social and economic influence such a reunification will have not only on Ife and Benin but on West Africa as well. The article “Bronzed off” from The Economist (1997) shares that many museums around West Africa, especially those with small collections, argue that the Benin bronzes will help make visitors more aware of the historical African kingdom, as well as of British imperialism, and that the return of the objects would add more value to the collections already in Nigeria.

Nevertheless, there are those who share an opposing view to the Ife and Benin artifacts being returned. Thomas Sutcliffe asks the question, “How long do you have to posses a stolen object before you can keep it forever?” (Sutcliffe, 1997, para. 1). The instinctive reply, Sutcliffe answers, might be that even if there is a statute of limitation on a crime, no amount of time will legitimately transfer title to the proceeds. If this is true and it is acted upon, the author continues, “we are in big trouble.” He notes that once this “global migration” is done, it would only create a world compartmentalized into parochial cultures and artistic cleansing (Sutcliffe, 1997, para. 1). The author, shockingly, argues that the looting of the city of Benin is actually not an entirely bad thing, stating that if one takes a long view of these matters, a certain amount of theft may even be a good thing, allowing for a cross-pollination of national cultures. Sutcliffe asserts that in the British Museum, the Bronze heads are valuable because of their intrinsic artistic worth as opposed to if they were returned to Nigeria where they would simply serve to “reinforce a sense of Nigerian patriotic pride” (Sutcliffe, 1997, para. 4). In the patriotically homogeneous surrounds of a Nigerian museum, Sutcliffe claims, the virtues of the bronzes would be taken for granted. It is disappointing that the writer gives no credit to the people of Nigeria, presuming they could not also appreciate the artistic beauty of the bronzes too. Correspondingly, in “We Can’t Rewrite the Bloody History of the Benin Bronzes,” Tiffany Jenkins asserts that repatriating artifacts on the basis of what we feel about history would be a serious mistake. She argues that not only would the world’s museums be emptied, it would be allowing modern day sensibilities to rewrite history. According to Jenkins, looking back from today is a privileged and elevated position from which to view the past and one often distorted by current preoccupations. In the author’s view, repatriating artifacts, or pulling down statues in order to make amends for colonization, is a poor substitute for trying to reshape the modern world (Jenkins, 2016, para 13).

It is evident that people and countries that have suffered any kind of wrongdoings will seek reparation. The Jewish people sought it for the Holocaust, the Greeks seek it for the Parthenon Marble, and the Benin and Ife people of Nigeria are no different. But have the Nigerian people asked for reparation? In the article by Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann and Anthony P. Lombardo, “Framing Reparations Claims: Differences between the African and Jewish social movement for Reparations,” the authors address how the success of reparation depends to a large extent on how the claims for reparation are framed. The authors point out that the movement for reparation to Africa so far consists of only a few unaffiliated or loosely affiliated individuals and a very small network with no formal organization, which is not good enough for a social movement. Reparation claims, the authors state, are a kind of symbolic politics. To engage in symbolic politics, those involved must offer a new narrative that produces an emotional and moral resonance in the people from whom reparation is claimed. Advocates of reparation must be coherent in their claim for reparation and more importantly, they must determine for whom or what the reparation is being asked for. So, have the people of Nigeria sought reparation the right way?

In Art and Cultural Heritage: Law, Policy and Practice, Barbara T. Hoffman shares how Ekpo Eyo, a Nigerian writer described, with bitterness, the problem the Benin Museum faced when it was about to open in 1968: the problem of finding exhibits (Hoffman, 2006, pp. 138-140). And faced with this problem, the Benin Museum drafted a resolution that was tabled at the general assembly of ICOM, which met in France in 1968, appealing for donations of one or two pieces from the museums that have a large stock of Benin works. The resolution was adopted, Hoffman added, but not one reaction was received and in the end, the Benin museum stayed empty. Ovwe, likewise, shares that despite the numerous calls for the return of the looted artifacts, the British Museum has continued to refuse the Nigerian people’s requests for restitution (Ovwe, 2011). Medeme added that even calls to the British Museum by global bodies like the UNESCO, several international conferences and ICOM, have not prompted the British Museum or other western countries holding these artifacts to respond to these pleas. Ovwe recalled that the British Museum arrogantly refused to return to Nigeria, even for a short period, the ivory hip mask of Queen-Mother Idia (one of the looted artifacts), which had been chosen as symbol for FESTAC 1977 (Second World African Festival of Arts and Culture) and thus the Africans and Nigerians had to produce a new version of their marketing campaign and branding. For anyone who is familiar with the equally famous Greek Parthenon Marbles case, this should sound familiar. Just as the British Museum has loaned the marbles to other institutions but not to the Greek people, the Nigerians only asked for it for a short period of time in order to celebrate one of their festivities. The difference in either case (Nigeria and Greece) is that the Greeks made it known that they will not return the marbles while Nigerians only wanted to borrow what is theirs. Either way, the British Museum does not seem to be open to any form of arrangement with the Nigerian people under the presumption that loaning these objects back to their countries of origin would put the objects at risk, a risk they are unwilling to take.

Kefas Danjuma, an art historian and lecturer with the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ABU) in Zaria, which is a state in northern Nigeria, argues that the entire situation of the looted Benin artifacts is quite unfortunate but insists that the Nigerian government should try to acquire the artifacts through diplomacy and any other means available (Ovwe, 2011, para 10). In the face of the world becoming a global village, Danjuma noted, other countries where similar occurrences abound have in fact succeeded in making restitution exchanges of cultural artifacts and Nigeria’s case should not be different. In Danjuma’s views, holding on to the artifacts by the British is not an issue of morality but an issue of war. He offers a different perspective when he states that the artifacts are being treated are like spoils of war:

A lot of damage has been done by the movement of these artifacts away from their habitat. As it is now the objects in contention do not serve any purpose but are regarded as mere artifacts. Back home, the art objects are a part of the soul of the community they belong to. Their importance carries more weight here (Ovwe, 2011, para. 11).

Here we see that militarism, rather than immortality, is seen as the root of the problem.

Nevertheless, on a more positive note, some private collectors around the world are trying to do the right thing. In “Benin Bronzes Looted By the British Returned to Nigeria,” Sara Cascone (2014) enlightens us that two of the artifacts have been returned. Cascone reminds us that hundreds of bronze artworks were looted from Benin in the raid of 1897 and now, over 100 years later, only two of those statues have gone back to Nigeria. The two works are a traditional monarch's bell and the figure of an ibis. These artifacts were part of the collection belonging to one retired medical consultant and grandson of one of the soldiers involved in the 1897 attack, Dr. Walker. Cascone shares that in a ceremony attended by royal officials and local dignitaries, the stolen bronze treasures were returned to Uku Akpolokpolo Erediauwa I, the Oba of Benin, whose grandfather was the Oba during the time the bronzes were taken. According to Cascone, Dr. Walker was prompted to return the statues when he read his grandfather's diary, which described the works as “loot.” He told Agence France Presse:

That gave me the idea that perhaps they should go to the place where they will be appreciated forever… I had no idea it would be regarded with such importance and it is very gratifying to me to have been able to play some small part in the history of the restoration of the bronzes, because I think more will come back. (Cascone, 2014, para. 4).

It is evident that Dr. Walker saw a need for reparation for the people of Benin especially after realizing how the artifacts that had been in his possession were acquired.

One would imagine that seeing this gesture of civility by one British citizen, especially one so personally close to the happenings of 1897 as Mark Walker, would inspire something similar in the British Museum. But on the contrary, the vast majority of the Benin Bronzes are still being held at in London. In fact, as pointed out by cultural historian Gus Casely-Hayford in “Africa’s Looted Heritage Needs to Come Home,” the British Museum has so many Benin artifacts that it has actually in the last century been selling them off. “That kind of thing makes one feel uneasy,” Casely-Hayford said (Hamada, 2015, para. 6). The Nigerian government has actually had to go compete with other countries at auction rooms in Europe to buy back some of the Benin bronzes (Hoffman, 2006). Again, Hoffman added, “as a matter of national honor and interest,” the Nigerian government bought a few more Nigerian works of art at Sotheby’s in London (pp. 139). However, it is not only the British who are guilty of the arguably unethical practice of looting cultural heritage through imperialism. Most major western museums have an art collection of spiritual and cultural objects known to have been procured dubiously and without the consent of the people who made them. Hamada points out that Paris’s renowned Quai Branly Museum has a number of Nigerian terracotta heads with unclear provenance and the Dutch and Belgians are equally guilty.

But, there are those doing the right thing. For instance, Andrea Shea in “The Boston MFA Returns 8 Looted Antiquities to Nigeria” describes how the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston returned a list of culturally important antiquities to the Nigerian government (Shea, 2014). Victoria Reed, the Boston’s curator of provenance, directed an investigation that found many works donated to the MFA were likely to have been looted or stolen before making their way to the United States market. Reed stated, as she flipped through a list of photos and intelligence she gathered about the repatriated Nigerian objects, “the last figure on this list is this Benin altar figure and we know there was a theft at this particular location in the 1970’s” (Shea, 2014, para 3). Thorough investigations like that of the Boston MFA should be done by every museum before the acquiring of artifacts, as it will help prevent wrongful acquisition.

In conclusion, the British Museum, amongst others, needs to live by the examples of Dr. Walker and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Taking these actions will only broaden the relationship between the British and Nigerians, building a bridge of trust between them. Moreover, it will contribute enormously to healing the scar of the Benin people from the occurrence of 1897.