Lessons for India: How Benin got its bronzes back
Formal requests began in the 1960s and were ignored. Nigeria persisted, lobbied the international community, kept the pressure up. Now, countries one by one are returning the treasures.
When British soldiers sacked the Kingdom of Benin (in present-day Nigeria) in 1897, they took from the royal palace as many as 10,000 ornamental artefacts dating to the mid-16th and early 17th centuries. Those objects, collectively known as the Benin bronzes, have since been scattered across Europe and the US, in museums, archives and private collections.
The bronzes are beautiful. They show fine craftsmanship, portraying representations of the oba (king), the queen mother, and their courtiers, and are an important part of Africa’s cultural heritage.
Scholars estimate that European colonisers and explorers have violently looted at least 5,000 known objects of historic and cultural significance from the continent. Nigeria, which gained independence from the UK in 1960, has campaigned long and hard for the return of its treasures. These efforts offer valuable lessons for India.
Formal requests to return the items began in the 1960s, but museums ignored them. In 1973, Mobutu Sese Seko, then-president of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), addressed the United Nations and denounced the “barbarous, systematic pillaging” of Africa’s artefacts. Twelve African nations signed his draft resolution. Every Western country in the UN rejected the resolution. They objected to the moral connotations of the term “restitution”, they said.
Western museum curators were openly racist. Friedrich Kussmaul, director of Stuttgart’s Linden Museum at the time, publicly stated that African museologists and administrators were too corrupt and not educated enough to manage their own heritage. He had never visited Africa.
Meanwhile, Benin-era objects were freely turning up at auction. At a Sotheby’s sale in 1980, Nigeria paid half a million pounds to acquire several pieces of its own heritage. Official return requests were ignored until 2007, when the UN urged the West to restore the “cultural, intellectual, religious and spiritual property” taken from indigenous people “without their consent and in violation of local customs”.
In 2010, the Benin Dialogue Group was established to open conversations between European museum delegates and Nigerian authorities. Requests were now more specific, aimed at particular objects, collections, museums and foreign ministries. The Group built a permanent showcase for returned items in Nigeria’s Benin City. Meanwhile, public outrage was building up in the West.
France had, for decades, cited an obscure 1566 law on “inherited objects” as its reason for not returning artefacts. Then, in 2018, President Emmanuel Macron appointed a committee to look into the matter of African collections and their provenance. The report recommended full restitution of items “acquired amorally”. It was the push the movement needed. By 2020, France had passed a bill for a phased return of 26 items looted from Benin in 1892.
Some objects, including palace doors, thrones and warrior dance staffs, were handed over late last year, in a landmark ceremony. In February, after pressure from students, the UK’s Jesus College at Cambridge University returned a bronze rooster and the bust of a king to Nigeria.
The US has followed suit; the Smithsonian Institution has pledged to return most of its collection of 39 Benin bronzes. Germany, which holds more than 500 Benin objects plans to return the bulk of them starting next year. More than a dozen institutions are working to return objects to Nigeria. The British Museum, however, has no plans to part with any of its collection. As with most such requests, it has cited the British Museums Act of 1963, which prevents it from permanently removing objects from its collections.
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