BERLIN – Earlier today, officials from Germany and Nigeria signed an agreement to return artifacts taken from the Edo people of the Kingdom of Benin more than a century ago. The artifacts, part of the collection commonly known as the Benin Bronzes, date from the 13th to the 19th centuries. The agreement will transfer ownership of more than a thousand objects from German museums to Nigeria, in whose territory the historical kingdom lay.
The Benin Bronzes are widely admired for their craftsmanship, demonstrating a mastery of the lost wax casting technique among other methods. Despite the name, the artifacts were constructed from not just bronze, but brass, ivory, coral, and other materials.
Memorial bust of a king’s mother iyoba, Nigeria, Benin Kingdom, early 16th century AD, gunmetal bronze, currently housed at the Berlin Ethnological Museum [Daderot, Wikimedia Commons, public domain]
Many of the Benin Bronzes concern the ceremonial cult of the oba, or the divine king, who interacts with the world of deities and spirits on behalf of the people. After the death of one oba, his son and successor was obligated to create an ancestral altar dedicated to him and perform rituals and sacrifices there to venerate him. Similar altars were sometimes created for the iyoba, or “queen mother.”
The oba is associated with leopards, and many of the objects looted from the kingdom contained leopard imagery that demonstrated the oba‘s mastery of military power and the natural world.
Two objects – a commemorative head of one of the oba, and a relief displaying an oba flanked by four attendants – were physically delivered by the German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, and culture minister, Claudia Roth, to the Nigerian state minister for foreign affairs, Zubairu Dada, and culture minister, Lai Mohammed, as part of the signing ceremony.
“Today we have reason to celebrate because we have reached an agreement on the Benin bronzes,” Baerbock said, according to the Guardian. “It was wrong to take the bronzes and it was wrong to keep them. This is the beginning to right the wrongs.”
Germany announced its plans to repatriate its Benin collections last year.
“Germany has taken the lead in correcting the wrongs of the past,” said Mohammed, who added that he hoped this would lead to further repatriation of Benin Bronzes from other countries.
In March, the United States announced plans to return most of its collection of Benin artifacts. Other museums with Benin holdings have made similar pledges. Both the German and American agreements reflect a decision to transfer title to Nigeria with an understanding that some objects will be retained on long-term loans, with Baerbock saying she hopes to see some of the items “on holidays in Germany,” per the Associated Press.
That said, the largest collection of Benin Bronzes remains where it has been since the bronzes were looted in the first place near the close of the 19th century: the British Museum in London, which indicates it has no intentions to repatriate any of its holdings.
Leopard aquamanile, Nigeria, Benin Kingdom, 17th century AD, brass, currently housed at the Berlin Ethnological Museum [Daderot, Wikimedia Commons, public domain]
The Benin Bronzes were looted from the Kingdom of Benin as a result of the Benin Expedition of 1897, in which, following many years of tension between Benin, which had maintained its independence during the colonization of Africa by the European powers, and British traders who sought access to Benin’s natural resources like palm oil, ivory, and rubber, a British expedition invaded and destroyed the Kingdom of Benin. The “punitive expedition” was supposedly taken in revenge for the “Benin Massacre,” in which a British trading delegation was killed after refusing to accept the oba‘s notice that he was not interested in meeting with them.
In order to pay for the expedition, vast numbers of Benin artifacts were looted from the ashes of the kingdom. The largest quantity of these objects made their way to the British Museum, while others were sold at auction to European institutions, such as the German museums now returning their collections.
The British Museum’s position is that it is barred from returning objects due to the British Museum Act of 1963 and the Heritage Act of 1983. It has about 900 Benin objects in its collection. Some other British institutions, such as the Aberdeen Museum and Jesus College, Cambridge, have returned individual pieces to Nigeria, but the leopard’s share of the Benin artifacts in the UK remain with the British Museum. The British Museum’s stance against repatriation has most famously been used to deny the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece.
That said, the move by German and American authorities to turn over their holdings is being greeted with praise from the Nigerian authorities. Mohammed described the agreement as “the single largest known repatriation of artefacts in the world,” while Dada described the occasion as “one of the most important days in the history of celebrating African heritage.”
“The restitution of cultural assets cannot heal the wounds of brutal colonial rule,” said Roth, according to Artnet News. “But it is a first step toward a new way of dealing with a past that has been largely ignored until now. People all over the world have a right to have access to their own cultural heritage. They should be able to decide for themselves how this is preserved and passed on to future generations.”
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