An angry Black man confronts a defensive museum curator in front of a display of artefacts from Benin – not the famous Museum of Great Britain heist scene from the hugely successful 2018 Marvel movie ‘Black Panther’, but Bernie Grant, Labour MP for Tottenham, arguing in 1997 over who truly owns the Benin exhibits in Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Museum. No glass display cases are shattered, but the challenge that Bernie Grant initiated a quarter of a century ago has grown into a European movement with apparently unstoppable momentum heading for collision with the British Museum and government in the current ‘culture wars’.
1997 marked the centenary of the sacking and looting of the palace in Benin, in present day Nigeria, by a British ‘Punitive Expedition’. After the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in the early 19th century CE, extractive commerce took the form of palm oil and rubber, both needed for the industrial revolution. The Oba (king) of Benin periodically restricted the flow of these products to influence the terms of trade; much like OPEC does with fossil oil in present times. This enraged the British merchants on the coast who wanted to ensure an unhindered and lucrative exchange of primary products in return for cheap manufactured trade goods. They lobbied for government and military intervention, including the overthrow of the Oba if necessary.
Benin had been a powerful kingdom of the Edo people since around the 13th century, with early Dutch visitors comparing Benin City favourably with European cities of the time. Ivory was an in-demand luxury good in Europe and finely carved pieces were commissioned and presented to patrons of Portuguese trading expeditions. Visitors also commented on the plaques (made of various brass and copper alloys collectively described as bronzes) depicting historical events and ceremonial activities that clad pillars around palace courtyards. Over the centuries the fortunes of the kingdom waxed and waned and by the late nineteenth century, despite its rich hinterland, factionalism within the Benin aristocracy and rebellion in parts of its empire had weakened Benin’s ability to resist the relentless European imperial advance.
A particularly impatient British Vice-Consul, against the express instructions of the Oba and the advice of intermediaries, insisted on visiting Benin City when an important annual ceremony was being conducted, during which the presence of outsiders was forbidden. Despite warnings that this was a suicide mission, the only concession made was to turn back a drum-and-fife band before approaching Benin. The clear intention was to either force compliance with a dubious trade treaty struck some years earlier or establish a case for military action. The party was ambushed and all but two of the British members were killed alongside many of their African servants and carriers. Outrage at the ‘Benin massacre’ provided the pretext for the invasion and destruction of the Benin kingdom. The vast military disparity – Maxim guns and rocket tubes against ‘Dane gun’ flintlocks, spears and arrows – led to massive loss of life among the defenders and the rapid capture of Benin City by the expeditionary force. It is this action that is considered the ‘massacre’ in Nigeria today.
Within days large parts of the city were destroyed, including the palace, but not before thousands of bronzes: wall plaques, standing figures, animal representations and memorial heads representing former Obas as well as carved ivory tusks and other sacred objects had been stripped from courtyards and altars and gathered for transportation to the coast and onward to Britain. How many irreplaceable Benin antiquities may have been lost or destroyed in transit through Nigeria or at sea will never be known.
This was the story that Bernie Grant was highlighting as he campaigned for the restitution of the artefacts. He tactically shifted his focus away from the British Museum, which holds the largest collection of Benin artefacts in the UK but is theoretically protected from ‘de-accessioning’ pieces by the British Museum Act 1963, legislation that prohibits the supposedly independent Trustees from disposing of holdings. He decided to bring the campaign to Glasgow, bolstered by the argument that Scotland had just received the Stone of Scone (also known as the Stone of Destiny), a symbol of Scottish identity, which had been removed to London at the end of the 13th Century, an enduring affront to Scottish nationhood.
The official British version of the sack of Benin and the razing of the palace to the ground, justifying it in the name of progress and civilisation, has long been challenged by both Nigerian and other historians, recently and most excoriatingly by Dan Hicks’ ‘The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution’, published in late 2020. What is incontestable is that a vast quantity of Benin bronzes, ivories, wooden sculptures and other artefacts, many thousands of pieces, were plundered from the palace.
The practice of looting art works in warfare had been repudiated in Europe, following Napoleon’s rampages across the continent, long before being formally outlawed in The Hague Peace Conference of 1899. Victorious Wellington had returned looted artworks held in Paris to vanquished nations after Waterloo. However, the same standards were not applied outside Europe. Apart from the trophies and ‘curios’ kept by members of the force, the bulk of the loot from Benin was sold by the Foreign Office. The British Museum gained a collection of around 1000 pieces (the precise number is unkown), German museums also acquired many and the rest have been scattered around the world, both in museums and private collections. Occasionally exhibitions have brought some pieces together, including the biggest touring exhibition ever mounted of Benin artefacts that opened in Vienna in 2007. Two plaques that together make a complete Portuguese figure were reunited for the first time since they were looted. No such exhibition has ever been held in Nigeria.
There has always been a co-dependent relationship between museums and the art market. Museums provide authoritative provenance, prestige. The art market provides opportunities for acquisition, a financial valuation for collections and a source of income if pieces are disposed of. The arrival of the Benin bronzes in Europe in 1897 took the art market by storm. Although there had been a trade in tusks and carved ivory, bronze casting was reserved for the Oba alone. The only documented ‘legitimate’ piece to leave the palace was a bronze equine figure (now in the National Museums Liverpool), given to an English trader, Swainson, by Oba Ovenramwen, possibly as a wedding present in1892. So when a hoard of thousands of pieces appeared in London, there was surprise that such metallurgic techniques existed to produce this quantity of highly sophisticated artefacts in West Africa. The ‘cire perdue’/lost wax casting technique only requires relatively simple tools and materials but is difficult to master and fraught with potential failure. Every piece is unique as the clay cast is destroyed to reveal the metal – there can be no mass production. A number of preposterous theories were put forward for outside origins in their production and it took some time to accept that the bronzes had been produced over centuries by Edo craftsmen (and they were exclusively men of the iguneromwon casters guild). Rapidly, in the early 20th century, an anthropological approach gave way to an art history appreciation. African sculpture became a major influence on European modernist art. As the Benin artefacts became ‘art pieces’ rather than ‘ethnographic artefacts’ prices soared. This reached a peak in 2016 when the ‘Ohly head’ was bought by a private collector for $10m – one of many stories concerning the bronzes revealed in Barnaby Phillips’ 2021 book, ‘Loot’. Since the movement for restitution has picked up momentum, pieces have started being withdrawn from auction and probably will never be sold on the open market again.
Bernie Grant became engaged in the issue after attending a Pan-African Conference on Reparations sponsored by the Organisation of African Unity in Abuja, Nigeria in 1993. The meeting was held to revive the movement concerned with repairing the harm done to Africans and the African diaspora by enslavement, colonisation and racism. The reparations movement has deep roots as far back as the very different approaches of W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Grant was demanding acknowledgement of historic injustices and reparations including, in the late twentieth century, demands for African and Caribbean debt cancellation.
He also learned about the hurt and insult felt by Nigerian’s from the British Museum’s refusal to loan the celebrated Queen Mother Idia ivory pendant mask, adopted as the symbol of the Second Festival of African Arts and Culture held in Lagos in 1977. Despite the violence of its removal from the Oba’s bedchamber in 1897 it was declared ‘too fragile’ to undertake the return journey (despite all measures that can be deployed by fine art carriers) and liable to damage in the climate from which it originated. Exorbitant insurance demands and other delaying tactics made it clear to the Nigerian hosts that the British Museum was blocking the request. On his return from Abuja, Grant established the African Reparations Movement (ARM-UK) and started to campaign for the return of the Benin Bronzes (used as a collective term to cover all the bronze/brass, ivory and other items) as the most immediate action of a reparations movement that sought to gain acknowledgement and justice for the exploitative nature of the relationship between Britain and Africa.
I had admired the Benin artefacts displayed in the Museum of Mankind in the early 1970s exhibition, ‘Divine Kingship in Africa’, which atmospherically recreated a palace courtyard displaying plaques on columns and an altar with bronze heads and carved tusks – a presentation later dismissed as ‘theatrical’ by museum staff. But it wasn’t until I read Robert Home’s ‘City of Blood Revisited’, published in 1982, that I understood the extent of the violence and plunder that had taken place in 1897 and the implications of this colonial ‘small war’. I took the opportunity to visit Benin with a Nigerian film director and spoke to Oba Erediauwa (the father of the present Oba) and museum professionals with the intention to collaborate on a TV documentary that would examine the historical events and their contemporary reverberations from the Benin perspective. I became aware of Grant’s campaign and recognised that supporting it would help raise the profile of this century-old issue.
Aside from the obstacle of the British Museum Act 1963, two further arguments were being used to prevent any discussion of restitution of the artefacts to Benin – the insecurity of Nigerian museums and the nature of the brutal Nigerian military regime of General Sani Abacha in the mid 1990s.
Particular revulsion was expressed worldwide for the 1995 execution of author and activist Ken Saro Wiwa, alongside eight others, for protesting the impoverishment and environmental devastation of the oil-rich Niger Delta. There had been some high visibility failings of Nigerian museum security, including the theft of famous terracotta heads from the Ile-Ife museum in 1994, and also the belief that there was a backdoor leakage of artefacts into the hands of wealthy private collectors.
One extraordinary episode, revealed by The Arts Newspaper in 2002 was the gifting of a bronze memorial head to the Queen in 1973 by Nigeria’s then military Head of State, General Gowon. This head had been purchased with funds from the Colonial Office sometime before Nigerian Independence in 1960 to help build a collection from scratch for the national museum. However, Gowon, about to commence a state visit to the UK, was lacking a gift for the monarch. A commissioned replica bronze was rejected as poor quality so, with days to go, Gowon forced the Director of the Museum to open up and allow him to remove a piece, against all legal processes. The fiction that this was indeed a modern copy was allowed to prevail until a staff member from The Arts Newspaper spotted the piece on display in a Jubilee exhibition of state gifts and suggested experts should investigate. They confirmed it was genuine, probably 16th century and taken in 1897. This twice-looted piece is still within the Royal Collections and has now also become the subject of a demand for return.
I had photographed ARM-UK demonstrations outside the British Museum and provided research for pamphlets and the early ARM website, I also put Dr Emmanuel Arinze, a former Director of Museums in Nigeria and at that time the Chair of the West African Museums Programme and President of the Commonwealth Association of Museums, in touch with Bernie Grant. Dr Arinze recommended an approach that would counter both of these arguments being used against restitution. Rather than returning artefacts to government-run museums, they could be returned to the Oba’s palace – a sacred space in Edo culture where the pieces would no longer be ‘artworks’ but could be returned to their original function as part of a living culture. Due to its religious status and the consequent spiritual sanctions, the palace was considered more secure than the museums. The Benin kingdom could not be identified with the Abacha regime: it long pre-dated the concept of Nigeria and relations between the Oba and the Federal Government were strained. This approach was adopted and contact was made between the Oba and Grant. In 1996 the Oba’s brother, Prince Akenzua, visited Britain and formally requested Grant to approach the government and museums holding looted artefacts on the Oba’s behalf.
With the raised profile that the approaching centenary of the sacking of Benin brought, I also attempted to resurrect the documentary idea. Official cooperation with Nigerian government agencies was going to be impossible under the Abacha regime, but a British production company was interested and a commission was under consideration from Channel4. When Grant told me he was going to Glasgow I took a basic video kit and travelled north with him; hoping to capture the start of a journey that would lead to him returning a piece back to Nigeria for the centenary. His research had shown several Benin pieces in two museums in Glasgow – the Kelvingrove and the St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art, both controlled by Labour-led Glasgow City Council. His plan was to gain the support of Scottish Labour MPs and councillors and to make an appeal both to the Director of Museums and the Council leadership. Burns Night saw Grant, in Nigerian agbada gown, giving the post-supper address to a Labour Party group. He appealed to their sense of fairness, following the successful campaign for the return of the Stone of Scone.
The warmth of his reception by political colleagues was not replicated when he visited the Kelvingrove Museum. The Deputy Keeper, Mark O’Neill, was defensive, insisting that the museum was ‘not in the business of righting historical wrongs’; that the people of Glasgow had a competing right to the pieces they had ‘safeguarded’ for almost 100 years and that they represented part of ‘their story as well’. Grant was visibly angered by what he believed to be official complacency and arrogance. He felt that the museums had clearly ‘lost the moral argument’. The City Council, who were more encouraging, had to consult with the Museum’s management before any pieces could be released, a process that the Museum’s Director, Julian Spalding, vigorously opposed and effectively blocked. He wrote: “Though it is possible for our museum service to restitute items from its collection and we have done this recently in the case of some Aboriginal human remains, we cannot advise the City Council that this should happen in this case.
“Our reasons are entirely professional. Museums have a collective responsibility to preserve the past so that people can enjoy it and learn from it. In the case of the Benin collection in Glasgow though it is small and not of the highest quality, it does play an important role in introducing our visitors to the culture, and religious beliefs of Benin, whose artistic achievements rank with the finest not just in Africa but in the whole world”.
Unusual as it is for museum professionals to talk down their own collections, the letter clearly values the claim of Glasgow Museum’s visitors above that of the Oba of Benin, the Edo and all Nigerian people. The response also targeted the strategy of return to the Oba: “…in this case, we are not considering a transfer from one public museum to another, but a request on the behalf of the Oba of Benin, himself, for future religious use. We believe, however, that these artifacts have an important role to play in the public sector by informing over 3 million visitors here about the culture of Benin…”. You may wonder how many of those 3 million even saw the Benin exhibits and how many of them were significantly informed by the poorly presented display. Presenting the argument as return for one man’s benefit rather than starting to fill a massive gap in the heritage of the Edo people was patronising, to say the least.
The argument that the objects have had a ‘life’ of their own since their arrival in Europe and that this existence provides a justification for retention over restitution was dismissed eloquently by Bernie Grant in this 1997 exchange with the curator in Glasgow:
Grant: Why can’t you make a copy?
O’Neill: We have a policy of being a museum, of only showing real objects. Otherwise it is a heritage centre. The charisma of the objects is real.
Grant: If you feel like this, the people who actually made the objects, they must feel 10 times worse, that they’re not able to do exactly what you are able to do, with this power over the ages… Isn’t that right?
O’Neill: I agree, and if the people didn’t have a significant collection of their own bronzes we would certainly say they need to tell their story; any people needs to tell its story with its best objects. We accept that cultural right. But the value of the objects we’ve got, they’re not unique objects, they’re not very high quality…
Grant: They are to them! They are to the people of Benin! They might not be to you… that’s the problem. The problem is that you’re acting as though these objects belong to you, but they were stolen.
The arguments were typical of those that were being used to justify the continued possession of objects of contested provenance in European and US museums. The threat that the 1963 British Museums Act supposedly protects the nation’s premiere museum from is the ‘domino effect’: Benin Bronzes followed by Parthenon Marbles, Egyptian, Ethiopian and Iraqi treasures. Greece has been pursuing the return of the sections of Parthenon frieze removed by Lord Elgin for decades. The refusal in this case is based on the argument that the removal was legitimate as it had been sanctioned by the Ottoman Sultan; but it was clearly believed that any comparable restitution would open the floodgates and could leave galleries stripped bare. Rather than engaging in constructive discussions the strategy was to stonewall. A former Director General of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments in Nigeria, Dr Yaro Gella, told me that when he attempted to raise the issue at international museum functions his counterparts behaved as though they hadn’t heard, “or as if there was a bad smell” – they would change the subject and absolutely refuse to engage. The arguments mutated over the decades, from the superior demands of anthropological knowledge in the service of colonial domination, to somehow doing Nigeria and the Edo people a favour by preserving their artefacts and ‘telling their story’ in a ‘universal museum’.
The approach to colonially acquired cultural artefacts, especially that acquired by force, is now undergoing a rapid revision, rippling out across Europe and the US. Over the past decade cracks have started appearing in the dyke of resistance to restitution. In France, Emmanuel Macron commissioned the 2018 Sarr-Savoy report and has committed to restitution of much of the colonially acquired cultural artefacts, including those in Jacques Chirac’s assemblage in the Quai Branly Museum. Macron stated, “I am from a generation of French people for whom the crimes of European colonisation cannot be disputed and are part of our history”. For the Benin Bronzes in particular, the surge of restitution appears unstoppable. In 2021 both Aberdeen and Cambridge went further than discussion and physically handed over pieces to a Nigerian delegation.
After the British Museum’s, the most impressive Benin collection in Europe is held by the Berlin Ethnologisches Museum which, after being closed for a few years, has been brought into central Berlin in the newly renovated Humboldt Forum. A planned major Benin exhibition is now in doubt as the Director of the Ethnologisches Museum, Jonathan Fine, is reconsidering how to appropriately negotiate the complexities of colonial era acquisition and display. German museums have led with a re-examination of the country’s colonial relationship with Africa. There has been acknowledgement of the genocidal repression of the Herero people in Namibia, forerunner of the racial policies central to National Socialism. Bénédicte Savoy, the co-author of the French report describes this as a ‘paradigm shift’. In an interview with Der Spiegel, referring to the Humboldt’s proposed exhibition, she stated that, “With every month, every day, it becomes less likely that the bronzes can be shown without disgracing oneself… Blood sticks to the bronzes.”
Compare this to the official British attitude. Interviewed recently for Channel4 News, the former Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden said he thought that the Benin artefacts ‘properly resided’ in the UK and ruled out any changes to the law that would permit the British Museum to return them. Boris Johnson even more recently rehearsed the same circular argument – that the decision, conveniently, lies with the independent Trustees of the British Museum, not government, but the Trustees are prevented from acting by this law that only Parliament can change. In rejecting a recent request, in person, by the Greek Prime Minister for return of the Parthenon sculptures, the UK government appears to be determined to defend an increasingly lonely and bankrupt position.
Since 2007 the Benin Dialogue Group has brought Nigerian representatives from the Edo State Government, the Royal Court of Benin, the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments and contemporary Nigerian artists together with delegates from several leading European museums. The establishment of a world-class museum in Benin, designed by renowned architect Sir David Adjaye, to house a permanent exhibition of reunited Benin work is under discussion. The British Museum is a participant and is offering technical support, funding and possibly reciprocal loans – a concept that the Nigerian ambassador to Germany rejects as offering to lend someone their own stolen goods from a pawn shop. The museum is still reluctant to concede the fundamental principle of ownership. Progress is not always straightforward; unsurprising with competing local, national and ethnic interests – but this is surely an issue that has to be resolved within Nigeria, not by those who have obstructed return.
The British Museum persists with the increasingly discredited ‘universal museum’ argument: that the visibility given by being in a global capital, with a global collection providing access to a global audience justifies its refusal to consider restitution. These years of restricted travel have revealed how threadbare this argument is. It was never simple or affordable for Nigerians to obtain a visa and an expensive air ticket to view their own cultural heritage. It is also disingenuous to ignore that the vast majority of Benin artefacts are actually inaccessible, hidden away in museum storage (fewer than 100 of the British Museum’s collection are on display), housed in small provincial museums or in private collections. In fact, it is still a challenge to discover what is held where. One museum curator, very committed to “actively tak(ing) part in repatriation requests and adopting decolonial practices”, admitted that “the collections are so vast and the information we have on them so sparse, and we have fewer and fewer staff, and this means it’s very difficult to get to grips with what we actually have and where the objects are from”. Bernie Grant’s pioneering research to uncover the whereabouts of looted artefacts across the UK has been reborn as Digital Benin, an ambitious collaboration between museums, universities and experts in Europe and Nigeria, coordinated by the Museum am Rothenbaum in Hamburg, Germany, aims to digitally network the globally dispersed works in an accessible database.
The last time I met Bernie Grant was after the Labour landslide victory in May 1997. Dr Emmanuel Arinze was in London and I brought him to meet Grant at the Commons. As a senior member of the House, Grant had been allocated impressive rooms and he fully inhabited his status as an elder of the institution as he strode between the tea room and his office, ignoring the resentful glares of some Opposition members who had vilified him in the past. Grant and Arinze were optimistic as they discussed how to maintain the momentum of the movement after the centenary, the direct involvement of the Benin royal family seen as critical. Touchingly, Grant had written to the Oba suggesting an appeal ‘monarch to monarch’ as the Queen had several Benin pieces, two of which, superb ivory leopards, were on loan to the British Museum but not protected by the British Museum Act. However, this faith in the sense of fairness in British institutions was not rewarded; the Palace replied to the Oba thanking him for his letter in the blandest terms and utterly ignoring the issue of restitution. The official line continues to insist that “questions concerning the restitution of objects from the Royal Collection are matters for discussion by the trustees of the Royal Collection Trust”.
Grant’s health rapidly deteriorated and he underwent a triple heart bypass in 1998. With his death in 2000 ARM-UK dissolved for lack of funding and leadership but the demands never went away. Despite disingenuous statements that they have ‘never received an official request’, the British Museum has been approached on multiple occasions and has continued to use the ‘universal museums’ argument and the 1963 British Museum Act to defend retention of looted Benin artefacts. Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Labour MP for Streatham, has taken on Bernie Grant’s mantle and is chairing an All-Party Parliamentary Group which will challenge the ‘remain and explain’ mantra and examine legislation to amend the 1963 Act. With the growing groundswell of demands for decolonisation, unleashed by the Black Lives Matter movement across the entire cultural landscape including academia and museums, watch out for further clashes with the British Government, which views the concepts of restitution and reparations as anathema and culture wars as a useful populist strategy. As Professor Dan Hicks exhorts in ‘The Brutish Museums’, ‘take action to make the 2020s a decade of restitutions by challenging the institutions around us to come clean and confront the legacy of the colonial past.
Update: On 7th April 2022, twenty-five years after Bernie Grant’s visit, Glasgow City Council agreed to return the Benin artefacts to Nigeria.