Nigeria expects more returns of Benin Bronze as early as next year

LAGOS (Reuters) – Nigeria expects to get back more of its Benin bronzes plundered by Western museums and collectors as early as next year, as global Black Lives Matter protests spur repatriation campaigns, a senior official said.

Godwin Obaseki, governor of Edo state whose capital is Benin City, said discussions are underway about several returns that would be a boost for a wider movement across Africa and beyond the search for colonial-era loot.

Plans have been made to build a center to store and study the returned artifacts by the end of 2021 and a permanent museum by 2025, Obaseki told Reuters.

“The whole Black Lives Matter movement has … added some urgency to the conversation,” he said.

British soldiers seized thousands of metal castings and sculptures during a raid on the then separate Kingdom of Benin in 1897.

The “bronzes” – actually relief sculptures in copper alloy, many depicting court figures – were auctioned off and then circulated among institutions from New Zealand to Germany and the United States, with the largest collection in London.

The British Museum has long resisted calls for the full repatriation of its collection of bronzes – as well as the Magdala treasures of Ethiopia and the “Elgin Marbles” of Greece – often citing legislation banning its disposal of the artifacts.

But Obaseki said the anti-racism protests around the world, which forced Western nations to reexamine their colonial past, have helped advance negotiations to find a compromise.

Several museums, including the British Museum and the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna, have formed a Benin Dialogue Group to discuss the sculptures and work to exhibit them in a museum in Benin City, some of which are officially on loan.

“FIRST FOR AFRICANS”

The British Museum said discussions were ongoing but did not provide details on timing.

“The question of the objects that will be present in the new museum in Benin and how many will be determined through the discussion with our Nigerian colleagues,” reads a statement.

A private collector returned an item in August, and four others had expressed interest in the past few months to do the same as early as next year, Obaseki said.

Funds will be raised over the next two years to build the three-story Edo Museum of West African Art (EMOWAA), and work on a research bureau to store the first returns will begin in March, he said.

It would be part of an estimated $ 100 million regeneration scheme that would involve excavating the original walls and moats of Benin City, once the Kingdom of Benin’s main hub, which covered much of what is now southern Nigeria since the Middle Ages, until the British arrived.

An independent fund has been established to raise funds including representatives of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments and the royal palace of the Oba, or king, of Benin.

More details will be announced on Friday, Obaseki said.

The new museum would encourage foreigners to come to Nigeria to view bronzes, widely recognized as among the masterpieces of African art, he added.

He would try to “make the world understand that there was a civilization in sub-Saharan Africa that compared to what was happening in Europe 400 or 500 years ago”.

Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye, who will oversee the project, told Reuters it was “ridiculous” that Nigerians currently have to travel to Europe to see artifacts of their own culture.

“This museum is really for Africans first,” he said.