Have You Seen a Benin Bronze in an Art Museum? The Guardian Launches a Campaign to Locate and Return African Art

The British Museum and other UK
institutions with Benin bronzes in their collections are facing
growing pressure to return them to Africa. Now,
the Guardian newspaper has increased the heat by
launching a public appeal to map the location of sculptures looted
by the British in the late 19th century.

The campaign focuses on the
bronzes plundered in the raid on Benin City in 1897, which is now
part of southern Nigeria. The newspaper asks for images and
information about the history of each piece
spotted. The
announcement of the campaign comes hot on the heels of a Cambridge
University college deciding to return a Benin bronze cockerel to
Nigeria that has been in its possession since 1905. It was removed
from display in 2016 after a student protest.

An increasing number of museums
in the UK and beyond acknowledge the punitive raid on Benin in
their displays of the bronzes. The Benin Dialogue Group, which
includes representatives from institutions in Africa and Europe,
has been meeting to discuss ways to tackle the colonial legacy.
European museums prefer to talk about short- or long-term loans
rather than restitution, which critics have described as a
post-colonial attitude. 

As the conversation around the
restitution of objects taken during the colonial era grows, Nigeria
is planning to build a museum to house the artifacts it hopes to
retrieve from Western nations. The British architect David Adjaye
is tapped to design the new Benin Royal
Museum in Nigeria.  

A number of Europe’s largest
museums have agreed to loan works to the new museum, which is
slated to open in 2021. This includes the British Museum, which
holds around 400 objects from Benin, just some of the 4,000
artifacts that were looted by the British troops.

Other UK museums, including
London’s V&A, and Horniman Museum, the University of Oxford’s
Pitt Rivers Museum, National Museums Liverpool, and the National
Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh hold similar objects. But
there is not much known
about how many Benin bronzes are held in smaller institutions
around the UK. The Guardian has created an online form and
has set up a tip line to help gather information about precisely
that.

“Academics believe that hundreds
of items taken during the expedition are held in city museums, art
galleries, universities and in private collections all over the
UK,” the Guardian
writes. “We’d like to start locating these objects, and mapping
their journeys to Britain – and we need your help.”

Back to Africa? 

The information appeals to
people who know of an institution or organization that holds
bronzes and other treasures from Benin. It asks them to tell the
paper where it is, what it is, and whatever is known about its
history. So far the mapping exercise does not include the many
objects from Benin that were sold by the British government and are
dispersed across Europe and the US. The Louvre Abu Dhabi recently
purchased examples, but declined to reveal their
provenance.  

The Guardian’s campaign
comes one year after the release of a historic report commissioned
by the French president Emmanuel Macron from two academics seeking
advice on how to deal with colonial artifacts in French national
collections. The French art
historian Bénédicte Savoy and Senegalese academic writer Felwine
Sarr reported back that the country should return all objects taken
by force during the colonial era to their places of origin. Sarr
has accused the British Museum of having an “ostrich-like” attitude
to the issue of restitution of African art.

Macron got the ball rolling by
quickly agreeing to loan back 26 bronzes held in the Quai
Branly–Jacques Chirac Museum, which were looted during an earlier
bloody siege from French troops on the Béhanzin palace in 1892. The
works are being sent back on a temporary basis while officials
study how to implement the restitution into French law, which
currently protects the objects in its national collections with
“inalienable and imprescriptible” rights. There are an estimated
5,000 Benin artifacts in French museums. 

The post Have You Seen a Benin Bronze in an Art Museum? The
Guardian Launches a Campaign to Locate and Return African Art
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