![]() ![]() The Smithsonian Institution has likewise pledged to give most of its small collection of Benin works to a museum in modern-day Benin City. The German government has committed to returning all of its Benin objects the first two were delivered to Nigerian authorities in July. The University of Aberdeen, in Scotland, and Jesus College at the University of Cambridge have each surrendered the single Benin piece it had owned. Then the George Floyd protests of 2020 jolted the group into hyperactivity. For more than a decade, the dialogue moved slowly. In 2007, a consortium of Western museums joined Nigerians in a “Benin Dialogue Group” to open discussions about repatriation. Nigerians have long demanded the objects’ return. (Shaw’s future husband, Frederick Lugard, would become the united colony’s first governor-general, ruling over a territory about the size of Texas and Oklahoma combined.)Īt least 3,000 Benin artworks are now owned by public museums or held in private collections around the world, especially in Britain, Germany, and the United States. Even the word Nigeria was a British invention, coined by a journalist named Flora Shaw to describe British holdings in and around the Niger River watershed. (The country now known as the Republic of Benin, situated on Nigeria’s western border, is an unrelated polity.) In 1914, Britain would merge all its Niger River possessions into the colony of Nigeria, an entity that comprised dozens of ethnicities, many alien to one another and some mutually hostile. The remains of the Benin kingdom were annexed by Britain. And then the art was pillaged, leaving behind only ashes where palaces and temples had stood for centuries. Art was the kingdom’s culture, its wealth, its literature, its memory. Ancient Benin had no system of writing other than the stories told in cast brass and carved ivory. The obas of Benin had once ruled an empire that extended from the Niger River westward hundreds of miles toward what is today Lagos. To the people of Benin, however, the sack of their city reverberated as overwhelmingly as if an invading army had captured London, burned Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey, and stolen the contents of the National Gallery and the National Archives. Gruesome evidence of a spasm of human sacrifice by Benin’s rulers immediately before the kingdom’s last battle only strengthened the British conviction that their attack had been righteous. The 1897 expedition was ostensibly launched in retaliation for the massacre of a British diplomatic mission to Benin earlier that year. ![]() In British eyes, justice had been served. The misnaming stuck as Benin art headed into public and private collections in Britain and around the world. But in London, the pieces were instantly dubbed “the Benin bronzes”-identifying them with the slightly different alloy of copper and tin used in the traditions most admired by the 19th-century British: those of classical Greece and Renaissance Italy. Most of the Benin metal pieces are made of brass, an alloy of copper and zinc. Seen from the side or bottom, a metalwork from the great age of Benin art, from roughly 1450 to 1650, is astonishingly thin, only about an eighth of an inch thick.Ī small but telling mistake of nomenclature conveyed the impact of these African works on the European art world. The artistry of the finest pieces is extraordinarily delicate. The artworks of carved ivory and cast metal were immediately acclaimed as masterpieces: heads of kings and queen mothers, symbolic animal figures, bells to summon the spirits of the ancestors, metal plaques that depicted court life and the great deeds of the obas. Most of the spoils were auctioned off in London. Shrines, storehouses, the homes and burial places of past obas-all were destroyed. Then a fire ignited, perhaps accidentally, perhaps not. They looted the royal compound and packed the most beautiful contents into crates to ship home. The British drove into exile-and would later capture-Benin’s oba, or king, a man of semi-deified status known to history by his regnal name, Oba Ovonramwen. ![]() Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |