This series focuses on the restitution of cultural property in the context of the decolonization of museums. Second case: the thousands of Benin bronzes looted at the end of the 19th centurye century.
The German Minister for Foreign Affairs and her colleague for Culture were this week in Abuja, the federal capital of Nigeria, to formalize the return of 20 bronzes from the former kingdom of Benin. The war prizes looted by the British military in 1897 were then incorporated into the collections of museums in Hamburg, Cologne, Dresden, Leipzig and Stuttgart.
The works have been claimed for decades by the African country. Nigeria will celebrate their return by holding a major exhibition in 2023. The bronzes will then be transferred to the Edo Museum of West African Art which is due to open in 2026.
“We want to give back what was never ours,” summed up culture manager Claudia Roth. “We are here to right a wrong,” added the head of diplomacy Annalena Baerbock. “It’s a story of European colonialism. »
More than 1,000 bronzes remain in German collections, and Berlin pledges to return them all. It is estimated that 85% to 90% of African heritage is found in the northern hemisphere and that only 5% of this wealth is displayed in museum halls. The rest sleeps in vaults or private collections. Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté recently sold his collection of African masks at Christie’s in New York for around $5.5 million.
The bronzes of Benin crystallize the struggles against the former European colonies to find their treasures looted for centuries. These are thousands of plaques and sculptures (sometimes even in wood or ivory) that decorated the royal palace. The creation initiated by Edo artists in the 13the century reached a technical and aesthetic peak during the reign of oba (king) Eresoyen (1735-1750).
This exceptional lot was looted during a punitive expedition of the British Imperial Army in 1897 organized in retaliation for the massacre of a consul. About 200 pieces quickly ended up in the British Museum (which now has 944, the world record) and thousands more have been sold at auction.
The bronzes of Montreal
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) has five. The quintet is part of the Digital Benin project unveiled in November. The online database lists no less than 131 museums in twenty countries, all of which have bronzes. In total, the great hunt carried out for years has made it possible to locate more than 5245 objects distributed as far away as Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Israel. In Canada, they can be found at the Royal Ontario Museum (4), at the Museum of Anthropology in British Columbia (1) and at the Canadian Museum of History (1).
“The project ideally wants to bring together on a single digital platform all the royal works of Benin scattered around the world and their documentation”, explains Erell Hubert, curator of pre-Columbian art at the MMFA who served as liaison with the Digital project. Benign. His museum was first contacted in the summer of 2021. Mme Hubert has since passed on as much information as possible contained in the archive files.
American museums like his often have less information on the provenance of works of colonial origin. This source was of little interest in the past and often, the mention stops at the last gallery in London or New York having sold a property. The site sometimes makes it possible to fill in certain gaps, for example by linking a poorly documented transaction to others from the same more complete source. The online cultural project also uses many African resources to better understand the works found.
One of the Montreal bronzes certainly seems linked to the looting of 1897 since its pedigree goes back to an officer of the military expedition. Others could be later productions.
This is the first step towards eventual repatriation. “For the moment, we have not received a request for restitution,” said M.me Hubert. As a private museum, the MMFA would have less difficulty disposing of works from its collection than state museums that have inherited the principle of inalienable collections. “We only have five bronzes and I imagine other museums with many more are Nigeria’s priority. »
The bronzes of London
The Benin Digital site was developed by the Benin Dialogue Group, which brings together delegates from Western museums and Nigerian representatives with the aim of feeding the Edo Museum. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York returned two plaques in November 2021. At the same time, France returned to present-day Benin 26 works looted in 1892 by colonial troops in the former kingdom of Dahomey. An expert report has identified, in 2021, at least 90,000 objects from Africa in French collections and recommended promoting restitution.
The Horniman Museum in London, which adopted a policy in this direction the same year, received a formal request for repatriation last January from the National Commission for Museums and Monuments of Nigeria. The museum took the decision last summer to return 72 objects to Nigeria, including 12 bronzes from Benin. Four properties have actually been transferred to Africa so far. The 66 others were the subject of a one-year agreement, the time to negotiate their return.
The establishment consulted with the Nigerian diaspora and even local schoolchildren before proceeding. “There was almost complete agreement that the morally correct thing to do was to return ownership of the items, as they had clearly been looted,” the official said. Homework Nick Merriman, managing director of the Horniman Museum and Gardens, founded in 1898, a year after the punitive expedition against the Kingdom of Benin.
The Berlin bronze
This week’s German restitution comes after years of blockades by museums that bowed to pressure from German civil society and ultimately the state. The Humboltd Forum concentrates the resistances and the attacks. The museum built in Berlin for a sum of nearly 1 billion dollars has tens of thousands of works acquired or stolen in Africa during the colonial period. The president and co-founder of the juggernaut dedicated to non-European cultures, Horst Bredekamp, an immense art historian, fought firmly against restitutions by equating them with a multicultural postcolonial ideology.
We want to give back what was never ours
“What makes identitarianism so shocking and unbearable is the callous way in which it separates ethnic groups and their cultures from each other,” he wrote in an article published in March 2021 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Herr Bredekamp went so far as to accuse postcolonial thought of being “identity madness” deemed “structurally anti-Jewish”, in particular because it “consists of moving the backstage of the debate from Auschwitz to Namibia and of denying the absolute singularity of the Holocaust”.
Nigerian jurist Kwame Opoku, who has campaigned for years for the return of African treasures to Africa, on the contrary described the first restitutions of the Benin bronzes as the beginning of a procedure which should spread like a tidal wave of justice. restorative.
“We should resist the temptation to appease ourselves with symbolic restitution, the return of a few artifacts, when Western museums have held thousands of our objects for over 130 years,” he wrote in December 2021 in Modern. Ghana. “The racist arguments of former colonial masters appear in their current statements even when they accept restitution in principle. »
Mr. Opoku then provided the figures at stake: 75,000 works at the Musée du Quai Branly; 70,000 in the British Museum; 180,000 at the Africa Museum in Tervuren, Belgium…
And so at least five at the MMFA…