Some of Benin’s Plundered Treasures Return Home

The restitution movement is picking up steam, and that’s a good thing.

T wenty-six works of tribal art originally from what is now the Republic of Benin, in Africa, that were stolen by the French army in 1892, went back to Benin this week. Owned by the French State and displayed at the superb Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac in Paris, the objects, some full-length wooden figures, were swiped from the king’s palace. Then and today, they’re considered heritage-defining treasures like the Crown Jewels in the U.K. or the four big history paintings in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington.

Benin, called Dahomey until its independence from France in 1960, is a sliver of a country touching the Atlantic and wedged between Togo and Nigeria. The French restitution this week is the first time a major stash of tribal art seized by a European colonizing power has ever been returned to its place of origin. The art was displayed one last time for a five-day special exhibition ending on Sunday. President Macron and the president of Benin attended a send-off ceremony.

I’ve been following the negotiations since I saw these objects in Paris in 2019. It’s a big news story in the art world, since it’s indeed a first. There’s so much fantastic though plundered tribal art in European and American museums, with African countries starting to demand its return and Western governments and collectors starting to give them a close listen. I see the beginning of a new restitution movement like the ones that have returned tens of thousands of works of art to Holocaust survivors, antiquities to Italy and Greece, and grave goods to Native American tribes.

I know very little about African tribal art. European colonialism in Africa is, as my concerns go, remote. I am indeed curious about any art of quality, though. I also believe that important art, when obviously plundered, ought to be returned. Insofar as western Africa is concerned, governments there are pushing hard to get their most important royal tribal art back. There’s a museum boom there, assuring the art will have a suitable home.

I first saw these objects a few years ago in my first visit to the museum, which is the main branch of the Louvre for the art of Africa, Native Americans, Inca and Aztec cultures, and the Pacific Islands. Some are large sculptures of animals and fish, carved from wood and gesturing emphatically, representing dead kings and divinities. They’re handsome things with a look of authority. The king’s throne, a big, carved and pierced chair, is part of the restitution. Four extraordinary doors carved in relief with animals, guns, and ivory clubs came from the palace.

As aesthetic objects, these are very different. The artists weren’t after anatomical correctness, the flow of drapery, or what I call, in the case of European figure sculpture, a speaking likeness. These are not Berninis. There’s no narrative, either. They’re beautifully carved, so there’s no lack of skill. These sculptures are icons of the world of the dead or the divine, abstract but meant to sober us up if we ever get too irreligious or even just too goofy. The figures are simply modeled. Their bulk — beefy torsos and legs, and heads fierce enough to dissuade petting — makes them seem far bigger than what they are.

When Richard Francis Burton visited Dahomey in 1860, he described a militaristic, traditional, king-centered culture big on pageantry and much like some countries in Europe. It grew rich on the slave trade and by plundering its neighbors in frequent tribal wars, both enterprises centuries old. European countries, among them Britain, France, Germany, and Belgium, always seeing West Africa as a source of raw materials, soon made these tribal kingdoms a surrogate for their own rivalries.

Burton, however courtly he found these people, viewed them as savages to be either exploited or reformed, but certainly conquered. So did almost everyone else. In 1892, the French took advantage of years of internal dissension in Dahomey and local wars that diverted and weakened the kingdom. A small French expeditionary force, loosely controlled by Paris but part vigilante, sacked its capital. Dahomey’s king destroyed as much as he could, including the royal cemetery, before heading to the jungle to fight a guerrilla war. The head of the French forces loaded his wagons with whatever remained in the palace’s ruins. He kept the palace sculptures, giving them to the French State a few years later.

In the 1890s, the French looked at these things as eccentricities and, more centrally, as work of a primitive, inferior culture. They were artifacts. Picasso’s incorporation of motifs from African masks in his painting starting around 1905 was a radical mix of high European figure style with visual cues from colonial Africa, then the most pagan of worlds. No one in Paris collected African tribal art for its visual qualities. These things were seen as anthropological evidence until, starting in the 1920s and 1930s, out-there collectors focused on them. The Chirac museum did a first-rate show in 2019 of the collection of African sculpture assembled by Helena Rubenstein starting in the 1940s. She and subsequent collectors were drawn to the exoticism, the minimalist form, and the different materials, among them polished wood, ivory, and feathers.

Last week the Chirac museum gave these objects a good going-away party. The curators prepared a meticulous account of the history of the royal collections in Dahomey, the sack of the capital, and the years of negotiation leading to Macron’s personal intervention. Macron says he wants to make nice with former French colonies. Benin is planning a new museum focusing on its art and history and, over time, intends to transform the country into a tourist center. West Africa, anchored by massive Nigeria, is expanding in population and economic complexity. Nigeria’s population is over 200 million. Yes, all of these countries were chaotic in the years after independence. They’re pulling themselves together.

It’s an extraordinary case of restitution since the objects are among the best Benin sculptures, and returning them required the permission of the National Assembly. In most of Europe, art isn’t owned by the museum displaying it. It is owned by the state and is inalienable, often constitutionally or, otherwise, it can leave state hands only through an act of the national legislature. In Italy, for instance, everyone knows that Italian museums, if left on their own, would sell Nonna and her rolling pin, so rules of this kind are seen as essential.

What happened this week is a very good thing. The French culture ministry emphasizes that this restitution won’t open a floodgate emptying French museums, and it shouldn’t. These 26 objects constitute what remains of Dahomey’s ancient royal palace. The kings there ruled the place for hundreds of years. The people living in Benin now deserve to have key heritage objects returned to them.

The next battle on the horizon will target the Benin Bronzes. That’s a group of about a thousand objects raided in 1897 by the British army from the palace of the kingdom of Benin. This isn’t what used to be called Dahomey and is now Benin. What was once the ancient kingdom of Benin is now part of Nigeria. This is deluxe royal art, some works dating from the 13th century, and the Nigerians want it back. In America, the Met owns the biggest collection of Benin Bronzes.

Through the late 19th century and into the 20th, it seemed incredible to Europeans that native Africans, thought to be primitive or, at worst, savages could make art of this complexity. And sculptors didn’t learn their craft from Portuguese traders. Some of the Benin Bronzes date to the 1400s.

The historical kingdom of Benin, now part of Nigeria, was established by the Edo people of southern Nigeria around 1200. For 600 years, this little kingdom, ruled by a hereditary king, or Oba, thrived as a city-state that a Dutch trader in 1668 described as about the size of Haarlem in the Netherlands and like a small European city in its diversity of buildings and its hustle and bustle. Over the centuries, the kingdom absorbed about a thousand square miles surrounding the city for agriculture and hunting. Ivory, pepper, copper, palm oil, and slaves powered its economy as it cornered the markets for each in the western Niger delta. Aside from African trading partners, the kingdom had a big international partner in the Portuguese. When the slave trade collapsed around 1800, the economy focused on palm oil, essential for soap and as a lubricant for machinery, and rubber.

In 1896, a small group of British mercenaries, led by a British diplomat who’d gone rogue, tried to topple the Oba but failed totally. The king’s forces massacred them.

A few months later, a 1,200-man British army retaliated, with battleship backup.

The British force sacked the city, emptied the palace, and then burned Benin City. What we call the Benin Bronzes today is a collection of thousands of royal sculptures, mostly metal busts of kings but also narrative metal wall sculptures and religious figures, ivory sculpture, and jewelry. Some were kept by the soldiers in the operation, entering the marketplace, mostly in the U.K., over time. Most went to London, where the foreign office distributed them to museums in Germany and the U.K. The Benin Bronzes taken in the invasion are the entirety of the Edo people’s royal heritage.

It’s great stuff. Old African sculpture generally isn’t in metal or even stone but easily degrading wood, but Benin artists developed a school of refined sculpture, mostly in brass, using their own version of the lost wax process. Each incoming Oba commissioned an altar honoring his predecessor, and decorating these were bronze busts, one of which might have held the shrunken head of the last king. His wisdom was to be preserved in this way, they believed. Over time, the shrunken heads might have disappeared, but the busts remained, each by no means a portrait but each different.

A big group of brass narrative wall panels is now in the British Museum, which owns overall about a thousand objects taken during the 1897 invasion. These objects visually convey the history of the kingdom over hundreds of years. The Edo tribe, like Dahomey, had no written tradition. These objects tell their history. Hundreds of works are in German museums. The Met owns about 150. The University of Pennsylvania’s archaeological museum has about 100.

Coincidentally, two Benin Bronze restitutions happened this week. The University of Cambridge, after some internal debate, returned a bronze sculpture. The bronze cockerel doesn’t, I have to say, seem like much. It looks, well, very Colonial Revival meets Pottery Barn. That said, it’s the first object among the looted Benin Bronzes located in Britain to be returned since the Nigerian purchases. A ceremony marking its restitution occurred on October 28 at Jesus College at the University of Cambridge, which got it as a gift in 1905. Over the years, the college treated it as both a work of art and a mascot, since Jesus College’s crest is three cockerels. It was displayed in the college’s main entry hall.

On October 29, the University of Aberdeen had its own event formally returning a bronze bust of an Oba purchased by its museum at an auction in 1957. Both schools responded to pressure from faculty and students over the past few years to return what was clearly stolen. The Met returned two Benin Bronze wall panels this summer. These, according to the Met, were sold by the British Museum to the Nigerian government and subsequently stolen from the museum. They entered the art market and were purchased by an unknowing collector who, years later, gave them to the Met.

In another piece of breaking news, the director of the Smithsonian Museum of African Art said on Thursday that her institution will repatriate its 30 or so Benin Bronzes at some point soon. This will surely pressure the Met and the University of Pennsylvania museum to send objects back.

This week, Nigeria’s National Commission on Museums and Monuments sent a formal request to the British Museum asking for the restitution of about 900 objects in the museum’s collection that were looted in 1897. This puts pressure on the British government. U.K. law prohibits deaccessioning from national museums such as the British Museum, so a transfer of ownership would require an act of Parliament. Long-term loans wouldn’t, but, and correctly so, the Nigerians want their heritage back, and not as a loan.

I don’t see this as punitive, and it certainly doesn’t address imperialist exploitation, including slavery. The Edo honchos were themselves up to their eyeballs in the slave trade. These matters are beside the point. It’s about who is entitled to own art of great cultural significance to a defined group of people. The decolonize-the-museums movement is, ultimately, not about repatriation of art anyway. It’s a type of sadomasochism meant to diss Western standards and to make young people feel guilty. The decolonize-the-museums movement surely has good people in it but seems mostly narcissistic and lacking any relation to the art or the culture that produced it. These are just props and tools.

And no, I haven’t gone wobbly on the Elgin Marbles. I don’t think Lord Elgin had, as he claimed, permission from the Ottoman sultan to remove the Parthenon’s sculpture from the Acropolis, then a fort used by the military. The documentation doesn’t exist, or, more precisely, what exists is an Italian translation from 1801 of an original document from the sultan that no one can find. They’ve been in Britain since 1811, though, and are now part of Britain’s national heritage and, more broadly, the Western world’s. The British and the Greeks both have statutes of limitations, and this one has long passed. Establishing the facts based on statements from Elgin and others would be impossible.

The British Museum hasn’t been the best custodian. A botched conservation job in the 1930s scraped much of the honey-colored patina from the sculptures. The Duveen Gallery, where they’re displayed in the British Museum, has a leaky roof. The Acropolis Museum in Athens is new.

The Benin Bronzes will be the next restitution frontier. The German ethnographic museum in Berlin has promised a big restitution in 2022. We don’t know what the British and American museums will do. The architect Daniel Adjaye is designing a new museum in Benin City called the Edo Museum of West African Art. The government of Nigeria is supporting it. A consortium of officials and curators from Benin, the British Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum, and German museums called the Benin Dialogue Group is developing a future for the Benin Bronzes, so the museum, when it opens in five years, will be full.