The Brutish Museums, page 27
For these reasons, the restitution of colonial loot is not a question of balance or taking sides. It’s about addressing blind spots and ongoing institutional racism. The idea that Africans are incapable of caring for their own cultural heritage, for example, is still, incredibly, heard from senior British museum professionals and politicians – just like the disbelief at the British Museum when a cast bronze English jug, dating from around 1400 ce, carefully kept for half a millennium, was ‘discovered’ amid the violence of the Ashanti War of 1896.6 ‘Give it back and it’ll only be stolen’ is the universal motto of the thief. Britain’s national museums reduce ‘decolonisation’ to ‘artwashing’ by offering long-term loans rather than giving back what was stolen, while indulging in disingenuous special pleading about legal restraints (straightforwardly overcome for Holocaust spoliation and human remains). Our national museums’ irrelevance grows as Britain’s non-national museums, from universities to local authorities, adopt more open-minded case-by-case approaches to restitution claims, start to take responsibility for understanding provenance histories of colonial spoliation, and begin to support African voices. This global shift is unstoppable: from the museum as end-point to the museum as process.
Restitution is not subtraction; it is refusing any longer to defend the indefensible; it is supporting African institutions, colleagues and communities; addressing western museums’ roles as sites of conscience and remembrance, tackling the ongoing effects of racial violence, paying a debt, rebuilding a relationship. No museum can stop the world from changing around it. Dialogue is giving way to action. We don’t know how this ends for the ten thousand objects looted from Benin.
Ten thousand unfinished events.
Afterword: A Decade of Returns
The looting of objects into a Western art museum is a dual process. It expropriates from people what was theirs, and supposedly enriches ‘us’ – scholars, students, artists, curators, photographers, museumgoers and museum’s neighbors – with privileges that work against these people’s rights and desires. Hence, a dual process is due in response: the restitution of the objects to claimant communities from whom they were directly or indirectly expropriated, and the disowning of the looted objects by institutions and communities that benefit from the looted objects. We are not demanding merely a physical transaction that displaces the object from our ownership to someone else’s ownership, elsewhere. We are demanding public recognition of the symbolic and epistemic violence that our intellectual community helps perpetuate … This is an opportunity to actualize repair.
Protest leaflet at Rhode Island School of Design, 30 November 20181
This is the kind of book where the reader has to write the conclusion by taking action, but here is an afterword on some of the practical dimensions of making African restitution happen.
In November 2018, protests at Rhode Island School of Design called on the college’s museum to return the Benin sculpture in its collections to the Royal Court of Benin. Letterpress posters read: ‘Heads Up RISD. Decolonization, or Complicity? RISD, you have a decision to make’. On the same day, the grassroots group Decolonize This Place called on the Brooklyn Museum – another North American institution that currently holds a looted Benin collection – to create a ‘Decolonization Commission’, under the banner ‘Reparations/Repatriation NOW!’2 The Brooklyn action came a few months after protests at Brooklyn Museum for the ‘tone deaf’ appointment of a white woman, Kristen Windmuller-Luna, as Consulting Curator for its African Art collection. Grass-roots movements are beginning to connect questions of reparations and fallism with those of restitution, questions of institutional racism with those of the use of museums as mouthpieces for outdated ideas of social evolution, cultural difference and white supremacy, and the challenge of decolonising knowledge in universities and in society with anthropology museums as public spaces. Where next?
It is clear that the enduring colonial violence of displaying loot is not just collateral damage, but an endurance of anthropology’s period of being put to work for an ideology of white supremacy. The museum will not be decolonised,3 but it can nonetheless be a place for thinking and doing. Anthropology museums are the public spaces in which Britain can begin to acknowledge the scale of the hundreds of thousands killed in Africa and beyond, and the role of ‘race science’ in justifying this. Just as skulls were removed from anthropology displays after the Second World War, as one form of ‘race science’, so today museums must face up to how cultural objects continue to play a role in justifying colonial violence based on cultural difference, and to put a stop to this.
Necrography reveals facts that are not just about museum ‘transparency’, but the excavation of the foundations – this is concrete, as talked about by Lindqvist at the start of this book, for which an archaeologist’s trowel may be needed, but so too at some points a jackhammer to dismantle what has set in, hardened over time. Just as the 1998 Washington Principles placed the responsibility for understanding looted Holocaust art, taken by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945, with the museum rather than the claimant, so museums and their research communities need to collaborate on the major task of locating some 10,000+ objects looted from Benin City in 1897. This requires museums to publish their data, not just in raw form but with detailed ‘necrographies’ of loss, through which provenance can be understood. I have tried in this book to begin this process for the 422+ looted objects that fall under my immediate purview: the 145 loaned or acquired objects here in Oxford, and the 283 that were documented in the dispersed ‘second collection’ (six of which are now within the 145 in Oxford). But there is so much more to be done. In Germany, an important campaign is under way to make public museums publish their accessions registers. In the UK, meanwhile, basic details of object collections are very hard to get hold of for most of the museums on the list. Even the well-funded British Museum claims that it continues to be unable to publish a definitive list of its Benin collections, while many non-national museums, after more than a decade of austerity and cuts, have very limited curatorial capacity to engage with these questions. Public funding is desperately needed to start to make these facts available, and to start to understand the necrology of each looted object, so restitution can begin.
Beyond the white projections of blame onto Africans through the ideology of the punitive expedition and so much more, and beyond the case of Benin City, there is an urgent need for museums to work together to build a much larger body of knowledge and understanding around colonial looting and the development of global capitalism throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the earlier examples in the 17th and 18th centuries. Rather than further hagiographies of Captain Cook, or balanced and passive histories of British looting of libraries, monasteries and palaces, or displays of pillaged objects where provenance is not mentioned, but the sharing of knowledge of museum collections as unique indexes of imperial theft in order to begin to build a new infrastructure to fulfil museums’ ethical responsibilities to dispossessed individuals, communities and nations – and also to visitors.
In this urgent, enduring ‘negative moment’, clear formal processes still need to be developed and evolved for the restitution of cultural remains by museums in the UK and globally. Human remains and Holocaust spoliation are generally well covered by national policy and guidance, but colonial spoliation is a major gap.4 In the UK, there is some specific provision that limits de-accessioning for national museums under the National Heritage Act, but also many opportunities for immediate action in university and local authority museums.5 Some of the factors that vary between claims include the legal basis of ownership by the museum, the circumstances of acquisition, the relationship of the claimant to what is being claimed, the existence of any counter-claim by other parties.
The legality of unlicensed exports of Benin cultural objects from Nigeria to the United Kingdom after 1924, and especially after the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, is also a factor. A few instances exist where urgent questions need to be asked about the international movements of Benin bronzes into British collections. These include the Benin head taken from Lagos National Museum in June 1973 by General Yakubu Gowon, head of the military junta in Nigeria, and given to Queen Elizabeth. It would also be helpful if the precise circumstances that led to two British Museum plaques being given or sold to Robert Lehman from the collections of the British Museum at some point during 1972, and any object received from Lehman by the British Museum in exchange, were made clear. Other factors that may be taken into account in such processes include whether an object was acquired from someone not authorised to give or sell it, and the nature of the importance of an object for communities, as for example with sacred religious and royal objects. Above all, provision for genuine and equitable dialogue with claimants is crucial, and a commitment to take no interest in the use of an object after a return is made – as with human remains, where return often means destruction through burial.
Action is urgently needed on one principal lesson of the Sarr-Savoy Report: the need for a new kind of typological work, based not on imagined types of object or culture, but on the different forms that ‘acquisition’ through which colonial material culture came to western museums has taken. In this typology of taking – a key exercise in the task of ‘necrography’, to make knowledge of loss and death – the first category must be loot taken with violence, the trophies and spoils of ‘small wars’ from Maqdala in Ethiopia in 1868 to the Asante Kingdom in Ghana in 1874 and 1896, and far beyond – iconic and foundational among which, of course, is the sacking of Benin City. Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy challenge curators to extend their view of restitution to include other circumstances. Let me suggest a preliminary series of seven types of taking: from (i) looting with violence in all its forms, including dispossessions of royal objects and other items of forms of sovereignty and power; (ii) physical anthropology collecting of human remains; (iii) missionary and other confiscations of objects of religion and belief taken during colonialism; (iv) archaeological collections and tomb-raiding; (v) ‘scientific’ collecting of natural history specimens; (vi) ‘ethnographic’ collecting; (vii) instances of barter, purchase and commissioning. This is not intended as a list of diminishing violence, since in all these cases, as Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy have observed,6 various conditions of duress existed and continue to exist. Rather, this typology sketches out a new framework for new necrographies of colonial taking.
The world needs anthropology museums where nothing has been stolen. Museum ‘dialogue’, so often takes the form of filibuster, of stonewall, of obstruction, and even of silencing and redaction – not least through the idea of ‘entanglement’ or complexity. But many of these histories are not so complex, or so difficult, or so entangled – they are straightforward. Where an object has been looted, and a community asks for it back, western museums have a duty actively to make a return, both of the physical object and additionally of other sharing of knowledge, resource, connections and platform. Every return offers an opportunity to fulfil the curator’s principal job: to understand their collections better. This extends to human remains as well, where the old reactive codes of practice need to shift to a new proactive process of sharing knowledge and being open to returns. It can also take place without sponsorship by disaster capitalist corporations like oil companies, whose extractivist project has wrought so much damage across the Global South, and continues to decimate landscapes and environments today.
The existence of museums of world culture in Euro-American towns and cities, where other ways of living, seeing, thinking and relating can be understood, has never been more vital. These museums need new commissioning programmes, through which each gap made by returns is filled by new work made by artists, designers, writers and others from the dispossessed community paid for by the museum, to help museums remember and to bear witness to colonialism today.
Let us re-imagine and reinstate the anthropological, archaeological and world culture museum as a site of conscience, of transitional and restorative justice, and of cultural memory. The museum as process, not an end-point.
Britain has reached a crucial juncture in how it understands its imperial past at just the moment when international pressure around African restitution is at a tipping point. The objects looted under colonialism’s cultural destructions are becoming new zones of intense action.
This may be a time for hope and for optimism; it is certainly a time for action. Twenty years ago, my future colleagues at the Pitt Rivers felt able to joke that ‘leaving Benin plaques to gather dust in a museum store could be regarded as a culturally appropriate way for museums to keep them.’7 Today, as plans for the new Royal Museum in Benin City, to be designed by Sir David Adjaye, move ahead, the world is changing around collections like Oxford’s.
The question of restitution to Benin is often framed, as so often across the continent of Africa, as solely about relationships between nation state and nation state: the African country and the former colonial power. But of course restitution in this case is not ‘repatriation’ to a nation, but returns to the Royal Court. And even within the UK, more Benin loot is held in non-national museums – that is, outside the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum – than is held in the nationals. Each of more than 40 museums and universities could choose to restitute Benin objects from their collections – as Jesus College, Cambridge is in the process of doing for a brass cockerel figure currently in its possession.8
Appendix 5 at the end of this book is one place to start if we are to move the question of the Benin Bronzes from colonial violence towards restitution. A total of 165 potential collections of Benin 1897 loot worldwide is identified. Of these, around half are in either the UK (43) or the US (45). There are also collections in an estimated 24 German museums and nine Nigerian collections, including that of the Royal Court of Benin. Beyond these four main countries, a further 44 collections can be provisionally identified, from Angola and Senegal to Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates. This list is provisional, and in some cases speculative and potentially historic – for example, the Wellcome Collection may have given away or sold its Benin collections, or it may retain some or have some on long-term loan. Other museums have definitely sold Benin collections, most famously when the highest recorded price for a looted Benin object was set in 2007 when Sotheby’s New York sold a 17th-century bronze head of an Oba de-accessioned from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, for $4,740,000. The list also does not include private collections made through purchase or inheritance. One example of this category came to public attention when the attempted sale at Sotheby’s of one of the six known ivory Queen Idia hip-masks alongside other looted items including bronzes and ivories by some of the descendants of Sir Henry Galway, who died in 1949, was prevented by a Nigerian-led campaign in 2010.9 Information about private sales is often poorly understood, as for example with the sale of another bronze head by Woolley and Wallis/Entwhistle in 2016 for an undisclosed ‘substantial seven-figure sum’, which the salesroom believed to be ‘a record for any Benin work of art’.10 I hope, in a second edition of this book, to be able significantly to expand the detail here, and to be able to update the picture of scale, location, and the progress of restitution to the Royal Court of Benin. Please tweet your contributions and corrections to @BrutishMuseum.
* * *
The clasps of the Royal Niger Company medals bore the Company motto: Pax, Jus, Ars – peace, justice, art. Is it possible to repurpose that phrase today from its bleak history? Could it be that, like the cire perdue (lost wax) process through which Benin’s brass heads were cast, so the negative framework of the brutish museums can be melted away, to leave something new – not a return to form, but something multiplied, recast from diverse materials? The answers lie in the hands of those who, after reading this book, will put it down, stand up from their chair, walk out of the door, and take action to make the 2020s a decade of restitution.
Appendix 1: Provisional List of the Worldwide Locations of Benin Plaques Looted in 1897†
Museum
Number of Plaques*
Private Collections
Unknown**
Ethnologisches Museum of Berlin State Museums
255
British Museum, London
192
National Museum, Lagos
64
Weltmuseum, Vienna
46
Staatliche Museum für Völkerkunde, Dresden
36
The Field Museum, Chicago, Illinois
35
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
26
Grassi Völkerkundemuseum zu Leipzig
20
‘ex-Pitt-Rivers, Farnham’
18***
Kunstkamera Museum of Ethnology and Anthropology, Saint Petersburg
18
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
15
Världskultur Museum, Stockholm
14
Horniman Museum, London
13
Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden
13
National Museum, Benin City
12
National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC
11
Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford
10
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge
