Benin bronzes Credit: Pitt Rivers Museum
* As debate over artefacts rages among slave descendants
* Slave descendants say Benin kingdom has “unclean hands”
By Craig Simpson
The British Museum has been asked by slave descendants to install signs explaining how African kingdoms benefited from slavery in a row over the Benin Bronzes.
The institution has faced pressure to return the collection of bronzes, but one campaign group wants the museum to retain the artefacts and instead tell visitors how they were created with the wealth from the slave trade.
Descendants of enslaved people have said the Kingdom of Benin has “unclean hands”, and demanded that the British Museum install signs explaining how the African power profited from selling slaves.
Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, head of the US-based Restitution Study Group which campaigns for slavery reparations, has called for the “full story” to be told.
She told the Telegraph: “The metal [used to make the bronzes] mostly comes from European slave traders, in exchange for our ancestors the Benin kingdom stole and sold into transatlantic chattel slavery.
“They have unclean hands and cannot claim legal or moral ownership greater than the descendants of the people who paid for these relics with their lives.
“Museums have a responsibility to teach this truth.”
Credit: Alamy
The Restitution Study Group says the Kingdom of Benin has ‘unclean hands’ and cannot claim legal or moral ownership of the bronzes
The Restitution Study Group’s legal representatives in the UK have asked the British Museum to ensure “the story of these objects is accurately portrayed” and that displays reflect “the circumstances in which these objects were created”.
The group wants the museum to install signage which explains that the Kingdom of Benin was heavily involved in warring with rival powers to take slaves which were then sold to European traders. Some of the bronzes were created by melting down metal currency known as “manillas” which the kingdom received as payment for their slaves.
Slaves within the Kingdom of Benin itself were not emancipated until the British took control of its territory, in what is now southern Nigeria, during a punitive raid in 1897, a military operation which led to the bronzes being looted then sold off to collections around the world.
The bronzes have since become the subject of repeated calls for repatriation to Nigeria – which absorbed the Kingdom of Benin – and the Horniman Museum, University of Cambridge, and the University of Oxford have sought to return their collections.
Some campaigners, however, believe that because the bronzes were created by a slave-trading African power with the profits from slavery, the modern-day descendants of these slave-traders have no moral right to claim the artefacts.
Several institutions in the UK have faced repeated calls to return the artefacts back to Nigeria
Ms Farmer-Paellmann told the Telegraph that repatriating the bronzes would make museums “complicit in furthering a crime against humanity by supporting the transfer of ill-gotten gains back to the heirs of slave traders”.
Concerns about the morality of returning the bronzes were recently raised when it emerged that the artefacts would not be returned to the Nigerian state, as originally negotiated with various museums, but to the Oba of Benin.
The Oba (king) is the traditional leader of the Benin or “Edo” ethnic group in Nigeria, and his tribal chiefs told the Telegraph last year that the bronzes belonged to him by right and should be held in his palace.
Following a subsequent 2023 directive from the Nigerian government, this is what is set to happen to artefacts which have been pledged by UK museums. Cambridge University decided to pause its repatriation plans in the wake of this policy change.
The British Museum is bound by law not to give away objects in its own collection, and a spokesman for the institution said: “The British Museum understands the significance objects have on different groups.
“This is why we work directly with museums, governments and communities across the world to share and research the collection as thoroughly as possible and will continue to do so.”
Source: The Telegraph
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