Returning the Benin Bronzes: The Hard Question Is Not Whether, but to Whom
Returning looted artifacts has become the correct position of the age, but with the Benin Bronzes ‘to whom’ is far harder to answer than ‘whether’: France and Germany are racing each other, Britain is playing dead, and three rival claimants inside Nigeria are fighting over them.
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Whether a regime is likeable does not change the duty to return
Bogans handles antiquities trafficking at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office in New York. His position is unambiguous: illegally looted objects must go back to the source country, even when that country's government is one you dislike. He answers the charge of naivety with a burglary analogy: a man has 19 televisions in his house and 18 of them are stolen — you do not let him keep the stolen goods on the grounds that he does not need that many televisions. He says he has been through three wars and six combat deployments, and has seen the mass graves in Kosovo and Iraq. He requires the receiving country to sign a pledge at the handover ceremony guaranteeing public display and upkeep. The document has no legal force; it is enforced through the chain of relationships instead: next time you want my help with a case, do not break it.
— Matthew BogansThe Pergamon Altar has no one left to be returned to
Frum uses the Pergamon Altar to show that ancient plunder often has no identifiable party to return it to. The altar was excavated by German archaeologists, but the people who made it were Greek, the king who commissioned it was of mixed Greek-Macedonian descent, and the taxpayers who paid for it spoke an assortment of languages from across the Asian mainland, Semitic peoples among them. So is it Turkey's, Greece's, Macedonia's, Syria's, or does it belong to the heirs of a world that no longer exists? Unlike the traceable looting of the war in Ukraine, plunder from 100 to 500 years ago cracks open the concept of ‘theft’ itself. His conclusion: ‘That world is gone, so there is nobody to give it back to.’
— David FrumThe Benin Bronzes are not a collection, they are the spoils of a sacked city
Dan Hicks pulls the story back to the Berlin Conference of 1884 — European states sitting around a map of Africa, dividing it up. The Royal Niger Company was Britain's commercial-military arm, controlling the palm oil and rubber trade. In 1892 the company signed a treaty with the Oba of Benin; a few years later the British side decided the king was uncooperative, sent a mission that was killed, and immediately launched a punitive expedition: 10 Royal Navy ships and 1,400 soldiers, equipped with the newly invented Maxim gun. The defenders of Benin had only machetes, pistols and muskets. British forces massacred residents, burned the city, exiled the king, and carried off thousands of objects. Within weeks the Benin Bronzes were on display in museums in London, Oxford and Berlin, placed in the Assyrian galleries alongside ancient Egyptian material — the implication being that this culture had been knocked back to the Bronze Age.
— Dan HicksRestitution is soft diplomacy, not a moral awakening
Savoy says France, Britain, Belgium and Germany today are competing in what looks like a ‘restitution Olympics’, each trying to be the first to hand back a significant holding. In 2017 Macron gave a speech in Burkina Faso saying it was unacceptable for so much of Africa's cultural heritage to remain in France, then appointed Savoy and Felwine Sarr to write a report, promising to return thousands of objects and to lend money for museums to house them. Critics said the report was too academic and too idealistic; French law forbids removing objects from public collections. Savoy sees restitution as simultaneously an act of soft diplomacy: France's reputation in its former colonies is dreadful, and Macron wanted to repair the relationship. She also punctures the black box of European museum storerooms: one museum in Paris holds 69,000 African objects and displays only 1,000 of them.
— Benedicte SavoyThe 1963 Act is not natural law; Parliament can rewrite it whenever it likes
Cullinan, the new director, says the 1963 Act of Parliament explicitly forbids the British Museum from removing anything from its collection; holdings acquired for the nation belong to the British people, and the museum has no right to sell them. Frum's response is that this is simply an ordinary law Parliament passed at a particular moment, and Parliament can pass another one — treating ‘legally impossible’ as though it were a law of physics is absurd. Cullinan concedes he cannot spend his entire tenure fighting this and needs Parliament to act. He also points out that in the early days of the pandemic people feared small museums would be forced to sell their only painting, which is why the prohibition is seen as a safety valve. The strategy British museums have actually adopted is to change the subject in public by talking about the Parthenon Marbles and Easter Island.
— Nicholas Cullinan / David Frum‘Return them to Nigeria’ conceals a three-way fight over who receives them
After going to Nigeria, Frum found that the phrase ‘return them to Nigeria’ papers over a fight inside the country. There are three main claimants: Edo State, which plans to build the Museum of West African Art (a public-private venture with an independent board); the National Commission for Museums and Monuments; and the current Oba, Ewuare II, a descendant of the king exiled in 1897. Choose one of them, he warns, and you have made a moral decision and have to live with the consequences. The museum project was initially favoured by Western funders, but it ran into the historical feud between two great families, the Edo State governor's and the Oba's. Once the governor's term ended, the project stalled. In 2023 the Nigerian government announced that all the objects must be handed to the Oba, and the museum plan is already at a standstill.
— David FrumSomething that has waited 500 years can wait another 50
Frum says this is not a good moment to be making decisions: objects that are 500 years old can wait 50 years, or 100, until our grandchildren produce a better answer. Faced with the retort that stolen goods should simply be given back, he offers a provocation: if the goal is only to relieve guilt, then burn the bronzes, melt them down, or sell them to a Russian oligarch and use the money to fund British schools. He thinks people doing good are prone to admiring themselves in the mirror, and that in a guilty world no one who holds power can exercise it in perfect innocence. If you have inherited something whose provenance is unclean, wherever it came from, you carry a duty of stewardship — which is why you should not let the pressure to ‘deal with it quickly’ push you into a bad answer.
— David FrumPlaques prised apart and hung on a wall are Shakespeare torn to shreds
Ehikhamenor remembers first seeing the Benin Bronzes in the basement of the British Museum in 2017. He could not understand why a burial mask was sitting in a glass case — it was meant to go into the ground with the dead. Benin had no written language; the bronze plaques recorded the kingdom's history, like the pages of a picture book. Before the looting there were more than 1,000 plaques; the British Museum holds nearly 200, pulled apart one by one and hung on a wall. His analogy: it is like tearing out the first act of Macbeth and the last act of Hamlet, pasting them together, and calling it Shakespeare. The melody is broken, the story is gone, and history, once taken, has been turned into decoration.
— Victor EhikhamenorIn their own words · checked verbatim
It's gone. That world is gone. So there is no one to give it back to.
David Frum7:56
We have a burglary in the Upper East side. This person has 19 televisions. And 18 of them are stolen.
Matthew Bogans9:31
A long time ago. Everyone in Britain got in a big old boat, and we robbed.
James Acaster12:49
If there's a contest between the governor and the obba, the obba is going to win.
David Frum39:37
Figures
| African objects in one Paris museum | 69,000 held, only 1,000 on display (68,000 never shown) | 31:30 |
| Force in the 1897 Benin expedition | 10 Royal Navy ships, 1,400 soldiers | 15:00 |
| Palace plaques in Benin before the looting | more than 1,000 | 51:12 |
| Benin plaques held by the British Museum | nearly 200 | 51:12 |
| Berlin Conference | 1884 | 13:59 |
| Ban on the British Museum removing objects | 1963 Act of Parliament | 33:42 |
| Trigger for the restitution movement | the killing of George Floyd, 2020 | 25:00 |
| Recipient named by the Nigerian government's handover order | the current Oba of Benin (2023) | 39:37 |
Glossary
- Benin Bronzes
- The thousands of brass, bronze and ivory objects looted from the Kingdom of Benin by the British expedition of 1897, now scattered across more than 160 museums worldwide.
- Deaccession
- The formal institutional act of removing an object from a museum's collection and disposing of it — by sale, transfer or return.
- Oba
- The title of the king of the Kingdom of Benin; the current holder of the line asserts a claim of ownership over the Benin Bronzes.
- Punitive expedition
- A military operation launched by a colonial power to punish a local force for an attack or for refusing to submit, typically accompanied by looting and destruction.
How to listen
Museum directors, collectors and auction houses, legal counsel, and founders working on Africa or colonial history — above all, anyone who wants to understand why ‘well-meaning restitution’ turns into moral arithmetic at the point of execution.