On page vii of Nick Merriman’s account* of his mission, as Director of the Horniman Museum, to get rid of its Benin collection, he dates the handover to Nigeria as November 2023. Not so: it happened a year before. It’s not a promising start to his supposedly peer-reviewed story.
The south London museum’s restitution process is described in grinding detail. The Horniman’s main engagement with its Lewisham neighbours, supposedly demonstrating overwhelming support, turns out to have been an online meeting of 30 self-selected locals, followed by discussion with a panel of just eight visitors.
Much is made of the feelings of schoolchildren and of Lewisham’s Nigerian immigrants of Edo heritage – people from Benin. But if any thought was given to the millions of black Brazilians, Caribbeans and Americans who descend from slaves captured and sold by that West African kingdom, the author never mentions it. They don’t have the comfort of knowing their exact lineage, though today’s DNA tests can confirm the general area from which their ancestors were sold as chattels.
The author downplays regular massed human sacrifice of slaves by the Benin regime, right up to Oba Ovonramwen’s overthrow in February 1897, with something of a throwaway: “… though the extent and scale has been debated” (p83). He seems not to have read the appalling account of the independent Benin kingdom’s last days by the Oba’s warlord Ojo Ibadan, widely published in 1899, and from which I quoted in an article last September:
Ibadan had led the massacre of the first British expedition in 1897, but he then
refused to hand over his mistress for crucifixion, the chiefs having run out of the other female slaves they used for the purpose. They seized him instead. He was about to be beheaded at a sacrificial altar when Oba Ovonramwen, his childhood playmate, saved him, though he remained a prisoner until liberated by the British.
The looting of Benin, Merriman claims, “… seems to have been pre-planned with the aim of defraying some of the costs of the military expedition” (p84). Yet every account of the February 1897 expedition says otherwise. The expedition knew gold was unlikely to be found (in contrast to that other slave-trading kingdom, Dahomey) and according to those who were there, brass and ivory artefacts were removed more as curious souvenirs than for any great market value. Many more wooden ones were lost in an accidental fire which started in the hut of some porters and, spread by a strong wind, burnt the Oba’s compounds.
Rubbing from the lid of a Benin wooden box. The executioner at second left brandishes the severed head from the side panel (above) while drummers play.
Contrary to every contemporary account, the author claims (p30) that the British expedition of January 1897, massacred on its trek to Benin, was “armed”. So emphatically was that expedition unarmed that the local military band it took along to impress the Oba was made to leave behind weapons of any sort. The aim was to persuade the Oba to honour his trade treaty, and to desist from selling and murdering slaves. But the expedition had to be intercepted lest outsiders witness “the Ceremony”, an annual mass beheading and disembowelling of slaves in honour of the Oba’s ancestors, in full swing over many days that January.
Merriman overlooks the disappearance of items restituted to Nigeria in recent years and shows touching faith in the new Digital Benin database to prevent local museum staff and others from stealing their heritage: “Effectively, any stolen Benin object is now valueless” (p85). A fair point, if only they were recorded. But museum professionals agree that hundreds of pieces bequeathed by Britain in 1960 and known to have been in the National Museum in Lagos until around 1980 are now unaccounted for, and can only have been looted by Nigerians. (Digital Benin still admits to only 140 items in Lagos, and calls for the state to publish the inventories of its museums at independence in 1960 have been met with silence.)
And this ‘vanishing’ could still happen today. In a thus far overlooked crime against scholarship, the Horniman – like Washington’s Smithsonian Museum – handed over not just physical items but the copyright in its own images of pieces it owned until recently (p73). Neither museum may permit outsiders to publish the pictures, or even – in the Smithsonian’s case – to look at them. So trying to prove that a restituted bronze relief panel, for example, once safe for future generations in a foreign museum, has been stolen once again in Nigeria, and has disappeared, will be that much harder – particularly if it doesn’t feature on Digital Benin.
Censorship is already happening: I wrote last year
about a scorched wooden box from Benin in Hamburg’s MARKK museum (Museum am Rothenbaum: Kulture und Künste der Welt, accession no. 1047:05). Digital Benin’s photos of the box’s carvings include the end panel where an executioner brandishes his sword over a bound, headless corpse, but oddly, not the most striking detail of the lid, executioners displaying a severed head as drummers celebrate. Once this incriminating box is in its hands, why would not Nigeria delete all images of it from Digital Benin?
One local consulted by the Horniman daringly suggested that the bronzes might not be properly cared for in Benin, but was silenced: the museum’s approach was that its pieces were “stolen goods” and, morally, must be returned. But to whom? The Horniman’s trustees have transferred ownership to the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments, as representing “the Nigerian people”. But everything taken in 1897 had been the Oba’s personal property, and his successors have never relinquished that claim. The Edo people didn’t own or benefit from them then, and nor do they or “the people” now: no pieces returned to Nigeria recently have been shown in any public museum, and that includes the six the Horniman handed over in 2022.
Merriman repeatedly references Barnaby Phillips’ book Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes (2021). This former BBC West Africa correspondent’s engrossing book is a model of research, and he’s clear: legally, in 1897 the Benin artefacts were spoils of war – though just two years later, they wouldn’t have been. But the Horniman’s fixed attitude was that they were “stolen goods” and handing them over was the “moral” thing to do; the embarrassing collection had to be disposed of. Well, Pontius Pilate had clean hands, too.
The process adopted was both secretive, in case the press got wind of it, and hurried; a new chair of trustees was to take office late in 2022 and should not have to take responsibility (and – though not mentioned here – might he take a different attitude?) The deal had to be sealed before he took over, therefore. But history is messy; today’s certainties may look otherwise tomorrow. Nigeria may never overcome either its endemic corruption or its nationwide power cuts, or locate the hundreds of Benin pieces its museums appear to have mislaid since independence. Caring for, and displaying, restituted artefacts in museums with no electricity isn’t simple, as the National Museum Lagos is finding out, and a much-touted new museum has still to materialise.
University museums in Oxford and Cambridge are no nearer to handing over their collections, and the restitution of 1,130 Benin pieces from German museums has stalled. Over a third belong to the museums of Länder (German states) which have not signed agreements, and just a couple of dozen items were flown to Abuja in December 2022: pawns in Germany’s huge antiquities-for-gas deal which I described here:
Restitutions generally ground to a halt when Nigeria’s then president decreed in March 2023 that all restituted Benin pieces must be handed over to the Oba – though oddly, not those in Nigerian state museums.
Will history decide today’s clean-handed museum directors and trustees were wrong to reward unapologetic descendants of Benin’s slave-traders? Already some argue that the slaves those Obas captured and sold were the real victims; and that the best tribute to their suffering would be to keep Benin’s artefacts on display in the world’s museums, with full accounts of that kingdom’s blood-soaked history and of the revolting trade in human beings engaged in by the Obas and their European customers.
Future generations may question today’s rush to restitute, and wonder how we allowed important artefacts to vanish. What did we imagine our museums were for, if not to preserve evidence of former civilisations to be studied, admired, and perhaps reinterpreted by future ones? Only arrogance supposes we, today, have all the answers. Merriman’s 114 page self-exculpation might then be Exhibit A in the case against the Pontius Pilates among today’s museum overseers. By his account, what mattered at the Horniman was total visitor numbers – even if they came for hairstyling or musical events – and a metric known as Advertising Value Equivalent.
Nick Merriman was appointed OBE in January for services to arts and heritage and is the new chief executive of English Heritage, where no doubt he’ll find plenty more of our shared heritage to decolonise.
* Nick Merriman, Returning The Benin Bronzes: a Case Study of the Horniman’s Restitution, Palgrave Macmillan; Cham, Switzerland 2024. ISBN 978-3-031-56100-9. ISBN 978-3-031-56101-6 (eBook). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56101-6
