The Smithsonian Institution is going to return most of its collection of Benin bronzes to Nigeria.
This is an important milestone in a movement that’s been gaining momentum gradually (too gradually) over the years.
Anglo-American jurisprudence on receipt of stolen property is fairly clear. Even if you bought it without knowing it was stolen, you don’t get to keep it if the original owner and law enforcement track the stolen property to you. You’re owed restitution, sure, but that comes from the party that stole it in the first place.
I can understand why people hesitate about routinizing land acknowledgements. It’s easy for them to become empty of meaning, to interrupt rather than stimulate reflection, to substitute for thinking about what kinds of transformations might be possible. I also understand why transformation in this respect is a harder challenge despite it being undeniable that North American land is almost all stolen by any standard you care to name. Even in terms of the legal standards, everyone understands that if enough time has passed and property has passed through enough hands, identifying the party who committed the theft for restitution becomes more and more difficult and identifying the specific owners to whom the property should be restored also becomes difficult, particularly if they held property in a completely different sociopolitical framework. Unravelling theft at huge scales that has unfolded over centuries requires some degree of abstraction about the kind of value that is returned and about where that value should come from.
But there shouldn’t be much thought required when the stolen property that’s held can be tied to a specific, tangible moment of violent appropriation in the concretely knowable past, when the institution holding the property has the resources to return it, and when there is a receiving party that is an appropriate steward of the people it was stolen from. This is especially true for museum and university collections where the provenance of the stolen objects is an intrinsic part of their value to those institution.
Every museum or collector that today has Benin bronzes knows exactly where they are from and how they were taken as plunder by an invading British army. That’s the point: that’s what makes them valuable, that they come from an identifiable place within an identifiable history. They represent four centuries or so of artistic work set within a remarkable and carefully built structure that was part of a remarkable and carefully built city. They were taken by a British military expedition that was allegedly avenging the killing of an earlier British expedition—an earlier British expedition of speculators and plunderers who had planned to overthrow the rulers of the Kingdom of Benin. If you found yourself feeling furious about recent Russian plans to create false provocations that would justify their invasion of Ukraine, spare a thought or two for the innumerable episodes of exactly the same behavior by European governments in 19th and 20th Century Africa. “What? The Kingdom of Benin defended itself against a small group of British plunderers (after giving them fair warning not to try to come into the city)? The deuce you say. Send a bigger force to sack the city and steal every damn thing of value in it.”
I’m so grateful that the Smithsonian has given up on the weak, unacceptable defenses that several generations of museum leaders have offered up before this point. It’s true that the Benin bronzes and a great many similar artifacts have been important for producing knowledge about Benin and its neighboring societies over the last six centuries. It’s true that they’re extraordinary artistic works. But most of what anybody might want to know from studying the objects themselves can be done not just as well but better if they’re held and exhibited closer to where they came from. We now have huge numbers of high-quality images of the objects to work with, in any event.
It may even be true that the Smithsonian, the British Museum and other institutions are in a better financial position to exhibit them for larger number of visitors than any current Nigerian institution. But you know, if that’s the concern, then perhaps all the money being spent to exhibit, protect, and generally curate these artifacts and artistic works could be donated from one set of wealthy institutions to a set of wealthy institutions elsewhere. Expertise could be donated and built up on a global scale. Moreover, it’s not at all clear that institutions in wealthy capitalist societies are any more reliable in the long haul than anywhere else when it comes to keeping collections for the public good. They’re subject to punishing austerity if they’re publically funded, they’re under the control of boards and directors who can capriciously decide to get rid of collections because they want more money to put into an endowment or to build a new wing, they sometimes deny access to vast unexhibited collections rather than treat them as part of what they hold in trust for the world, and so on.
More to the point, the institutions and researchers who have dragged their heels on repatriating or transferring artistic works, artifacts, human remains and other materials just never seem able to square the privileged claims they make about building universal knowledge or scientific understanding for the good of all mankind with the blatantly unequal character of what they are holding on to. The anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss can argue if she likes with regard to repatriating Native American remains or mummies,
“I’m against reburying bones. I think they can tell us a lot about the past,” Weiss said of her views. “I think they can be used to train forensic anthropologists. I think that they are a key resource for young anthropologists, for archaeologists, forensic anthropologists, and I think that we still have a lot to learn from skeletal remains. I also think that a collection is not something that you study once and then it can be repatriated, because as you build knowledge on the collection, it helps you ask deeper questions as you learn more about the collection.”
but that can’t hide the self-protecting sophistry behind that argument. It would be one thing to argue that all cemeteries, all human remains, of a certain age should be held by scientists and researchers to improve our understanding of the past and train scholars of the future. I wouldn’t agree with that call but it would have the virtue of some kind of consistent vision of inquiry on its side. That is not a project of retention, it is a breathtakingly ambitious call for a complete change in global material culture that would involve comprehensively digging up cemeteries across all of North America and Europe, among other things. Should you observe, “but we know a lot about those dead people, just not about these other dead people whose remains we’re still studying”, this is absolute rubbish. There are many things we might learn if we funded a massive research project to dig up all the remains of Europeans and European settlers who were buried between 1400 CE and 1850 CE and study them comprehensively. We won’t ever do it—or even call for it—because we feel obliged to respect the religions, cultures and values that put those remains into the earth in what are held to be sacred places.
That the remaining defenders of holding the remains of certain people don’t call for that shows that what they’re really defending is that it’s ok for certain people to be dug up, studied, and stolen from. Just as the remaining defenders of holding aesthetically remarkable objects in a small set of museums located in countries that organized the conquest and plundering of other societies are not arguing that all aesthetically remarkable objects should be held by institutions devoted to the public good. Otherwise they’d have to call for using eminent domain to raid many private collections and even to end all private sales of art.
There is no jurisprudence in any existing contemporary nation that says “If I can use what you own better than you can (in my own judgment and by my own ad hoc standards) then I can steal it with impunity and regard myself as a moral paragon.” But this is precisely what imperial conquerors said openly and without apparent shame—and it is what museums, universities and researchers who continue to defend the possession of stolen art and artifacts are still saying to this day. In a moment that feels as if we’re losing ground, it’s comforting to see a good change still coming our way.
I have refused to look at Benin bronzes for decades, basically, so I'm glad that they will be repatriated. At last.