Opinion | Nigeria should do what it wants with the Benin Bronzes

International repatriation of the bronzes has become a bit … complicated. The outgoing president of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, announced in March that ownership of the bronzes would be transferred to the current Oba (or king) of Benin, Ewuare II; the Oba has said he would build his own museum, near his palace, to display and house them. This threw Western museums for a bit of a loop, as they had made agreements with Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments to take custody of the bronzes and house them in a state museum in Edo, yet to be built.

All of this has some European critics shaken and stirred to anger. Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin, a Swiss ethnologist, wrote an angry column in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine, saying the repatriation was a “fiasco for German politicians and the museum employees who did their bidding.” Now, the bronzes are “a gift to a single royal house,” to a royal family “that, from today’s perspective, also committed horrendous war crimes and crimes against humanity until it was subjugated by the British: notorious wars of aggression over centuries with looting, destruction, massacres, the enslavement of prisoners of war, human sacrifices, and slave trading on a large scale.”

Hauser-Schäublin went on to demean what was left of the Kingdom of Benin, writing that “it now consists of a paean to the embellished past in which the bloody excesses are concealed and denied. This is an affront to the descendants of slaves in the United States and the Caribbean.”

It’s bad enough that Hauser-Schäublin would have the audacity to attempt to speak for Black people in the Western hemisphere and to play down Britain’s murderous campaigns and bloody colonial systems. But by citing Benin’s past, and painting the empire as only a brutal, slave-trading band of war criminals, Hauser-Schäublin reverts to the original reasons the British used to justify violently subjugating and ultimately destroying, the Benin kingdom.

Her article — and the colonial, racist sentiments behind it — would be laughable if the revelations about Nigeria’s plans for the bronzes didn’t have other ripple effects.

Conservative German politicians have blasted Berlin’s decision to repatriate the bronzes. Dorothee Bär, a conservative member of parliament, told the Financial Times that “the government has recklessly consigned African world heritage to oblivion” and that “the pieces will vanish into the private possession of a Nigerian king.” In response, the Nigerian artist and writer Victor Ehikhamenor told the FT: “The audacity of these people — thinking they should decide what we do with objects we’ve been waiting 126 years to get back.”

In Britain, according to a report by the BBC, Cambridge University — which has the second-largest collection of bronzes, after the British Museum — has “quietly postponed” its plans for repatriating more than 100 bronzes.

This conflict shines a light on the problematic nature of what gets to be considered “world heritage” or “universal” art. It doesn’t seem right that art looted in war, taken against the wishes of the people who made it, gets to be labeled universal. It’s like stealing from a store, then slapping a “This Item Is Free” label on it.

Nigeria is a sovereign nation and should be allowed to do what it wants with the pieces of culture stolen from it. When other nations decide to house their artifacts in dark museum storage rooms, or in private collections, it’s called “preservation.” But when Black or African people want to gate-keep their own artifacts, those objects are described as being at risk of vanishing into “oblivion.” Peculiar, innit!

Not only that but the institutions reluctant to relinquish looted African art are the same that often fail in other, more significant ways to promote and showcase African art and culture. It is hard to take their appeals to universalism and care for African culture seriously when these museums, and African studies in the West more broadly, fail to recruit, hire and retain curators, creators and educators from the continent who can teach their own histories and cultures. Is this not an important part of cultural preservation?

Repatriations aren’t just about giving back objects to Africans. They’re about restoring cultural agency and choice. Honestly, I would understand (and maybe even quietly applaud) if the Oba were to decide that some of the bronzes should never be viewed by Europeans again. If and when Nigeria and the Oba grant access to the bronzes, it should be on their own terms.