2023-05-08 16:23:00
“It was wrong to take her away, and it was wrong to leave her,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said on December 20, 2022 in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital. Together with Claudia Roth, Germany’s Minister of State for Culture and Media, she personally handed over 20 Benin bronzes to Nigeria on this historic day.
Artifacts were kept in German museums for 125 years. And this is only part of the entire collection: about 1,100 artifacts were stolen and taken out by the British army from the palace, which today is located on the territory of modern Nigeria, during the so-called Benin punitive expedition in 1897. Some of the items from this collection later ended up in the German Empire.
At the end of 2022, the act of transferring to Nigeria part of the stolen works of art, which had been in the collection of five German museums for decades, took place. But now the question has arisen as to whether the population of the West African state will ever see these valuable exhibits in the museum?
Benin bronze now belongs to the descendants of the kings of Benin
The other day, the media reported that the President of Nigeria, Muhammad Buhari, had already managed to transfer the Benin bronze to King (Oba) Ewuare II, a descendant of the kings of Benin. The transfer of artifacts took place on March 23, 2023.
The Swiss researcher Brigitte Hauser-Scheublin, in an article published in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine, asked in this connection the question: “And this was the meaning of restitution?” The return of the Benin Bronze has been a “fiasco,” she says. Arrangements to transfer property rights to Nigeria “were formulated in haste,” a scholar criticizes the German government.
According to the statement of the President of Nigeria on March 23 this year, all objects are subject to transfer to the descendant of the kings of Benin, since he has all the rights to own and store the heritage and traditions of the Benin kingdom. And this applies to artifacts that have already been returned, as well as those that are still kept in museums outside of Nigeria. It is up to him to decide how Ewuare II will dispose of the cultural values. He can keep them on his estate, or he can exhibit them in one of the private palaces. But will ordinary people be able to look at valuable exhibits? Can these artifacts be sold to collectors? These questions still remain unanswered.
What do the German government and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation say about the fate of the Benin bronze?
The German government does not believe that now there is reason to doubt the meaning of restitution. “This decision remains the right one: to return the stolen cultural property to the states that today represent the people and culture that were robbed,” Claudia Roth, spokeswoman for the state minister for culture and media, told the German dpa news agency. However, it remains to be clarified, together with the German Foreign Ministry, what the actions of the outgoing Nigerian president mean. “We want to talk about this with the new Nigerian government when it takes over,” spokesman Roth said.
The German Foreign Ministry on Sunday, May 7, voiced a similar position: “Who will be left with the returned Bronze, which institutions and people in Nigeria will be involved in this process, and who is responsible for storing and ensuring public access – these are all issues that It’s up to Nigeria to decide.” “The return of the Benin bronze to Nigeria was not tied to any conditions,” Berlin emphasized.
Hermann Parzinger, an archaeologist, specialist in Scythian culture and chairman of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, is confident that what happened does not call into question the ownership of Nigeria. Parzinger stressed that Nigeria is independent and free to decide on the further fate of the Benin bronze. There is nothing sensational in the very fact of the transfer of artifacts to the descendants of the kings of Benin. Already at the beginning of 2022, the President of Nigeria handed over two artifacts.
In an interview with DW, the German State Minister for Culture and Media in December 2022 stressed that “this act of transfer symbolizes the recognition of the fact that lawlessness was committed in the colonial past – when it was decided to appropriate stolen works of art.” The German Minister of State hopes that this historic event, which she says is also a partial return of a “stolen cultural identity,” will help heal open wounds.
Only now it is not entirely clear whether the people of Nigeria will be able to see the cultural heritage that was stolen from them. Hermann Parzinger looks to the future with optimism. He has no doubt that the artifacts will be displayed in the museum. In addition, about a third can be seen in the Humboldt Forum. It was originally planned that 220 items from Berlin’s Benin Bronze Collection would be on display at the museum “as loaned items”, but that number was later reduced to four dozen.
See also:
#Benin #bronze