2023-05-07 13:57:38
Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock brought the Benin bronzes to Nigeria. what she wants to do now
Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth (left) and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock in Nigeria at the return of the Benin bronzes in December 2022.dpa
It was announced on Saturday that the outgoing Nigerian President Mohammedu Buhari has handed over the bronzes from the historic Kingdom of Benin to the successor of the Benin kings, Oba Ewuare II. So they are now privately owned and the Oba decides what happens to them. On Sunday, the Minister of State for Culture, Claudia Roth, announced: “Together with the Federal Foreign Office, we will clarify what this measure by the outgoing President means. To this end, we want to talk to the new Nigerian government as soon as it takes office. An important basis of the negotiations was the responsibility of the National Commission for Museums & Monuments for the restitution process. It remains correct to return looted art to the states that today represent the people and culture from which this art was once stolen.”
At the end of December, Roth traveled to Nigeria together with Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock to return 20 Benin bronzes, including artefacts from Berlin – an act of reparation loaded with symbolism. Claudia Roth spoke of healing. Has this act now failed? Hundreds of other artefacts from German museums should be returned to Nigeria this year.
The statement makes it clear: the Minister of State for Culture is initially perplexed by this surprising turn of events, she sees a need for clarification. However, she does not initially question the entire return policy with regard to colonial art. However, it is also clear that the German government returned the Benin bronzes to Nigeria under certain conditions, and these were apparently ignored by Nigerian President Buhari.
Benin bronzes were prepared here in the Dahlem Ethnological Museum for return to Nigeria. dpa
In an official notice published on March 23, 2023 entitled “Notice of Presidential Declaration”, Buhari had decreed: “Under the proposed law, all artifacts must be turned over to the Oba of Benin, who exercises the rights of the original owner. This applies to both those already returned and those not yet returned.” After British troops looted and ransacked the Royal Palace of Benin in 1897, at least 3,000 artifacts were scattered internationally.
It is up to the Oba what to do with the Benin Bronzes
The statement went on to say that the Oba is free to decide what to do with the artifacts: he can keep them in his palace or in any other place in Benin City or elsewhere that the Oba and the Nigerian government deem safe. Would the Benin bronzes in the palace be hidden from the eyes of the interested public, i.e. the Nigerian people Annalena Baerbock spoke of?
It is said that a palace museum is to be built there, but whether this private museum will then be open to the public is questionable. And one more thing: could the new owner possibly sell the bronzes to private collectors as well? To collectors in Europe? That would be absurd, but not impossible in private ownership.
In Germany, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung first reported on the process. The guest author Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin, a Swiss scientist, assesses the process highly critically: “For German politics and the museum people who serve their goals, the return of the bronzes to ‘the Nigerian people’ ends in a fiasco. How frivolously worded the agreement on the transfer of ownership between Germany and Nigeria was now clearly shown,” she writes.
The royal house of Benin was involved in the slave trade
Hauser-Schäublin also recalls that the Benin royal family committed the worst war crimes and crimes against humanity before it was subjugated by the British: “Notorious wars of aggression over centuries with looting, destruction, massacres, enslavement of prisoners of war, human sacrifices in honor of the ancestors represented in the memorial heads, as well as large-scale slave hunting and trading.”
In Africa one reacts sensitively to such remarks about the inglorious history of the royal house of Benin. In early May, a comment on the Modern Ghana news website said Westerners should be careful about making the slave trade a purely African affair.
The Nigerian President presented the Oba with two Benin Bronzes in 2021, which came from Great Britain at the time. In 2022, according to a report in the Nigerian newspaper Premium Times, Buhari stated: “My order to return these artifacts to the Oba of Benin marks the beginning of another aspect in the cherished relationship between the Nigerian federal government and our traditional institutions, which are indeed the upholders They are the guardians of our history, customs and traditions.” In Germany and elsewhere, one could at least have guessed what Buhari was up to.
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