In April 1897, Frederick Horniman, at the time Britain’s wealthiest tea trader and an avid collector, was offered an opportunity he could not refuse. Through “established commercial sources and private collections” he acquired 12 items of what was referred to as “Benin material” for the modest sum of £30.
Horniman, a Quaker whose parents had been part of the anti-slavery movement and who as a Liberal MP campaigned for what became the welfare state, had become almost certainly the first person in Britain to purchase items stolen barely weeks earlier from Benin City in an 18-day rampage by 5,000 British troops sent to sack one of West Africa’s foremost civilisations.
Upon its return to the UK, the booty from the openly punitive raid was sold, both officially by the Foreign Office to recover the cost of the military operation, and unofficially by the troops themselves, a number of whom had been sufficiently comfortable with their looting in present-day Nigeria to be photographed beside their hauls.
Gentleman aficionados such as Horniman would have been the subject of many offers from these “private collections” and in the next two years, the tea trader continued to acquire 60 more objects emptied from the Benin citadel, among them ornamental plaques telling stories of tribal history and a key to the palace of the Oba, or king.
Worth millions but acquired for the equivalent of a few thousand pounds of modern money, these “Benin bronzes” were put on display among thousands of other artefacts in Horniman’s palatial home in the plush south London suburb of Forest Hill.
Shortly after 1901 a purpose-built museum on the site was bequeathed by the magnate to the then London County Council for the “recreation, instruction and enjoyment” of the capital’s populace. Horniman’s goal, as he saw it, of “bringing the world” to a suburban corner of the British empire’s capital was complete.
A century or so later, the museum’s trustees, required to oversee and shape Horniman’s increasingly thorny legacy, this week recorded another first in his name.
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After a two-year process of consultation and evaluation, it was announced that the 72 Benin bronzes are to be returned to Nigeria, making the Horniman the first major museum directly funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to undertake such a large-scale act of restitution of colonial-era plunder.
The pledge to return the items was made all the more significant by the unvarnished recognition of wrongdoing that accompanied it. Eve Salomon, chair of the Horniman’s trustees said: “The evidence is very clear that these objects were acquired through force… It is both moral and appropriate to return their ownership to Nigeria.”
Other British institutions have previously undertaken smaller returns of Benin artefacts, led by Aberdeen University and Jesus College, Cambridge last year.
But there is a growing view that the Horniman Museum’s decision – alongside a similar announcement last week by Oxford and Cambridge universities to seek the return of 200 items to Nigeria – is a watershed moment in a restitution campaign which has seen the slow erosion of a decades-long refusal by cultural institutions (the UK holdings of Benin bronzes are held by 150 separate bodies) to contemplate the surrender of ill-gotten gains. It is a fact which bears repetition that nearly 90 per cent of major African works of art and artefacts are held outside Africa, most of them in Europe.
Professor Dan Hicks, curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and one of Britain’s leading voices for the return of stolen art, told i he believes western museums now stand on the brink of a decade-long process of artefacts flowing back to their homelands – from the Benin bronzes to Nigeria to the Parthenon Marbles returning to Athens.
The academic, who is the author of the best-selling The Brutish Museums, said: “I think we have reached the point where we are looking at a decade of returns. If you look at the language chosen by the Horniman’s trustees, we can see new things are happening across the country in city and regional museums, arms-length institutions and so on. It is very significant.
“These demands [for restitution] have been made for decades and it has taken far too long to respond. But there has been a sea change in public opinion on this issue. You now cannot be a museum curator in Britain without having to deal with this issue. In my view, the Parthenon marbles will be back [in Greece] by 2030.”
It is indeed hard to escape the sense of a dam breaking in the once rarefied world of western anthropological erudition whereby it is increasingly untenable for the origins of cherished collections to be shielded from the passionate, voluble and convincing arguments from Africa and beyond that colonial plunder be returned. One curator at a major regional museum told iWeekend: “In my view, the argument is already over – if you hold items in your collection as a result of colonial brutality, they’re not yours any more than taking ownership of a stolen Rolex. The only real debate now is how and when to hand this stuff back.”
Alongside Nigeria, claims for the restitution of artefacts from Britain and other western countries are currently being pursued by nations including Kenya, Ghana, Sudan, Egypt, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Angola, Zimbabwe and Gabon. Among the countries alongside Britain where museums have begun to make returns are the United States, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and in particular Germany, which last month signed an agreement with Nigeria for the return of more than 1,000 items acquired from the 1897 Benin attack.
At the heart of these claims, and increasingly behind the returns, is a sense that forcibly obtained treasures represent a spiritual as well as physical theft. As Lai Mohammed, Nigeria’s culture minister, put it earlier this week: “Through [the artefacts] we trace our history, with many recording events, whilst others served spiritual or cultural functions. And it is in knowing our past, anchored in the rich heritage, that new futures might unfold. Refusal to return our historical artefacts deprives us of both.”
That refusal is no more keenly felt than when it comes to what is by far the United Kingdom’s greatest repository of global art and culture in the shape of the British Museum.
The Bloomsbury institution, which holds some 928 Benin bronzes acquired directly from the 1897 attack but displays only about 100 at any one time, is currently working with the Nigerian authorities and other leading international museums on the establishment of a state-of-the-art museum on the site of the main pillaged palaces, including a £3m archaeological excavation.
But when it comes to filling the new facility with items returned from the British Museum itself, discussion remain at an awkward impasse. While the museum says it is enthusiastic to loan items to Nigeria, and elsewhere, it insists it is bound by legislation – the British Museum Act 1963 – which bars the return or “deaccessioning” any of the 4.5m objects in its collection.
Mr Mohammed complains that the British elite is refusing to “get with the times” and claims the British Museum has yet to respond to a formal request made last October from Nigeria for its antiquities. The museum denies this and says it replied in February after “fully reviewing the documents”, though it refuses to be drawn on what it said to the Nigerian authorities.
Experts argue that Britain’s leading museums, in particular the British Museum, are consequently at risk of finding themselves isolated on the global stage by continuing to offer loans and complain of legal restrictions when smaller British institutions such as the Horniman and large museums abroad such as the Smithsonian in Washington and the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris have acknowledged a moral obligation to right a historic wrong.
Prof Hicks said: “It is in my view untenable for the [UK] national museums to hide behind the old manufactured arguments about legal restrictions or circulating artefacts around the world.”
It is a view reinforced by the historian and broadcaster David Olusoga, professor of public history at Manchester University. He told Channel 4 News earlier this week, he said: “It is immoral for us to hold objects that were violently stolen from another people. These are Nigerian national treasures. I know that it is very difficult for the British Museum, it is a very high-profile museum. But the risk is that our greatest national museum is left behind by a global movement which has morality on its side.”
Campaigners argue that Britain’s refusal to review legislation barring the return of artefacts, despite a call last month from V&A director Tristram Hunt for such laws to be reviewed, is exposing “absurdities” in the system.
One of the most graphic contradictions thrown up the restitution wranglings lies in the fate of the Ethiopian tabots, or sacred tablets, held in the British Museum and Westminster Abbey following another infamous incident of British colonial misadventure – the plundering of the fortress of Maqdala in 1868.
The tabots were among thousands of items removed by British forces which, rather like the Benin bronzes, have ended up scattered across dozens of UK institutions. But their sacred nature means they can only be viewed and handled by priests of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, meaning they are kept permanently under lock and key in a room in the British Museum and sealed in an altar at the Abbey.
The British Museum said it put in place measures to safeguard the sanctity of the tabots. A spokesperson added: “The museum’s sustained ambition is to lend these objects to an Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Great Britain where they can be cared for… by the clergy within their traditions.”
Andrew Heavens, the author of a forthcoming book – The Prince and the Plunder – on the Maqdala saga, told i: “With the tabots, we have an utterly absurd situation where they are stuck in limbo, thousands of miles from their place of origin and of no use to anyone at the museum. They are locked away – Schrodinger’s plunder. In Ethiopian culture, a tabot is something beyond price and the outpouring of good will that would be generated by their return would be vast. And yet, as matters stand, we have these tabots orphaned and stranded in Britain – a situation that is generating only bad will. I think one key point that is being missed is the opportunity that these debates present for new beginnings.”
