The University of Aberdeen's Return of a Benin Bronze

Among the wave of Benin Bronzes restitution pledges made by British institutions in 2021, the University of Aberdeen’s stands out for a simple reason: it was actually completed, and quickly. The university did not merely announce an intention to return looted Nigerian art; it became the first UK institution to carry out the full repatriation of a Benin Bronze from its own collection.

The object was a brass sculpture depicting the head of an Oba, or king, of Benin, one of the thousands of court artworks looted by British forces during the punitive expedition that destroyed Benin City in February 1897. The university had acquired the piece legitimately by the standards of its time, purchasing it at auction in 1957, decades after it left Nigeria. It was a routine collections review, undertaken as part of a broader push to research the provenance of contested items, that confirmed the sculpture’s origin in the 1897 looting.

Rather than simply flagging the finding, the university’s Museums and Special Collections team, working with Professor Bankole Sodipo of Babcock University in Nigeria, opened direct talks in 2020 with Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments, the Edo State government, and the royal court of the Oba of Benin. A formal Nigerian request for repatriation followed, and in March 2021 the University Court, the institution’s governing body, unanimously approved the return after review by an expert panel that included representatives from the University of Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum.

The handover ceremony took place on October 28, 2021, at the university’s King’s College campus in Aberdeen, Scotland. Nigerian delegates present included Prince Aghatise Erediauwa, brother of the reigning Oba of Benin, Ewuare II; Professor Abba Isa Tijani, Director-General of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments; and Nigeria’s Deputy High Commissioner to the UK. university principal George Boyne signed the formal transfer alongside the Nigerian delegation, and copyright in images of the piece passed to the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, with the university retaining a non-exclusive license for non-commercial use.

In remarks at the ceremony, Oba Ewuare II rejected the argument, common among institutions resisting restitution, that a later legal purchase erases the injustice of an original theft. The Aberdeen case became a frequently cited precedent in the restitution debate that followed: within days, Jesus College, Cambridge completed a separate repatriation of its own Benin Bronze, and Nigerian officials pointed to Aberdeen’s voluntary, self-initiated process, undertaken without formal legal pressure, as a model they hoped other museums holding Benin material would follow.