1897 and the Benin Bronzes

As a young African kid growing up in the motherland, the famous Idia mask was almost the go-to artifact to portray the sophistication of African arts and culture in the media. Images of it have splashed across the world, from luxury magazines to art symposiums, and it has even been turned into logos for some organisations. Clips of Nigeria’s FESTAC ‘77, which had the mask as the festival’s emblem, were still being beamed on TV screens across the continent.

The craftsmanship involved and the detailing in each of these precolonial works of art always made me proud of how advanced we were, culturally. However, until recently, with some being returned, they were all housed thousands of kilometres away from their place of origin. Thousands of artifacts were carted away from the Oba of Benin’s domain at the tail end of the 19th century, when European armies were marching across the continent, pillaging and subduing nations with the trickery of unfavourable treaties backed by the barrel of the gun and, later, a slew of missionaries. The Kingdom of Benin was not spared in their onslaught.

Nobody counted what British troops carried out of Benin City in February 1897. The curator Felix von Luschan, who tried to list every piece in 1919, arrived at about 2,400. Later scholars worked with 3,000 to 5,000, and in 2017 historians and collectors in Benin City told the art historian Felicity Bodenstein that the figure was 5,000 to 10,000.¹ The archaeologist Dan Hicks reckons the objects are on show in about 161 museums and galleries in Europe and North America.²

The brass heads and plaques, ivory tusks and regalia that the world now calls the Benin Bronzes were made for the Oba, the king, and his court, by hereditary guilds that worked for him.³ They stood in the palace and on royal and ancestral altars, and they were never made to be sold.⁴ The metal came through European trade. A 2023 geochemical study found that most of the brass had been made in Germany and probably reached Benin as manillas, the horseshoe-shaped rings Europeans paid out as currency on the coast.⁵ How the objects came to be in Berlin, London, Washington and Christchurch, New Zealand,⁶ and how some of them have begun to go back, is a story of a war, a market and a century-long argument.

The treaty and the trade, 1892-1896

Benin sat across the trade routes behind the Niger delta, and the Oba controlled them. He took dues, which the British called “presents,” from the Itsekiri middlemen who carried goods to the coast, and he could close the trade when they were withheld. Palm kernels were a royal monopoly.⁷ Bodenstein writes that the invasion was largely driven by British officials’ ambition to control those routes.⁸

In March 1892 Vice-Consul Henry Gallwey reached Benin City to get a treaty. The Oba, Ovonramwen, kept him waiting three days, until Gallwey threatened to leave and not come back as a “friend.” Gallwey judged the court interpreter too frightened of the Oba and used an Akure servant instead. Ovonramwen, conferring with his chiefs, asked many times “whether it was peace or war.” In the end he would not touch the pen, saying he was engaged in a ritual, and the chiefs touched it after his name had been written for him.⁹ The printed treaty said the Queen extended her protection “in compliance with the request of the King of Benin.”¹⁰ It bound Ovonramwen to accept British advice on his internal government as well as his dealings with his neighbours, and it opened the kingdom to traders of every nation and to Christian missionaries.¹¹

Gallwey wrote in the Geographical Journal that “the extensive dominions of the King of Benin are now under Her Majesty’s protection.”¹² Consul-General Macdonald, who forwarded the treaty to London, wrote that “the Benin territory is a very rich and most important one,” and listed minerals, gums, palm oil and kernels.¹³ Alan Ryder, the historian of Benin’s four centuries of dealings with Europe, doubted that Ovonramwen understood provisions so far from the existing order, and thought the Oba and his chiefs, anxious only to avoid a “war palaver,” were probably unaware that they had signed away their independence.¹⁴ Historians at the University of Benin put it more bluntly. Collins Edigin points out that the treaty opened on the false claim that the Oba had asked for it, and Charles Osarumwense calls it a deception that was never properly explained to him.¹⁵ Philip Igbafe, writing in 1970, saw the treaty as a means of securing economic control through political control.¹⁶

The treaty changed nothing on the ground. Pressure to make it work came partly from traders and partly from the Treasury, which insisted that the protectorate pay for itself out of the import duties it had begun to levy in 1891.¹⁷ In 1894 Ralph Moor, then acting consul-general, broke Nana, the most powerful of the Itsekiri traders on the Benin River, and began planning an armed march on Benin City. Macdonald stopped him and insisted that peaceful means be tried first.¹⁸ Nana’s fall frightened Ovonramwen. “The king has shut himself up since October 1894,” Gallwey reported, “and has refused all overtures from the white man.”¹⁹

On April 2, 1896, the Oba stopped all trade with the Itsekiri. Moor, consul-general by then, told London that the Oba took every peaceful approach as a sign of fear and weakness, and asked for an expedition in the coming dry season. The Foreign Office was not convinced. “The King of Benin may have to be dealt with, but it should be set about with care and with a sufficient force, and at our own time,” an official minuted, and Lord Salisbury told Moor to persevere with peaceful means.²⁰ Edigin argues that this was the pattern across West Africa: London wanted no costly new commitments, and the push for conquest came from consuls and traders on the spot.²¹

In November 1896, with Moor on leave in Britain, the acting consul-general, James Phillips, found every market in the Oba’s territory closed again. He wrote to London: “I am certain that there is only one remedy, that is to depose the king of Benin from his stool.” He asked permission to go to Benin City in February “to depose and remove the king of Benin and to establish a native council in his place.”²² He planned to take 250 protectorate troops, 150 Hausas, two seven-pounder guns and a Maxim, and Moor later confirmed that an intelligence officer had spent 18 months mapping the approaches to the city.²³ Phillips described the Edo as “a most unwarlike people.”²⁴ He hoped, he added in a postscript, that “sufficient ivory may be found in the King’s house to pay the expenses incurred in removing the King from his Stool.”²⁵

Phillips’s journey, January 1897

The Foreign Office said no, for now. Its cable of Jan. 8, 1897, and a despatch the next day gave the reason: there were not enough troops.²⁶ By then Phillips had already left. He set out from Sapele on Jan. 2 with protectorate officials and two traders, Gordon of the African Association and Powis of Miller Brothers, along with clerks, cooks and carriers.²⁷ Why a man who had asked for an armed force two months earlier now went in a hurry without one is still argued over. Igbafe thought it was most likely a reconnaissance, and that Phillips did not believe the Bini would fight. Ryder suggests he wanted the credit for making the Oba receive him while Moor was away.²⁸

That night his messengers came back from the Oba. Ovonramwen thanked him and asked him not to come: he was occupied with a festival and offered to receive Phillips and one Itsekiri chief about a month later. At Ughoton the next day his messengers asked again. Phillips refused both times.²⁹ The Itsekiri chief Dogho also urged him to turn back.³⁰

The festival was Igue (Igbafe writes “Ague”), a festival of rededication. Igbafe points out that it did not involve human sacrifice, whatever British writers later claimed.³¹ How much the timing mattered is disputed. For Osarumwense and his University of Benin colleague Odion Osiki, Igue was a period of seclusion in which strangers were not allowed to see the Oba, and Phillips’s insistence was a violation of Benin custom.³² Edun Akenzua, a descendant of Ovonramwen, wrote in 1960 that during the festival the king could neither see nor be seen by anyone who was not Bini.³³ Ryder was more skeptical. The festival, he notes, had not been closed to Europeans in the past, and for years Ovonramwen had cited religious ceremonies to put off consular visits he did not want.³⁴

The decision to fight was not the Oba’s alone. At the trial later in 1897, the chief Obakhavbaye said that when word came that the white men were “coming with war,” Ovonramwen told his people “you must not fight with them” and to let them come; the senior chiefs answered that “the king’s word is not good” and sent men to fight. Of the Benin chiefs, only the Ezomo is known to have backed the Oba. Ranged against him were the Iyase, the war chief Ologbosere and others, among them the chiefs who directed the attack.³⁵ Osarhieme Osadolor, a historian at the University of Benin, reads the split as a quarrel between the war leaders and an Oba whose trade policy some chiefs disliked, sharpened by fear of the size of Phillips’s party.³⁶ Akenzua wrote that the people of Benin came to see the disaster as a misunderstanding and blamed the rashness of Ologbosere as well as the foolhardiness of Phillips.³⁷

On Jan. 4 the party walked in single file into an ambush near Ugbine. Alan Boisragon, one of the two British survivors, later wrote that they must have passed nearly a mile of warriors hidden barely 20 yards from the road. The officers had been told they could carry revolvers but not show them, so the guns were locked in the baggage, and when the shooting began, Boisragon recalled, Phillips said, “No revolvers, gentlemen.”³⁸ Omoregboma, the Benin guide who led the party from Ughoton, testified that he ran ahead and knelt before Ologbosere to beg him not to kill the white men, and then told the king, “I tried all my best to stop the people from killing the whitemen but I could not.” The Oba, he said, was so angry that he threatened to leave the city and let the chiefs fight the war that would follow.³⁹ All but two of the British party, Boisragon and Ralph Locke, were killed, along with many of their carriers.⁴⁰

Evidence at the trial showed that Benin had not believed Phillips’s talk of peace and had been expecting war since the British deported Nana in 1894.⁴¹ Boisragon’s book, The Benin Massacre, came out within the year and shaped how Britain remembered the ambush. Locke, the other survivor, was reported to have been “deeply angered” by it.⁴²

Nine days in February

The Foreign Office now ordered an expedition “to take the City of Benin, & if possible the King himself, and to arrange for the occupation of the town.”⁴³ Ships were pulled from the Cape and Mediterranean squadrons, and by early February about 1,500 sailors, marines and protectorate troops had been assembled.⁴⁴ Admiral Harry Rawson cut his naval landing party to 700 fighting men, more, he judged, than the task needed.⁴⁵ The columns moved on Feb. 10 along three routes, took Sapoba on the 11th and Ologbo on the 12th, and fought a running battle to the city.⁴⁶

Benin’s defense was divided. The Ezomo, one of its two senior war commanders, judged the war a bad one and stayed in his compound. Ologbosere took charge of the city. At Ughoton, where the Edo had expected the main attack, the defense was led by Ebeikhinmwin, a warrior with no command rank, and the British column there made no headway at all.⁴⁷ The main column reached Benin City on Feb. 18. Ovonramwen stayed in his palace until a rocket landed in one of its courtyards, then left with most of his chiefs.⁴⁸ Moor reported that the troops took the city at about 2 o’clock after a charge over the last 200 yards.⁴⁹

What happened next is disputed. Rawson sent parties to destroy the compounds of the queen mother and a senior chief, the sacrificial and crucifixion trees and the shrines.⁵⁰ Moor wrote that “a fire, unfortunate only in that we were unprepared for it, broke out about 4 P.M. on the 21st” and destroyed the king’s quarters and everything round them.⁵¹ Igbafe, working from the official papers, wrote that the troops burned most of the city on Feb. 19 and 20, ending in the great fire of the 21st.⁵²

The troops described a city full of the remains of human sacrifice, and those descriptions became the justification for the war. The historian Robin Law accepts that sacrifice in Benin grew from about the 1830s to the 1880s, but finds that European observers “grossly exaggerated” its scale. The killings the troops found in 1897, he concludes, were mostly a desperate response to the British attack, “rather than vice versa.”⁵³ Akenzua made the same point in 1960.⁵⁴ Five years earlier, on his treaty visit, Gallwey had reported seeing crucified victims on the plain outside the palace.⁵⁵ Within four weeks of the city’s fall, an officer wrote home, the occupiers had laid out “a good nine-hole course,” and its best green lay “immediately beneath a tree known as the ‘crucifixion tree.’”⁵⁶

So is the death toll. Rawson reported 10 of his force killed in action, two officers and eight men, and 50 wounded.⁵⁷ “On the Bini side,” Hicks writes, “the military and civilian casualties were never estimated.”⁵⁸ Hicks argues that tens of thousands died. In a 2024 article, Staffan Lundén of the University of Gothenburg argues that the documents do not support that figure. He counts about 60 Edo dead actually seen by British witnesses, notes that the Edo carried away their fallen, and cites the historian Robert Home’s estimate of “several hundred” killed.⁵⁹ The historian Paddy Docherty puts the toll “assuredly” in the hundreds and possibly in the thousands, once the displaced and the disruption to food supplies are counted.⁶⁰ Nobody kept count, so the dispute cannot be settled from the record.

Trophies, sales and museums

No list was made of what was taken. Bodenstein finds that the objects were split three ways: official trophies, some of which went straight to the Queen, among them two ivory leopards; pieces set aside for sale; and a share kept by senior officers. There was no formal prize system of the kind used in China in 1860.⁶¹ Gallwey, who went with the expedition, called the collecting a “harvest.”⁶² Moor wanted the ivory. The brass heads, he thought, were “hideously constructed.”⁶³ By early March he had sold ivory for £800.⁶⁴ Benin was not an isolated case. From the 1880s British forces in southern Nigeria had made shrines a target, and officers such as Robert Allman, the protectorate’s principal medical officer, collected on one punitive expedition after another, from the Cross River in 1895 to the Aro campaign of 1901-02.⁶⁵

The Foreign Office lent 304 plaques from the Crown’s share to the British Museum in the summer of 1897. They went on show that September, propped on screens in the Assyrian Saloon, a lecture room in the basement. The press almost unanimously praised the workmanship, while repeating the gruesome stories of the expedition.⁶⁶ The next year the museum was given just over 200 of the plaques, and the Foreign Office sold the rest to help pay for the expedition.⁶⁷ The museum’s curators, Charles Hercules Read and Ormonde Dalton, dated the earliest plaques to the mid-16th century, “perhaps with the help of the Portuguese,” and wrote of Benin as a capital “doomed to lie waste.”⁶⁸ Their 1899 catalogue spoke of objects “obtained by the recent successful expedition sent to Benin to punish the natives of that city for a treacherous massacre of a peaceful English mission.”⁶⁹ Allman, for his part, called the Edo “most skilful and proficient” in casting brass and carving ivory.⁷⁰

Collectors moved fast. Frederick Horniman bought ivories for his museum in south London in March 1897 from W. J. Hider, a Royal Navy man who had been on the expedition and, the museum now says, “was personally involved in the looting.”⁷¹ Von Luschan cabled the German consulate in Lagos to buy loot “regardless of the price.”⁷² The consul, Eduard Schmidt, bought at least 80 looted objects between February and August 1897. Some of them passed to Max Schöller, a German sugar magnate, who in January 1899 gave nine Benin bronzes, four of them heads of Obas, to the Lisbon Geographic Society.⁷³ Berlin built the larger collection: by von Luschan’s 1919 count it held 580 Benin objects to the British Museum’s more than 280.⁷⁴ Ndubuisi Ezeluomba, a curator at the New Orleans Museum of Art, puts the difference down to British condescension toward the objects and the larger budgets of German museums.⁷⁵ At the London auctions of William Downing Webster and Henry Stevens, prices ran from 10 shillings for a brass bracelet to £40 for a large head or a long ivory tusk. Von Luschan bought one of the Queen Idia heads for Berlin for £31.⁷⁶

The market never stopped. A German study of 2018 traced how the first five years of sales built the European market for Benin loot.⁷⁷ Between 2002 and 2016, Sotheby’s sold 51 pieces from the Edo kingdom for about 14 million euros.⁷⁸ In 2007 four museums, in Vienna, Paris, Berlin and Chicago, staged a Benin exhibition of 300 works from 25 lenders. In Paris the sections on the fall of Benin and on the kingdom today were left out.⁷⁹ The directors’ preface called the 1897 attack unjustifiable “from our 21st century perspective,” and added that “we must recognize the role it played in bringing these works of art to far broader attention.”⁸⁰

The Oba in exile

Ovonramwen stayed out of British hands for nearly six months. He surrendered on Aug. 5, 1897, with about ten of his chiefs, and two days later the acting British resident told him in front of a large crowd that he had been deposed.⁸¹ Moor arrived on Aug. 31 and opened the trial the next day in the consular court, with two European officers and about 70 Benin chiefs present.⁸² Six chiefs were found guilty of killing Phillips’s party. One had killed himself, one had died, one was a boy and was pardoned, and Ologbosere was still at large. The other two, Uso and Obakhavbaye, were shot on Sept. 4.⁸³ Under Benin custom, Osiki and Osarumwense point out, “the Oba was the law and can never be tried.”⁸⁴

Ovonramwen was not among those convicted. On Sept. 7 Moor offered him a place as a chief in the new order and proposed to take him on a tour of Calabar, Lagos and Yoruba towns to see how they were governed, promising that he would “return to his country when the farms are planted and the crops are grown up ready to reap.” Akenzua wrote that the Oba’s courtiers told him this was a trick to exile him.⁸⁵ On the morning of Sept. 9 Ovonramwen did not appear at the meeting. Moor sent armed men, and the Oba was found that afternoon and sentenced to exile. “Today I was in my house when I saw plenty soldiers coming and going round the house,” he told the court, “so I ran away to Ojumo’s village only.”⁸⁶ Igbafe calls the outcome “foregone.” Ryder thought a little more patience on Moor’s side might have spared the Oba his exile.⁸⁷

He left Benin City on Sept. 13, 1897, for exile in Calabar.⁸⁸ A photograph taken on the protectorate yacht Ivy shows him seated, with chains visible below his robe.⁸⁹ Ologbosere and Ebeikhinmwin kept fighting from the forest.⁹⁰ Ologbosere was captured in May 1899, tried again before Moor and the new Native Council, and executed on June 28; Barnaby Phillips marks his death as the end of organized Edo resistance.⁹¹

The British governed through a Native Council of chiefs chosen not by rank but because they had submitted quickly.⁹² Chief Agho Obaseki became the most prominent of the chiefs who worked with the British, and the chiefs who wanted Ovonramwen back began organizing in 1899. Their plans for risings were betrayed in 1899 and again in 1906, when the “Benin Scare” set off a panic.⁹³ The new administration’s first concern, Igbafe notes, was economic: soon after the conquest, rubber tappers from the Lagos Colony overran Benin’s forests, and the protectorate moved to regulate them and to invite Liverpool firms in.⁹⁴ The economist James Fenske argues that rubber was one motive for the conquest, and that the government failed to protect the forests from overtapping and gave up on the industry as a failure in 1921.⁹⁵ Foreign timber firms followed, and Frank Ikponmwosa and Joseph Osagie find that Benin’s own people, the owners of the forests, were pushed aside.⁹⁶ Competition for the forests also set Benin people against Urhobo migrants working them, Uyilawa Usuanlele writes.⁹⁷

Ovonramwen died in Calabar in January 1914. The British came close to making Obaseki Oba in his place, and all but one of the senior kingmakers agreed to serve under him. In July that year Ovonramwen’s son was installed instead as Oba Eweka II, and the British then had him make Obaseki the Iyase, by tradition the Oba’s first subject.⁹⁸ Eweka II rebuilt the palace on a smaller scale and revived its rituals, and in 1927 he set up an art school in front of it. The casters and carvers now worked for merchants, colonial officials and visitors.⁹⁹

Getting them back

One early return was Ovonramwen’s royal regalia, sent back by the British in 1938. His grandson, Oba Akenzua II, was photographed wearing it.¹⁰⁰ Most of the other early transfers were sales. In the 1950s the British Museum sold some of its Benin plaques to the new museums in Nigeria founded by Kenneth Murray. It sold or exchanged a dozen more with dealers and collectors as late as 1972, calling them duplicates. Phillips points out that no two castings are alike.¹⁰¹

Buying back was expensive. A pair of brass leopards from the palace sold at auction in London in August 1897 for £53. In 1930 the French dealer Charles Ratton paid £700 for them, and in 1952 the colonial museum in Lagos bought them from Louis Carré’s New York gallery for £7,133, more than Murray’s first budget of £5,000 for building the whole museum. They went to Lagos, not Benin City.¹⁰² “Today we have to buy them back at extortionate prices from the descendants of those who took them,” Akenzua wrote in 1960.¹⁰³ Nigeria became independent that year, and the archaeologist Neil Brodie calls Britain’s failure to return the material then a further injustice on top of the looting.¹⁰⁴

The quarrel that Nigerians remember came in the 1970s. For FESTAC, the festival of Black and African arts held in Lagos in early 1977, Nigeria asked to borrow the British Museum’s ivory mask of Queen Idia, which had become the festival’s emblem. The museum refused on conservation grounds: in the curator John Picton’s words, the ivory “would shift and the surface would crack” in the humidity. The Daily Times of Lagos called it a “tragi-comedy.” The museum offered a resin replica. It sat unclaimed for years.¹⁰⁵ By 2018 Nigeria and Ethiopia had been asking for their objects back for nearly half a century, Sarr and Savoy noted in the report they wrote for the French government.¹⁰⁶

In 2007 the British Museum and other European museums formed the Benin Dialogue Group with the Royal Court of Benin, the Edo State government and Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments. Its plan was a royal museum in Benin City.¹⁰⁷ Through most of its life the group favoured long-term loans over returns, Cresa Pugh notes.¹⁰⁸

Returns since 2021

The ground shifted on Nov. 28, 2017, when France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, told students at the University of Ouagadougou that he wanted the conditions for temporary or permanent returns of African heritage in place within five years.¹⁰⁹ “African heritage cannot solely exist in private collections and European museums,” he said. A report he commissioned from Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy recommended in November 2018 that France return objects taken by force.¹¹⁰ Then the change came fast. In April 2021 Lambeth Palace offered to return two bronze busts given to Archbishop Robert Runcie in 1982, though it pointed out that they were modern gifts, “not taken from Benin in 1897.”¹¹¹ On Oct. 27, 2021, Jesus College, Cambridge, handed over a brass cockerel, the okukur, and gave up ownership to the Oba.¹¹² The next day the University of Aberdeen returned the head of an Oba that it had bought at auction in 1957. “It would not have been right to have retained an item of such great cultural significance that was acquired in such reprehensible circumstances,” its principal, George Boyne, said.¹¹³

Germany went furthest. In a joint declaration signed in Berlin on July 1, 2022, it committed to transfer to Nigeria the ownership of all the Benin Bronzes in its public museums, 1,130 objects identified so far, with some kept in Germany on loan.¹¹⁴ In the United States, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art returned 29 bronzes under a new ethical-returns policy and kept some on loan. A New York group, the Restitution Study Group, went to court to stop the returns, arguing that the bronzes were cast from manillas paid for enslaved Africans and that their descendants had a claim. A court refused its request for an emergency order, finding too little evidence of a link to the objects.¹¹⁵ On Nov. 28, 2022, the Horniman Museum transferred ownership of 72 objects to Nigeria and handed six of them back that evening.¹¹⁶

Not everything called a Benin Bronze was taken in 1897. When eight Swiss museums worked through their 96 Benin objects with a historian based in Benin City, they found 21 that were looted in 1897 and 32 that probably were. The other 43 were probably or certainly acquired some other way.¹¹⁷

Who owns them in Nigeria

Returns raised a new question: to whom. Edo State’s former governor, Godwin Obaseki (2016-2024), backed the Legacy Restoration Trust and its planned Edo Museum of West African Art. The Oba objected that diverting custody of the objects “is not in the interest of the people of Benin Kingdom.”¹¹⁸ On March 23, 2023, the late Muhammadu Buhari, then president of Nigeria (2015-2023), issued an order vesting ownership of the returned objects in the Oba. It was published in the Official Gazette dated March 28, which is the date some writers give for the order.¹¹⁹ Its eighth section gives the Oba ownership, custody and management of the returned objects and directs him to work with recognized institutions to keep them secure.¹²⁰

The law professor L. Amede Obiora reads the order as recognition of the traditional institution that colonial and Nigerian law had pushed aside.¹²¹ The Igun community in Benin City is home to the descendants of the bronze-casters’ guild that made the objects, and more than a dozen casting families still work on Igun Street.¹²² Surveying the community, the legal scholar Afolasade Adewumi found the view widely held that the objects belonged with the Oba, not the state government.¹²³ Critics in the art trade saw it otherwise. Writing in the art-market magazine Tribal Art, Yves-Bernard Debie called it a privatization of objects that had been public for more than a century.¹²⁴ Chukwuemeka Nwigwe of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and Nkechinyere Anyaoha of the University of Maiduguri argue that after so long abroad the objects are little studied in Nigeria itself.¹²⁵

The argument over 1897

The history has become part of the fight. The picture of Benin as a “City of Blood” began, Osadolor and his colleague Leo Otoide argue, with Richard Burton’s account of a short visit in 1862 and was fixed by two books of 1897, Boisragon’s The Benin Massacre and Reginald Bacon’s Benin: The City of Blood, written to justify the conquest.¹²⁶ In 2013 the lawyer Salome Kiwara-Wilson argued that the principles used to return art looted by the Nazis should apply to colonial plunder like the Benin objects.¹²⁷ Hicks’s The Brutish Museums (2020) argued that the scale of British violence in 1897 had been grossly understated and that perhaps 10,000 objects were taken.¹²⁸ Lundén, author of a 2016 doctoral study of the Benin objects in the British Museum, answered in 2024 that Hicks’s figures for the dead and for the loot have no support in the sources. An inaccurate history, he argues, makes it harder to repair past wrongs.¹²⁹ Lundén has been just as hard on the British Museum, whose director from 2002 to 2015, Neil MacGregor, he accuses of whitewashing its record to justify keeping the collection.¹³⁰

The British Museum still holds the largest collection of Benin Bronzes, and it says it cannot give it back. The 1963 Act allows it to dispose of objects only in narrow cases such as duplicates, and neither the director nor the trustees can return the bronzes unless Parliament changes the law. “We have a lot of discretion about loans,” one trustee told Barnaby Phillips. “But not returns.”¹³¹ The legal scholar Carsten Stahn reads the Act less strictly. It lets the trustees dispose of objects they judge “unfit to be retained,” and the Charities Act 2022 opened a route for disposals on moral grounds. “The barrier to return is thus partly self-inflicted,” he writes.¹³²

Saddening.

Notes

1. Bodenstein 2018, p. 268 and n. 7; Hicks 2020, p. 147. ↩

2. Hicks 2020, p. 3. ↩

3. Kaplan 1991, p. 206. ↩

4. Bodenstein 2018, pp. 267-268; Pugh 2025, p. 3. ↩

5. Skowronek et al. 2023, pp. 1-2; Read and Dalton 1898, p. 375. ↩

6. Fyfe and Murray 2014, p. 7. ↩

7. Igbafe 1970, p. 390. ↩

8. Bodenstein 2018, p. 267. ↩

9. Ryder 1969, pp. 269-271, from Gallwey’s report of March 30, 1892. ↩

10. Treaty of March 26, 1892, art. I, printed in Egharevba 1968, appendix XIII, p. 86. ↩

11. Igbafe 1970, p. 387; Ryder 1969, p. 272. ↩

12. Gallwey 1893, p. 128. ↩

13. Igbafe 1970, p. 388. ↩

14. Ryder 1969, pp. 271-272. ↩

15. Edigin 2020, p. 34; Osarumwense 2014, p. 4. ↩

16. Igbafe 1970, p. 387. ↩

17. Ryder 1969, pp. 272-273. ↩

18. Ryder 1969, pp. 275, 278-279. ↩

19. Gallwey to the Foreign Office, Oct. 20, 1896, quoted in Ryder 1969, p. 280. ↩

20. Ryder 1969, pp. 280-282. ↩

21. Edigin 2020, pp. 29-30, 33. ↩

22. Phillips to the Foreign Office, Nov. 16, 1896, quoted in Igbafe 1970, p. 395; Ryder 1969, pp. 283-284. ↩

23. Ryder 1969, p. 284. ↩

24. Phillips to the Foreign Office, Nov. 16, 1896, quoted in Igbafe 1970, p. 396 n. 63. ↩

25. Phillips to the Under Secretary of State, Nov. 16, 1896, quoted in Obiora 2025, p. 3. ↩

26. Igbafe 1970, p. 395; Ryder 1969, p. 285. ↩

27. Igbafe 1970, p. 395 and n. 58. ↩

28. Igbafe 1970, p. 396; Ryder 1969, p. 286. ↩

29. Igbafe 1970, p. 396. ↩

30. Ryder 1969, p. 286. ↩

31. Igbafe 1970, p. 396 n. 62. ↩

32. Osarumwense 2014, pp. 2, 4; Osiki and Osarumwense 2019, p. 369. ↩

33. Akenzua 1960. ↩

34. Ryder 1969, p. 286. ↩

35. Evidence at the trial, Public Record Office, F.O. 2/123, quoted in Ryder 1969, pp. 287-288. ↩

36. Osadolor 2001, p. 216. ↩

37. Akenzua 1960. ↩

38. Boisragon 1897, pp. 78-79, 98, 100-101. ↩

39. Evidence of Omoregboma at the trial, quoted in Ryder 1969, pp. 288-289; Egharevba 1968, p. 55. ↩

40. Igbafe 1970, p. 396; Ryder 1969, p. 288. ↩

41. Igbafe 1970, p. 397. ↩

42. Robert Home, City of Blood Revisited (1982), quoted in Osadolor and Otoide 2008, p. 409. ↩

43. Foreign Office to the Admiralty, Jan. 16, 1897, quoted in Obiora 2025, p. 3. ↩

44. Ryder 1969, p. 290. ↩

45. Igbafe 1970, p. 398; London Gazette, May 7, 1897, p. 2517. ↩

46. Igbafe 1970, p. 398. ↩

47. Osadolor 2001, pp. 220-222; Ryder 1969, p. 290. ↩

48. Ryder 1969, p. 290. ↩

49. London Gazette, May 7, 1897, p. 2531. ↩

50. London Gazette, May 7, 1897, p. 2519. ↩

51. London Gazette, May 7, 1897, p. 2532. ↩

52. Igbafe 1970, p. 398. ↩

53. Law 1985, pp. 66-67. ↩

54. Akenzua 1960. ↩

55. Gallwey 1893, p. 129. ↩

56. Letter dated Benin City, April 18, 1897, in Golf, June 18, 1897, p. 295, quoted in Husemann 2013, p. 2. ↩

57. London Gazette, May 7, 1897, p. 2519; Docherty 2021, ch. 9. Hicks 2020, p. 115, counts eight killed and 40 wounded. ↩

58. Hicks 2020, p. 115. ↩

59. Lundén 2024, pp. 204, 208-209. ↩

60. Docherty 2021, ch. 9; Lundén 2024, p. 212. ↩

61. Bodenstein 2018, p. 268 and n. 8. ↩

62. Bodenstein 2020, p. 64. ↩

63. Bodenstein 2020, p. 68. ↩

64. Bodenstein 2018, p. 268 n. 10; Igbafe 1970, p. 398; Bodenstein 2020, p. 67. ↩

65. Strother 2017, pp. 21, 27. ↩

66. Coombes 1994, pp. 59-60; Lundén 2016, p. 163. ↩

67. Lundén 2016, p. 163; Bodenstein 2018, pp. 268-269. ↩

68. Read and Dalton 1898, pp. 362, 373. ↩

69. Read and Dalton 1899, preface, quoted in Obiora 2025, p. 3. ↩

70. Robert Allman (1897), quoted in Lundén 2016, p. 192. ↩

71. Horniman 2022. ↩

72. Hicks 2020, p. 148. ↩

73. Figueiredo 2026, p. 581. ↩

74. Bodenstein 2018, p. 273 n. 28. ↩

75. Ezeluomba 2022, p. 102 and n. 6. ↩

76. Bodenstein 2018, pp. 269, 273 n. 29. ↩

77. Kunst & Kontext 2018, p. 60. ↩

78. Bodenstein 2018, p. 270. ↩

79. Plankensteiner 2007, pp. 74, 80. ↩

80. Quoted in Bodenstein 2018, p. 271 n. 24. ↩

81. Ryder 1969, pp. 291-292, quoting the letters of Dr. Felix Roth; Brodie 2018 (author’s copy, p. 117). ↩

82. Ryder 1969, p. 292; Osiki and Osarumwense 2019, p. 372. ↩

83. Ryder 1969, pp. 292-293; Brodie 2018 (author’s copy, p. 117). ↩

84. Osiki and Osarumwense 2019, p. 364. ↩

85. Ryder 1969, pp. 293-294; Akenzua 1960. ↩

86. Ryder 1969, p. 294. ↩

87. Igbafe 1970, p. 398; Ryder 1969, p. 294. ↩

88. Igbafe 1970, p. 398. ↩

89. Kaplan 1991, p. 209. ↩

90. Osadolor 2001, p. 227. ↩

91. Ryder 1969, p. 293 n. 1; Phillips 2021, timeline. ↩

92. Oriakhi and Osemwengie 2022, p. 325; Osadolor 2011, p. 45. ↩

93. Osadolor 2011, pp. 45-47; Oriakhi and Osemwengie 2022, p. 326. ↩

94. Igbafe 1970, pp. 398-399. ↩

95. Fenske 2010, p. 1. ↩

96. Ikponmwosa and Osagie 2015, p. 183. ↩

97. Usuanlele 2007, p. 483. ↩

98. Phillips 2021, timeline; Osadolor 2011, pp. 47, 51; Oriakhi and Osemwengie 2022, pp. 327-328. Oriakhi and Osemwengie give the date of death as Jan. 13, Phillips as Jan. 14. ↩

99. Kaplan 1991, p. 210; Nevadomsky, Půtová and Soukup 2014, p. 92. ↩

100. Kaplan 1991, p. 213. ↩

101. Phillips 2021, ch. 18. ↩

102. Bodenstein 2021, pp. 135, 137-138. ↩

103. Akenzua 1960, quoted in Bodenstein 2020, p. 58. ↩

104. Brodie 2018 (author’s copy, pp. 112, 126). ↩

105. Phillips 2021, ch. 16. ↩

106. Sarr and Savoy 2018, p. 14. ↩

107. Obiora 2025, p. 5; Phillips 2021, timeline. ↩

108. Pugh 2025, p. 7. ↩

109. Sarr and Savoy 2018, p. 1. ↩

110. Obiora 2025, p. 2; Phillips 2021, timeline. ↩

111. Williams 2021. ↩

112. Obiora 2025, p. 1. ↩

113. BBC News 2021; Obiora 2025, pp. 1-2. ↩

114. Joint Declaration 2022, clauses 1-5. ↩

115. Pugh 2025, pp. 3-6. ↩

116. Horniman 2022. ↩

117. Hertzog and Uzébu-Imarhiagbe 2023, p. 6. ↩

118. Obiora 2025, p. 5. Obaseki’s term ended on Nov. 12, 2024: Channels Television, “Okpebholo Sworn-In As Edo State Governor,” Nov. 12, 2024. ↩

119. Obiora 2025, p. 1; Adewumi 2024, p. 220; Debie 2023, which cites the order as Government Notice No. 25, Order No. 1 of 2023, Official Gazette no. 57, vol. 110 (Lagos, March 28, 2023), pp. A245-247. Buhari was president from 2015 to 2023 and died in London on July 13, 2025: Reuters, “Nigerian former President Muhammadu Buhari dies in London,” July 13, 2025. ↩

120. Oguche, Imoedemhe and Omoregie 2024. ↩

121. Obiora 2025, pp. 1, 12. ↩

122. Nevadomsky, Půtová and Soukup 2014, p. 96. ↩

123. Adewumi 2024, pp. 209, 220. ↩

124. Debie 2023. ↩

125. Nwigwe and Anyaoha 2024, p. 77. ↩

126. Osadolor and Otoide 2008, pp. 407-409; Edigin 2020, p. 32. ↩

127. Kiwara-Wilson 2013, p. 376. ↩

128. Hicks 2020, p. 137; Lundén 2024, p. 204. ↩

129. Lundén 2024, pp. 202, 218-219. ↩

130. Lundén 2024, p. 203. ↩

131. Phillips 2021, ch. 18. ↩

132. Stahn 2023, pp. 516-517. ↩

Ubani, P. (2026, October 19). 1897 and the Benin Bronzes. Provenance Africa. https://provenanceafrica.com/history/articles/benin-bronzes-1897-restitution/

Ubani, Princewill. "1897 and the Benin Bronzes." Provenance Africa, 19 Oct. 2026, https://provenanceafrica.com/history/articles/benin-bronzes-1897-restitution/.

Ubani, Princewill. "1897 and the Benin Bronzes." Provenance Africa. October 19, 2026. https://provenanceafrica.com/history/articles/benin-bronzes-1897-restitution/.

Ubani, P. (2026) '1897 and the Benin Bronzes', Provenance Africa. Available at: https://provenanceafrica.com/history/articles/benin-bronzes-1897-restitution/ (Accessed: 27 October 2026).

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  howpublished = {\url{https://provenanceafrica.com/history/articles/benin-bronzes-1897-restitution/}}
}

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