The vision for a modern state museum in Benin City that meets all the requirements as a new home for the 1,130 Benin bronzes that Germany transferred to Nigeria is for now a thing of the past. The incumbent Nigerian President, Muhammadu Buhari, announced in a public statement on March 23rd that he had transferred ownership of all Benin artefacts looted from the Royal Palace in 1897 and collected elsewhere in the Benin Empire to the Oba of Benin. He recognises him as the owner and has therefore transferred all associated rights, including storage and administration, to him by means of a presidential decree: “To the exclusion of any other person or institution,” as the Nigerian newspaper This Day quotes the decree.
This applies to all the Benin objects that have already been returned and all the others expected to be returned worldwide; in future, they will have to be handed over directly to the Oba as the original owner. All the artefacts are to be housed at the king’s palace or another location in Benin City or elsewhere, according to the Oba’s discretion, as long as their safety is assured. The Federal Government of Nigeria and the Oba are jointly responsible for the security and protection of the objects. As far as the management of the collections is concerned, this is entirely in the hands of the Oba. He can, at his own discretion, cooperate with national or international institutions regarding the preservation of the objects. There is no longer any talk of travelling exhibitions, loans, public access, scientific international cooperation and exchange.
Denial of history
With this decree, Nigeria’s President, shortly before the end of his term of office – the swearing-in ceremony for the new President, Bola Tinubu, will take place this month – created what at first glance seemed surprising. The current President is transferring Nigeria’s national property – including what had been the national property of Germany until the summer of 2022 – to a private individual or a private, autocratic institution. A public good has thus become private property. The Oba has already officially informed the Dutch ambassador in Nigeria that the Netherlands must also comply with the this ‘law’ (“that is the law”).
What was intended by German politicians as a return of important cultural artefacts to the “Nigerian people” to “heal the wounds of the past” is now instead a gift to a single royal house – one among many royal houses and Sultanates in the Republic of Nigeria. A royal family that, from today’s perspective, also committed horrendous war crimes and crimes against humanity until it was subjugated by the British: notorious wars of aggression over centuries with looting, destruction, massacres, the enslavement of prisoners of war, human sacrifices, and slave trading on a large scale.
The actual Benin bronzes are known to be the direct result of the slave trade because the Europeans paid for the slaves with brass rings that became the raw material for the bronzes. They are now returning to the place where they were created, transformed into valuable works of art and historically ‘cleansed’. As can be seen in publications from around the royal court, on the Internet and even in the Digital Benin database connected to the Rothenbaum Museum in Hamburg, the history of the Kingdom of Benin now consists of a paean to the embellished past in which the bloody excesses are concealed and denied. This is an affront to the descendants of slaves in the United States and the Caribbean.
The return of the bronzes to the “Nigerian people” has ended in a fiasco for German politicians and the museum employees who did their bidding. How careless the wording of the agreement on the transfer of ownership between Germany and Nigeria can now be seen very clearly.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said at the state ceremony in Abuja last December, as she performed the symbolic handover of the Benin artefacts: “We are therefore pleased to fund the construction of an art pavilion at the Edo State Museum and to invite you to exhibit the bronzes there. In addition, we have agreed that some bronzes will go to global travelling exhibitions and some of them will remain on loan in German museums.”
By the “Edo State Museum” she obviously meant the planned Edo Museum of West African Art (EMOWAA), a private initiative of the Legacy Restoration Trust that goes back to the governor of the state of Edo, Godwin Obaseki. The Benin Dialogue Group, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and the Federal Foreign Office have been supporting the construction of this architecturally impressive project for years – although a long-term financing plan for the museum’s operations was never presented – and funded it with four million euros.
The wrong museum
The museum is now under construction. However, some significant changes have been announced on the EMOWAA homepage since the beginning of March. It previously stated that the museum would be “home to the world’s most comprehensive collection of Benin Bronzes”. That sentence is no longer there. The EMOWAA will no longer be what German politicians imagined.
There were other indications that things were not going to plan. In the minutes of the last meeting of the Benin Dialogue Group in Hamburg in March of this year, the EMOWAA was no longer mentioned at all, but the Benin Royal Museum, i.e., the Oba’s private museum, was referred to explicitly. Just a few weeks earlier, the overall political situation looked different: the responsible ministers of both countries were at the official ceremony of the German handover. The royal court was not represented – it obviously hadn’t been invited. So what changed?
The family conflict
Everyone who was interested knew that things had been brewing behind the scenes in Nigeria for a long time and that the expected repatriation of thousands of Benin bronzes had become a bone of political contention. Nigerian newspapers have long been reporting on a “cold war” between the Governor, Godwin Obaseki, and the Oba, Ewuare II. The royal court and right-wing groups supporting it starting making threats and did not rule out physical violence if the Benin bronzes went to EMOWAA instead of the king. However, Obaseki had ambitious plans for the new museum. As governor of the federal state of Edo, he wanted to develop the capital, Benin City, into a cultural centre of West African art. The Benin bronzes would have played a central part in this.
Ironically, the conflict dates back to 1897, when the British conquered the royal city of Benin and deposed the king, as This Day and other newspapers reported in 2019. Agho Obaseki, the grandfather of the current Governor, was given the title of honorary chief by the Oba. The Oba gave Obaseki his daughter in marriage and gifted him 100 slaves. When the Oba was already in exile, according to Nigerian newspaper reports, Obaseki took over the office of Oba from 1897 to 1914 and after the death of the exiled king his eldest son was installed as Oba. The British interfered by appointing Obaseki the new Oba’s chief adviser. This resulted in a power struggle, because Obaseki was considered a collaborator with the British and a traitor to the king. Godwin Obaseki, the current governor, is now accused by royalists of perpetuating this treason. A newspaper headline related to the governor’s EMOWAA initiative read: “Does Obaseki want to be like his grandfather?”
According to the Nigerian media, President Muhammadu Buhari’s decision to hand over all Benin properties to the Oba puts an end to the fight between the two opponents. The decision was also apparently made over the heads of the Nigerian Museums and Monuments Commission (NCMM) and its Director General, Abba Isa Tijani. Why Buhari did not stipulate that all Benin collections should be housed in purely state museums (such as the national museums in Lagos, Benin City and Abuja) is a mystery. Whether the transfer of ownership is legal and what domestic and foreign policy consequences it will have will only become clear once the new Nigerian President has been sworn in.
Museums as state gift repositories
Presidential access to national treasures is nothing new in Nigeria. Just one year after independence, the then Prime Minister A.T. Balewa went to the National Museum in Lagos to select a state gift for the American President John F. Kennedy. Despite protests from the Director in charge, Balewa chose a richly carved 18th-century elephant’s tusk. Such ivory carvings were placed on the bronze memorial heads on the royal altars of Benin. Balewa delivered the tooth on the occasion of his state visit to the United States in 1961. It is now in the JFK Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.
It didn’t stop there. A few years later, in 1973, General Yakubu Gowon, then President, contacted Ekpo Eyo, Director of the Nigerian Department of Antiquities (the forerunner of the NCMM), and announced his visit to the National Museum. He would choose a gift for Queen Elizabeth to bring to her on a state visit. As Barnaby Phillips, author of the book Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes, writes, Eyo cleared the most valuable pieces from the exhibition before the General arrived. But he could not prevent the latter from selecting a 17th-century bronze memorial head and presenting it to the Queen in 1973 in gratitude for British support in the Biafra War.
In England, the head, long thought to be a copy, stood on a shelf in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. Only in 2002, on the occasion of an exhibition of state gifts to the Queen in Buckingham Palace, did experts identify it as an original which came from the collection of the National Museum in Lagos. Today, it is in the Grand Vestibule of Windsor Castle. The history of the memorial head is embarrassing: it came from an altar of the Oba and was captured by the British in 1897. Most likely an officer of the punitive expedition took it to England, where it eventually ended up on the art market. British colonial officials in Nigeria acquired the head between 1946 and 1957 for the National Museum in Lagos, where it remained until 1973. The British royal family received notification in December 2022 that Nigeria would not reclaim the state gift.
The odyssey of the Benin bronzes from Germany and other countries continues.
Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin was a professor of ethnology at the Georg-August University in Göttingen from 1992 to 2016. This article was first published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on May 6th. Translation by Mike Wells.
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“The fossil-fuel industry cannot be allowed to continue making us sick, shortening our lives and destroying the planet.”
Would this be the life shortening Bernie is talking about?
The fossil fuel industry makes us comfortable.
The life shortening stuff comes from overengineered food products, over medication, stress caused in part by over taxation and over regulation which mean that as our societies get richer somehow it gets more and more difficult for a working man to buy a home drive a car or raise a family.
I think the ‘fossil fuel’ (I prefer the term ‘hydrocarbon’) industry does a lot more for us than keep us comfortable. It underpins huge swathes of other industry which makes us better fed, better protected and yes, better educated as we don’t need to send kids into the fields for barely-subsistence level farming.
Losing hydrocarbon industry will be a disaster if we let it happen. Fortunately many parts of the world say one thing and do another.
The term “fossil fuel” is a recent, deliberately pejorative term to undermine a long standing industry that has been, and still is, beneficial to us all. Anyway, hydrocarbon assets are nature’s way of long term storage of solar energy. While it’s useful to use more modern techniques to capture some of it in real time (light, wind, tidal flow), why not use some of the long term fuel in the bank as well?
Yes. Let’s not waste it but we should use it.
Thanks for these graphs. If you trace the life expectancy graph back to the 19th century, sanitation and piped water were the quantum leaps of the era.
Sanitation, mains electricity and hyrdrocarbons – the holy trinity of the modern world that societies merely take for granted (until whoops, the smarty pants meter’s cut out…).
Engineers, plumbers and electricians are the true guardians of modern civilisation.
And remember, these improvements in life quality have progressed even as the world’s human population has increased massively as well .
Cue honourable mention for chemistry – early 1900s Haber-Bosch process for manufacture of ammonia, provenance of fertiliser that’s fed a world populace quadrupled to 8 billion in the last hundred years.
Yes. Fertiliser producer’s plan to shut UK’s largest ammonia plant triggers agriculture and food security concerns so next we’ll have to import it. Genius.
The world’s money lenders refuse to lend for projects to exploit hydrocarbons. This hinders the progress of less well developed countries. It’s not ‘fossil fuel industry’ which is shortening lives, It’s Green activism which is preventing lives being extended.
Institutionalised and state-sponsored collective insanity. To mitigate against the imagined hobgoblin, governments and institutions enact policies that risk unleashing real-life demons.
Betrayal of unspoken hippocratic oath of government, in other words treason.
Old-school journalist H. L. Mencken summed it all up this time last century:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
The Guardian is merely the left’s flunkey. Dr Alexander’s namesake, physicist Dr Ralph Alexander, has collated newspaper reports of the extreme weather of that era…
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2024/03/History-Weather-Extremes.pdf
“…This report refutes the popular but mistaken belief that today’s weather extremes are more common and more intense because of climate change, by examining the history of extreme weather events over the past century or so.”
Obligatory reading for Guardian fans.
Many thanks for the link.
The Guardian used to be a serious investigative newspaper. It actually published several articles criticising NATO expansion particularly as regards Ukraine.
That stopped about 10 years ago when it upset TRPTB by publishing some Snowden files. Big mistake – the hard drives were destroyed due to threats from HMG.
Only the BBC can rival it for brainwashing propaganda.
It is now run by Head Girls and read only by teachers.
I used to buy printed ones thirty odd years ago (sometimes known as the Grauniad in Linotype days), but never read it at all now.
Just followed the link to the Rupert Read piece.
It looks like he’s actually given up on his ‘decarbonised Utopia’ and decided to just do some sensible adaptation to the weather, while not giving up on his hair shirt just yet, cos it is still of course ‘all our fault’.
Well, I’d love to take some of the credit but I don’t think I can. Other people – ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ made it possible.
Rupert Read, founder of XR, has written a piece.
Ultimate as in ‘last ever’? Oh good.
Sadly, I don’t think he meant it that way.
If you really believed this then surely you would argue for other energy production methods? And since renewables are not reliable or sufficient you would expect arguments to ramp up nuclear power production. If not, why not?
In my opinion the Guardian is a comic for the Pearl Clutchers, but without the illustrations. Or possibly a Propaganda Pamphlet.
My interest in Climate Change began around 2013, trolling the comments section (below the line) on their daily climate-doom articles. Happy days, which only ended when they started censoring some of my comments.
Dana Nuccitelli was writing stuff at that time, moonlighting from a real job, now he is a full time propagandist for The Citizen Climate Lobby.
Zigzaggeration! That’s my word of the day!
Word to Guterres – there’s no deadly heat in my kitchen where the little temp indicator issued by the power company is telling me I am at risk of hypothermia. [Sarcasm alert] I am so grateful that the state told me how I could make things less unpleasant by wearing warm clothes blah blah blah. Pass the sick bucket…..
I hope those old ladies in Switzerland are not getting too hot, or they might take legal action!
” we emit 513 kg on Christmas Day.”
Maybe we can get Britain’s strongest man to see if he can Deadlift it.
I know this doesn’t prove things one way or another, but The Light Issue 51 do two whole pages listing geoengineering patents from 1891 — 2023. A huge list so I will just randomly select one as an example…..Fluidized Particle Dispenser cloud seeding. 4362271. Dec 7th 1982.
The Guardian’s Climate Whoppers
It’s been another grand week for climate scare hysteria in large parts of the media: massive heatwaves at both poles – what a coincidence – and another mass coral bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). Where, we might ask, were the equally prominent reports on the recent news that the South Pole had its coldest six-month winter since records began, and coral at the GBR has been growing furiously in recent years, and could be at a near-100 year high?
Largely missing from the latest reports, however, are the important facts that the nearest weather station to the North Pole is 800 kilometres away, the suggested heatwave across eastern Antarctica was the product of a weather forecasting computer model, and the coral ‘mass bleaching’ was spotted from an aircraft.
I think this is the first time I have detected such passion in one of James’ usually sober pieces, but I was particularly struck by the Brosovic comment. That is indeed a lot of reading. Maybe its precision is because there’s a publication that actually lists all those references. Would that the COVID brigade had read – just one book (Cron and Behrens, “Cytokine Storm Syndrome”)!
I wonder whether the debunking of the climate change official narratives would have happened if the COVID crisis had not attracted such a depth of critical analysis. It was another case of computer modelling being passed off as real science. As James points out, you can very simply alter the conclusions to fit the hypothesis by tweaking the model. Let’s get back to real data based science.
Not for the first time, our resident Professor says that what we need is not fact-checking but criticism, by which he means — and has sometimes said — that superannuated old thing, literary criticism. And, by mentioning Dr Johnson, the great 18th century critic, he shows that that’s what he means again, today.
Now, that shows him to have an interesting, not to say (something else he likes) complicated, relation to The Daily Sceptic, to which he so regularly contributes and which might, not unfairly, be thought of as, itself, a fact-checking organ, different from the Guardian or BBC only in being more truthful and more accurate.
But criticism, of the sort he recommends, is no friendlier towards non-MSM factchecking organs like TDS than MSM ones like the Guardian. Its standard being not so much Free as Best Speech, it is marvellously neutral and, in principle, as ready to find fault with what appears in TDS as what appears anywhere else.
Although I have not yet noticed the Professor himself being critical of anything here, I have come across a substack, Reactionary Essays, which does have a current article which not only expresses just our Professor’s preference for criticism over fact-checking but illustrates how it might, like some unreliable dog, be turned on TDS itself. You might want to look it up, to see to what unwelcome places criticism can take you.