Tomorrow was supposed to be a day of triumph for the campaign to send Benin bronzes back to Nigeria. Will it be? Not exactly, no. On Tuesday May 16th Cambridge University was supposed to hand over 116 artefacts from its Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) to a Nigerian delegation, but has just postponed the project until October, at least.
Dissent has broken out in Germany over that country’s massive restitution of 1,130 bronzes, and in the U.S. the Smithsonian has ousted the director of its National Museum of African Art (NMAfA), Ngaire Blankenberg. Bundestag deputies criticised the German ruling coalition’s naivety in a heated debate, newspaper articles there stoked the fire and a Benin prince gave a bizarre interview to Berliner Zeitung. It’s hard to be certain whether the wheels have begun dropping off the restitution bus, or if they’re just wobbling madly.
Like the Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, Ms Blankenberg – previously a design consultant and TV producer – took up her job with a declared intention to restitute bronzes: just the one cockerel at Jesus, but some of America’s finest pieces in the case of the NMAfA. Blankenberg then sidelined evidence submitted by the Restitution Study Group (which speaks for slave-descended black Americans) that Benin’s Obas had, in some cases, cast their bronzes from brass they’d got from selling West African slaves to European traders.
Misled by their NMAfA director, the Smithsonian’s regents – including vice-president Kamala Harris and chief justice John Roberts – voted to transfer ownership of 29 pieces to Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums & Monuments. The ceremony last October was held in private, with no media. It’s not clear whether tomorrow’s Cambridge handover was due to be equally discreet, but until Barnaby Phillips revealed the date and its postponement for BBC News on May 10th, the secret appears to have been well kept. Nor is it clear whether the MAA’s director Nicholas Thomas, so avid to restitute, will now have to fall on his sword as well.
Blankenberg is now back in South Africa and casting aspersions: her downfall, oddly, came thanks to German metallurgists who painstakingly investigated manillas (brass ingots shaped as bracelets) found in 16th and 17th Century shipwrecks; these never had any function other than to buy slaves, being the payment Benin’s Obas insisted upon. The metal turned out to come from Rhineland mines, with records showing that these special manillas were made first for Portuguese slave traders and later sold to other nations too. And it was a perfect match for metal scraped from the Benin bronzes.
That was inconvenient for German politicians and museum directors, who, until recently, insisted their nation’s only guilt in the matter had been to buy Benin bronzes from the British who’d wickedly looted them in 1897: but devastating for Blankenberg’s job, because as Smithsonian Magazine prepared its story on the German Mining Museum’s research, it became impossible to ignore the fact that the NMAfA director who’d arrived less than two years before, determined to engage new audiences, to tell new stories, had never told the true story. How her ousting was kept so discreet has yet to be explained.
Phillips’s BBC scoop also claimed that Nigeria’s National Commission for Museum & Monuments (the NCMM Director, Prof Abba Isa Tijani) had been “blindsided” by President Buhari’s shock decree that all restituted bronzes must go straight to the Oba. They’re all to be his personal property and not to be kept “for the people” (represented by the NCMM) as Germany and others had intended. Tijani’s academic qualifications for Nigeria’s top museum job seem as tenuous as Blankenberg’s – what he mainly seems to be is a first class fixer. Did he really not know about the presidential decree?
His words at the panel discussion after the Benin Dialogue Group meeting in March were entirely consistent with a plan that all restitutions would go to Benin’s king, though perhaps that wasn’t a plan that was clear to the assembled well-intentioned foreign curators. Nor has his NCMM made an effort to trace the hundreds of fine bronzes missing (looted by Nigerians themselves) from Nigeria’s state museums in recent years. As I wrote for the Daily Sceptic on May 5th, the president’s decree let the NCMM nicely off that hook.
What was Buhari thinking of? Did he really not understand how his decree would be received in the West? Nigeria is deeply, proudly tribal. Most humans like belonging (why else follow a football team?) and take pride in their roots. A comfort for the man in the street maybe, but pity a president who must strive daily to reconcile competing tribal claims in Africa’s most populous country, with its enormous oil and gas wealth so unevenly distributed, while also presenting to the world the facade of a modern, federal democracy. For a Fulani president from the Muslim north to make such a valuable gift to the important Edo tribe in the (largely Christian) south must have made sense in terms of domestic politics – how the world would perceive it perhaps mattered less.
Swiss-born Prof. Hauser-Schäublin wrote here on May 7th about that decree, and on May 12th in Neue Zürcher Zeitung she took a swipe at Benin Initiative Switzerland, which in February declared that 53 of the 96 Benin artefacts in Swiss museums should be restituted; it’s keen to do so, and is still waiting for a formal request. Her descriptions of the bronzes’ mystical role in Edo society, the legal position on ownership, and her demolition of Switzerland’s biased provenance research are worth reading.
On May 13th, Matthias Busse pointed out in Welt that important museums in Saxony (263 artefacts in Leipzig and Dresden) and Bavaria (24 in Munich) have not in fact signed restitution contracts. German museums are owned by their Länder (federal states) so it is the Länder and not the central government which have to give away their treasures – or not. First to do so was the Council of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK) which controls Berlin’s Ethnological Museum. It signed a contract transferring ownership of 512 pieces in its collection to Nigeria last August. As Welt reported, its Director Lars-Christian Koch “does not mince his words: ‘It was not our intention to transfer [our bronzes] to the king [of Benin]’.”
The SPK’s restitution contract is detailed and interesting. The pieces kept on loan in Germany can’t necessarily stay there for more than 10 years, the signatory for Nigeria is Tijani of the NCMM, paragraph two of the Preamble says: “Acknowledging the importance of the Benin Bronzes to the people of Nigeria, particularly for the Edo people, and their universal importance for humankind….”. Which hardly squares with President Buhari’s decree that those same bronzes are now the Oba’s personal property.
Not that this matters: clause 1.1.(2) states: “The transfer of ownership is unconditional.” Amazingly, Nigeria was not held to any clauses promising to keep the restituted artworks safe, in curatorial conditions, available for study and display, as foreign museums and collectors have faithfully done since 1897: a straight gift, no questions asked. The Oba may now do exactly as he pleases with them, and may well hide them away, for he takes a quite different view: marvellous artworks though they may be to the rest of the world, to him they’re the living embodiment, still to be placated, of his ancestors and their – to us, murderous – dominion over the Edo and the surrounding tribes who provided their slaves.
Perhaps the oddest intervention has been Berliner Zeitung’s May 12th interview with an Edo prince, for decades resident in Germany. To him the Oba is literally divine: “..an Oba is born in heaven. And he’s [here] until he dies. Although you are not allowed to use that verb in connection with the Oba at all. He is [here] until he ascends to heaven again.” And: “The Oba does not interfere in political affairs, but he only needs to blink his eyes, and we know what he wants to say. He is our King.”
He then unwisely criticised Prof Plankensteiner (convenor of the Benin Dialogue Group, and the most committed restitutor of them all) and Foreign Minister Baerbock whose triumph was her speech at Abuja, “righting an injustice” and returning Germany’s bronzes “to you, the people of Nigeria”. The prince feels otherwise, all bronzes belong to his Oba: “I’m sorry, but your Foreign Minister is too young. She has no experience, and sometimes you can tell that when she speaks.” he said. “She overdid it. That is the problem with your Foreign Minister. She doesn’t know how to express herself diplomatically. And apparently she doesn’t have any good advisers.” He even repeated the theory that Benin City with a new museum or two could become become “a tourist attraction” – the so-called Bilbao Effect which used to be touted back in the days of the Edo Museum of West African Art, a project since forgotten.
Divinity notwithstanding, today’s Oba did serve as Nigeria’s ambassador to Angola, Sweden and Italy before succeeding to his throne, and in 2018 pronounced a voodoo curse on Edo’s persistent human traffickers: the 1897 Punitive Expedition did at last stop Benin’s human sacrifices and crucifixions, but West Africa’s most resilient slavers never entirely gave up.
I described in March why Germany’s massive restitution seemed to be essentially an enormous business deal – access to Nigeria’s gas and oil, in return for hugely valuable artworks from Germany’s museums. With a pretence that it had been altogether more worthy, talking about righting colonial injustices and so forth, the coalition government came out fighting in the Bundestag last Friday. The debate, called by the right-wing AfD (boo, hiss) in response to the “fiasco” and “scandal” of Germany’s well-meant restitutions being diverted to a private royal family, also drew criticism from the CDU and CSU, something the Art Newspaper’s report that evening failed to mention. The debate will continue this Friday and as Michelle Müntefering, an SPD member of parliament, told the Bundestag: “The last word on this has not [yet] been spoken.” Indeed not.
Nor should one forget the market value of Benin’s bronzes. With the disclosed record for a single piece standing at £10m for the Ohly Head – see Barnaby Phillip’s book Loot – then Cambridge University’s 116 artefacts must have a cash value well into the tens of millions. If the odd piece from that haul, whether lifted from a Nigerian state museum or quietly deaccessioned by the Oba (perhaps as a “duplicate”?), were to find its way to the market, then the effort to extract this first major restitution from a U.K. university museum would have paid off handsomely.
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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.