Yesterday’s Sunday Times carried a shocking story by Christina Lamb OBE, the foreign correspondent and author.
Incredibly, not once but three times she refers to the outlawed practice of FGM (female genital mutilation) as “circumcision” of girls. That might be forgivable ignorance in a rookie male reporter, but for a writer of Lamb’s gender and experience there’s no excuse.
She reports that the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum’s is currently playing host to a group of Maasai women from East Africa in search of “sacred objects” taken from their ancestors. These include “an emonyorit – an earring worn by girls after circumcision” and “an isikira – a headdress worn by newly circumcised girls”.
The Museum’s enthusiasm for returning artefacts has been widely reported, and in the case of body parts such as shrunken heads, no-one but an idiot would oppose returning them to descendants. More controversial has been the long campaign by Pitt Rivers curator Dan Hicks to gift its superb collection of Benin bronzes to Nigeria.
As DS has reported repeatedly (here, here and here) various developments have derailed the ignorant campaign to return Benin artefacts in the last couple of years.
They were the private cult objects of a murderous line of kings, and never sacred to – or the property of – the Bini people. The greatest setback has been the Nigerian President’s shock decree that all returned Benin items would no longer belong to the Nigerian people (i.e., the National Commission for Museums and Monuments) but would be given to the current Oba of Benin, a private citizen. Similar fates have befallen other artefacts returned to Nigeria.
From 1991-2021, New York’s Metropolitan Museum held two Benin bronze plaques, provided by the British to Lagos Museum around 1951. After independence in 1960, they were looted by Nigerians and resurfaced in the USA. As Barnaby Phillips wrote in the second edition of his book Loot, the Met ignored his information until the first (2021) edition appeared, then caved in and returned the bronzes – not to the British, but to the Nigerians. If they were now safe in the National Commission for Museums and Monuments’ museums in Lagos or Benin, they would be recorded today on Digital Benin, but they’re not – they’ve disappeared.
The Smithsonian Museum’s National Museum of African Art suddenly lost its South African director in March 2023. She’d assured its Regents (trustees) that the RSG’s (Restitution Study Group) argument that the museum’s Benin bronzes were cast from brass bracelets used to buy slaves from the Benin kingdom was untrue. But it was true, as the Smithsonian’s own magazine was about to reveal in its archaeological report on ships wrecked on their way to West Africa. The Museum’s Director Ngaire Blakenberg had to go – and fast.
The Smithsonian secretly handed over 20 bronzes to the National Commission for Museums and Monument anyway (where are they now?) and wants to send nine more. But the RSG currently has a petition before the USA’s Supreme Court, arguing that the Smithsonian has acted unconstitutionally by setting its own restitution policy without the statutory consultation.
The above photo shows RSG director Deadria Farmer-Paellmann visiting the British Museum this month; she’s holding a copy of the Supreme Court petition and had been supposed to meet with a BM curator and a head of department on her visit from the USA – both were unavailable after all, one suddenly taking annual leave – to discuss the BM’s display captioning. Increasingly, museums are seeing the force of RSG’s arguments: that the brass manillas used to buy slaves and then cast the bronzes were “Blood Metal”; that the Obas of Benin were despots who enslaved other West Africans and either sold them to European traders or sacrificed them as ancestor-worship in appalling numbers.
Tens of millions of today’s Americans, Brazilians and Caribbeans are descendants of those slaves. So, says RSG, those “stolen souls” (or rather, their descendants) have a better claim on Benin artefacts than the Obas’ descendants on these “stolen goods”. The RSGs want Benin collections to remain in world museums with accurate descriptions of their origin, to honour the stolen or murdered slaves – among other things, nailing the lie that the 1897 British expedition, which finally deposed the murderous Oba and his regime, also killed thousands of his subjects.
Historically truthful descriptions would also be helpful at the Pitt Rivers Museum, as well as in articles by writers like Christina Lamb. Female genital mutilation is no longer something to be coyly referred to as “circumcision” or tolerated as ceremonial and sacred. It’s the deliberate maiming of defenceless young females, many of whom, if not killed by shock, infection or loss of blood after this torture, suffer lifelong pain. It’s still done in Africa – generally by older female relatives of the same family or tribe – and even, allegedly, in secret in the U.K., where the NHS identified nearly 12,000 victims in 2022.
Stop Press: The U.S. Supreme Court gets over 7,000 petitions a year, asking it to grant a writ of certiorari, and typically accepts only 100-150 of them for hearing. Whether the RSG’s petition against the Smithsonian Museum will be among them is due to be decided this week and presents the court with an interesting challenge to its impartiality. The Smithsonian’s Regents voted in April 2023 to hand over the museum’s Benin bronzes to Nigeria (not the Oba): these trustees include Vice President Kamala Harris and the Supreme Court’s own Chief Justice, Honorable John G Roberts Jr. – neither of whom were present for that vote, as it happens.
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