The campaign to save Benin bronzes in the world’s museums was unexpectedly boosted in Zurich last Saturday. New York lawyer Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, herself descended from Africans the Benin kingdom captured and sold, announced to a packed symposium that Swiss museums are getting it wrong: by conspiring to send their Benin artefacts to Nigeria, they are sidelining Benin’s own victims. Farmer-Paellmann, founder of the Restitution Study Group (RSG) is shown above on her visit to the British Museum’s Africa gallery in September
The Rietberg Museum’s ticket-only event was supposed to celebrate a long campaign by Benin Initiative Switzerland (BIS) to purge the country’s museums of colonial-era relics from Benin: only invited speakers must address the meeting, no questions from the floor – what could possibly go wrong? The museum had kept the event quiet and tried to exclude the RSG: but Farmer-Paellmann got a ticket anyway, and rising to her feet she told the meeting that descendants of Benin’s slaves demand a seat at the table, wherever the fate of museums’ Benin collections is being decided.
Filmed by her husband, Farmer-Paellmann brandished a small manilla, one of the brass ingots with which Portuguese and other traders bought slaves from the Obas of Benin. To the consternation of the platform speakers and with the audience of 150 initially stunned but then applauding, she declared that the “bronzes” in Swiss museums were cast from exactly this brass. This makes it “Blood Metal” as far as tens of millions of black people in USA, Brazil and the Caribbean who descend from slaves sold by West Africa’s kingdoms are concerned.
An alarmed Olugbile Holloway, Director-General of Nigeria’s National Commission for Museum and Monuments (NCMM), cancelled his dinner and from the platform invited Farmer-Paellmann to an immediate, closed-door meeting with the Rietberg’s Director – which then went on for two hours – to learn more about RSG’s stance. With only a BA in politics and international relations and a Master’s in business administration, Holloway has no clear qualification for his role of safeguarding Nigeria’s heritage. How he will now explain to the President who appointed him what the RSG’s dramatic intervention means would be interesting to hear.
Restitutions of Benin collections from Cambridge and Oxford university museums, and also the German states of Saxony and Bavaria, were suddenly derailed in May 2023 after Nigeria’s president decreed that all restitutions to the NCMM will be gifted to the current Oba of Benin, a private citizen. Farmer-Paellmann will be back in Zurich this week to meet the Rietberg Museum’s Director and others; perhaps Switzerland’s mass restitution will be put on hold too. Nigeria’s own Benin collections, gifted by the British but depleted by local looting since independence in 1960, were not included in the President’s handover, and have still not been audited.
Also at the Rietberg, and also not invited to speak, was Prof. Brigitta Hauser-Schaüblin, the Swiss social anthropologist who specialises in cultural property and ownership: she distributed to delegates a paper explaining why the Swiss BIS project is so misguided, and the Rietberg’s current exhibition of its bronzes so misleading. “The Benin court,” she points out, “has never officially acknowledged or apologised for its crimes against humanity and war crimes to the descendants of slaves in the U.S., the Caribbean and Brazil.” In this dramatic clip from the symposium – watch up to minute 2:20 – Prince Patrick Oronsaye of Benin makes a doomed attempt to deny that the kingdom cast its bronzes from slave metal or even sold slaves at all: which is not what he says on p32 of Barnaby Phillips’s 2021 book “Loot”.
Campaigns need funding, especially one so morally myopic and race-obsessed as the present campaign to strip the world’s museums of their Benin collections. But as the RSG says, why reward Africa’s slave-sellers twice? Step forward the George Soros-funded Open Society. It’s becoming clear that generous funding has been on offer to the campaign to convince museum trustees and directors – not bad people themselves, but sometimes badly advised – that they must “decolonise” their museums and hand over their “looted” artefacts.
Open Society was once again behind Sunday’s London “U.K. Reparations Conference 2024” organised by the “All-Party Parliamentary Group for Afrikan [sic] Reparations“, chaired by Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP. The RSG’s view that museums’ Benin collections represent “Stolen Souls, not Stolen Goods” has been sidelined so far, but it may be time for museums’ approach to change.
The Benin collections can be their opportunity to tell the full story of the revolting slave trade: how Africa’s kingdoms procured and sold their slaves to European dealers, how Britain became the first to outlaw this trade, and how the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron’s blockade intercepted other nations’ slave ships for half the 19th century, liberating tens of thousands of shackled slaves in the process. It may be time to describe the Royal Navy’s Benin Expedition in February 1897 as one of the 19th century’s great humanitarian achievements, by deposing Oba Ovonramwen and his regime of slavery and massed human sacrifice, while carting away his blood-encrusted trophies in the process.
Benin’s medieval artworks (above, the British Museum’s Benin gallery) have a far wider story to tell future generations than is currently being attempted. Though for any museum bold enough to tell the whole unvarnished truth, Soros’s Open Society may not be the place to go looking for grant aid.
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As was reported here quite a few times, the motivation of the British attack on Benin was not the least bit humanitarian and certainly not motivated by the not-yet-invented crimes against humanity fetish. It was a punitive expedition to avenge an earlier group of white people who had travelled into this territory and were slaughtered by the natives. Insofar it had effects present day lefty liberals believing they have an unlimited license to mess with other people’s affairs all around the globe because of their eminent moral superiority consider “humanitarian”, these were effects it also had.
Maybe an additional explanation: Whenever I hear someone chastizing somebody else for “crimes against humanity” I feel like having an “excuse me while I kiss the toilet¹” moment.
For our present understanding, the Oba of Benin at that time was a brutal despot and his rule was a bloody reign of terror his hapless subjects had to suffer. However, for his (and also that of his entourage) understanding, he was the perfectly legitimate traditional ruler of his people in line with what centuries old customs demanded from him and what the gods he honestly believed him commanded him to do for the greater good of his people.
This is especially true regarding slavery which we consider morally repellent nowadays but this notion isn’t yet 250 years old. Before this time, it was a perfectly legitimate instiution which had existed in all human cultures since the dawn of time.
Considering that we’re just very much imperfect and fallible human beings ourselves – even “New York lawyer Deadria Farmer-Paellmann”, although she’s probably not really convinced of this – we should not aspire to condemn people from alien cultures (including the alien culture of our own past) morally just because they’re living up the moral standards they’re accustomed to and not to ours they’re typically completely ignorant of.
We may end up being at war with them for some reason we believe to be good, as in the case of the abovementioned punitive expedition, but we’re most certainly not inherently superior beings and they might well feel the urge to condemn us morally because we’re not living up to their standards.
¹ Allusion to Hendrix’ “Excuse me while I kiss the sky”, throw up.
We are all savages and it is beautiful. I know people now who struggle with the idea of toilets. We got a bit silly in the twentieth century with an industrial model based on providing greater and greater ease. This will be gone soon and we will become primal again. All of these prissy discussions will just look like decadent hot air. Then you won’t be so dismissive of furs and animal hides.
You could always be a trend-setter and start early, by going off into the wilderness and donning lice-infested animal skins, eating bugs and other wildlife, making temporary shelters with tree branches or something, trying to light a fire by rubbing sticks together, and fending off inquisitive wolves & bears, in your new “beautiful savage” lifestyle.
The Benin court … has never officially acknowledged or apologised for its crimes against humanity and war crimes to the descendants of slaves
No one can realistically apologise for things that were not a crime at the time they took place, which no one alive today carried out, and where there are no living victims.
The point of parading the crimes against humanity fetish is to negate all of that because that’s the purpose it was invented for.
This is a handy reference: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-53444752
Very informative link— thanks for that.
An interesting early start in life this Ethnic African woman had: one of six daughters of a single Ethnic African mother on US welfare benefits who was given a house in an all-white area and then complained about white racism for decades, while having her education and law school expenses paid for by US taxpayers, before choosing to marry a white man, a German executive, instead of a fellow Ethnic African.
And now she’s becoming famous, like so many other Third World peoples who scorn to marry their own, but insist on marrying Ethnic Europeans, who have helped them every step of the way, while they continue to complain about white racism.
Of course it’s always possible that she was subjected to racism, that she married for love and that she was just as entitled as anyone else in the US to have an education at the public expense.
Well maybe but isn’t the point about hypocrisy?
the slaves of today will be relived to know that people who do not yet exist will benefit from their suffering
I’m sick of hearing about the “Benin bronzes” and all the other stuff that came from abroad. Send the bloody lot back to whoever wants it. We don’t need it. At the same time any native Brits or anyone else moaning about slavery and racism can piss off somewhere else too. I’m sick of hearing about Africa and other countries’ problems that are nothing to do with us. The correct response to all of this is “Do I look bothered?”
Hear, hear! I always thought the Benin bronzes were ugly, overrated lumps of metal.
Ugly they may be, but a lot of art is ugly. They have a story to tell. I understand that many were acquired legally and that there is no case for giving them back.
Maybe we should ask America to give us back London Bridge.
Benin might of been the most powerful West African Kingdom 250-300 years ago and captured more people to be sold as slaves than any other Kingdom but they certainly wouldn’t of been the only Africans profiting from the slave trade. Maybe claims for reparations should be against the decendents of the people who captured them sold the slaves.
Maybe the UK should ask for compensation for the cost, surely hundreds of billions in todays money, of using the royal navy against slave traders for 50 years not to mention some recognition of all the lives that were lost doing this.
Your last point was made rather eloquently earlier by TCW.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/our-bill-for-ending-the-slave-trade-please-pay-asap/
I presume Keir-Ching! raised this matter with the Reparations-demanding grifters of the Caribbean …. and pointed out that they should be directing their claims to Benin, or oil-rich Nigeria?
No. Well colour me surprised (not).
It is very well known by anyone not brainwashed by the anti-British lefty brigade which infests this country that slaves transported across Atlantic were bought from the African or Arab leaders who had captured them.
That’s not to excuse the trade, but the idea that we are solely responsible is ridiculous and WE stopped it, at vast expense. African and Arab leaders would have carried on with the trade (and might still be doing it) if they could.
Slavery continues, but that isn’t as important.
Will we, and other European Countries, be purging our museums of colonial-era relics of the Romans?
Italy is going to have a heck of a problem.
It’s time to leave the past alone and concentrate on the sh1tty job that’s being done of the present.
It really does seem as though G. Soros nad his loathsome foundation is behind so much evil in the world.
I’m genuinely curious why nobody takes him on .
He is singlehandedly try to dismantle western civilization.
Was he a KGB sleeper? how come he’s not in jail?
I have been troubled for many years as to why such a myopic history of the African slave trade has been taught in our schools. The way in which it demonises and blames the British and fails to give equal opprobrium to African and Arab slavers has certainly stirred anti-British sentiment and resentment in the hearts of many British people.