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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I recommend they take injections of common sense.
Containing modified Reliable Normal Advice?
I think a few C1984 boosters would achieve the correct results.
Perhaps the Dales et al could be jailed forfact denial.
I, a pale, stale, male am suffering mental distress because of the climate crisis hoax. Do I get my share of tea and biscuits?
No, I though not.
The mental health problem is way over-blown. It appears that the diagnosis and treatment is okay to be delivered for someone who can’t keep their nose out of your business, to offer some platitudes like ‘You okay, hun’, and force you to talk about private matters while feeding you tea and biscuits. It is however a complete cure, so you can look forward to leaving the encounter with a smile on your face, a spring in your step, and a whistling a happy tune. God forbid we were over-reacting to people who are ‘a bit sad’, or trivialising conditions that need the work of a professional psychiatrist.
Our walking route to our town centre takes us down a woodland shared path. It is tarmacked and well used by pedestrians and cyclists, but obviously suffers from overgrowing undergrowth and leaves in the “leafing season”. This morning one of the locals has spent the morning sweeping all the leaves off it. The council cannot even manage to do the basics, but they find money for all sorts of other irrelevant BS. At every level of government, the basics are not being executed very well but plenty of money is available for lunatic political projects.
So UKHSA is looking for evidence on how best to treat people to relieve their anxiety about climate change?
Simple. Reassure them.
Surely if their anxiety is crippling it does not matter if you don’t believe the reassurances you’re giving – use some professional bedside manner to make the final days of the patient more bearable. I think there’ll be a lot more ‘final days’ than they think.
U.K. Health Security Agency (UKHSA)
Department of Health and Social Care
NHS
You can never have too many civil servants, doing the same thing, wasting our money.
Genuine mental health issues like anxiety, depression and substance abuse caused by societal and lifestyle factors are being overlooked, and instead we invent new ones (for example climate anxiety) that would not exist if it were not for the deliberate steering of people’s worldviews towards anything – literally anything – that might justify Net Zero.
Since the wheels are falling off the Net Zero bandwagon, increasingly desperate attempts are being made to keep the masses on board – now that, for example, the National Energy Systems Operator claim in a report that at best household bills will remain the same (and probably increase) once the grid has been decarbonised.
So, no savings to be made for your average household, a crippling of individual mobility with the decimation of private vehicle usage, no holidays abroad, lack of evidence of a climate crisis and no evidence that Net Zero would have any impact on the climate. The mental health thing really is a last resort!
Classic.
Government intervention to solve a (non-existent) problem causes a new problem that disnt exist. And government intervenes to solve the problem it created.
So with this new intervention we can comfortably predict 2 things.
1. The problem of stress from climate change will not be solved by this intervention (because it isn’t climate change but the hysteria causing the problem obviously and because governments are terrible at solving problems anyway)
2. This government intervention will cause a whole new problem that the government will blame on something else and will attempt to solve. In an endless maddening escalating cycle.
If the disaster risk person wants to look at real risks, he might investigate the reckless destruction of dams that manage waterflow in dry countries that are prone to natural cloudburst events and the risk to countries of blackouts by not having secure base load electricity production when skies are grey and the wind is not blowing, rather than the fictional claim that weather related disasters historically never happened to the same degree as they do today.
What about spending money on finding out the Covid boosters kill people? My mate’s care home has lost 5 inmates already since the latest jabbing starting. It was into double figures last Autumn.
The climate does affect mental health and obviously affects the character of a nation. We have words and phrases too many to mention that link the weather with states of mind. Anxiety about carbon dioxide damage makes no sense at all because either there is nothing to be anxious about or there is nothing that can be done about it, anthropogenic or not. They have already said that the tipping point was reached years ago so why not just chill out and enjoy the end of the world you bloody fools.
If the ‘news’ or every wildlife programme, or really anything on TV stopped including Climate Change, or Climate Emergency, or Global Warming, the afflicted would realise it’s a load of crap meant to frighten them and their children into believing the world is about to implode and would be a better place without people! No wonder our birth rate is falling.