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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