Construction plans for the eagerly-awaited new museum in Benin City in Edo State, Nigeria are about to take an important step forward.

The museum has made no secret it would like to reunite more of the Benin objects currently held in international collections. 

For almost a decade, members of the Benin Royal Court, representatives of the Edo State government and the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria (NCMM) have been working with a multilateral consortium of western museums to help facilitate this new museum.  Called the Benin Dialogue Group, the consortium includes museums in the UK, US, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. Last Friday’s announcement in part reflects the contribution made by this Group towards the new museum’s construction.  It also reflects their growing confidence that returning artefacts may be possible.

However, discussions within the Group about which significant Benin works held in western collections will be returned and whether full restitution rather than long-term loans is feasible remain unresolved.  Deaccessioning from western museums throws up seemingly impenetrable legal problems, while Nigeria itself has made it clear that a solution based on loans is inadequate. 

Given Nigeria's poor record in museum management during the '80s and '90s, there are major roadblocks still to overcome, including future risks of political instability, the status of museum security and a financing requirement understood to be as much as $150 million.  The vicissitudes of Nigerian politics, in particular, have been known to throw other initiatives off course. But this time there are grounds for optimism. Edo State insists this new museum will be independent of any government organisation, operating with its own autonomous management and implementing modern security and environmental standards.  They hope this will reassure western museums concerned that EMOWAA would otherwise fall under the control of the federal government, whose track record in museum management has been questioned.

The widespread looting of the city’s shrines, royal chambers and storerooms that followed the capture of Benin City by British troops in February 1897, led to a wide geographical dispersal of thousands of highly important objects, including plaques, sculptures and items of great ceremonial and sacred value, collectively known as the Benin Bronzes.

In his latest book about the looting of the Benin Bronzes, The Brutish Museums, Prof Dan Hicks explains the sacking was an act of 'corporate militarist colonialism', the plundering a chaotic free-for-all.

For more than a decade, the British had been expanding their economic interests in the Niger territory, determined to erode the monopoly of trade held by the King of Benin and his influential middleman, chief Nana.  A series of military actions were launched to advance these commercial objectives.  However, rather than repeating the popular myth the sacking of Benin City was an isolated act of military retaliation for the killing of a trade delegation in January 1897 (an action that became known as the 'Phillips Massacre'), Hicks draws on contemporary papers to confirm the action was in fact part of a longer-held strategic plan, conceived by the British as far back as 1892 - five years before the sacking took place.

This places the scale of plundering that followed the killing at Benin City in an altogether different light.  It was not an isolated military action, followed by an auction of looted objects to finance a punitive expedition.  It was a deliberate attempt to obliterate the Edo people and their cultural heritage, an 'act of extreme iconoclasm', according to Hicks. 

So far, the huge legal obstacles that prevent national collections returning the objects looted from the 1897 expedition have proved largely insurmountable. Those artefacts that have been returned have come mainly from smaller regional museums, dealers, auction houses and private collections. 

Following the rampant thefts that took place in the 1950s, the collections holding Benin artefacts outside Nigeria say they need reassurance that objects returned will be secure.  Whether it is fair to make security a condition for repatriation of looted objects or not, it would certainly oil the wheels of progress and give Adjaye's chances of completing construction greater impetus.  However, completion in five years still looks ambitious - it took nine years to complete Washington’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. 

Photos: View of main entrance and courtyard garden, Edo Museum of West African Art

 Gates and Portals, Edo Museum of West African Art

Both courtesy of © Adjaye Associates