Case Study: Benin Bronze (Oba) at the RISD Museum

by: GracePosted on:
Unknown artist, Beninese, Head of a king (Oba) (probably 1700s). Image from the RISD Museum.

Key Events

Written by Audrey Buhain

The Head of the King (Oba) is a bronze casting of the head of an Oba or supreme king of the Edo people organized under the Kingdom of Benin. Their lands are known today as Southern Nigeria, more specifically Edo State. The Oba is one of an estimated thousand bronze castings, colloquially called ‘Benin Bronzes,’ which filled the royal palace of the former Kingdom until the British Punitive Expedition of 1897, where 1,200 British soldiers looted the Kingdom and massacred its citizens. This expedition resulted in the confiscation of over a thousand bronze castings, which were brought back to Britain, and auctioned off to the British Museum and individual members of the military as spoils of war. 

The Oba that is held at the RISD Museum was auctioned to a private individual named Lucy Truman Aldrich at the Knoedler Gallery in New York in 1935, labeled as a French import. In 1939, Aldrich donated the Oba to the RISD Museum. The Oba has been shown in various exhibits and configurations in relation to the rest of the Museum’s collections, such as in European galleries with 17th and 18th-century work which address imperialism. Yet in its local context, the Oba is a sacred object. Each new oba who rules Edo State must install an ancestral altar for his predecessor—here, the king head casting plays a critical role in representing the wisdom of the deceased and channeling the collective wisdom of all past obas. 

In 2018, the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics, colloquially known as the Sarr-Savoy report after its authors Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, was released on November 21. The report was commissioned by French President Emmanuel Macron to address the state of unlawfully-collected sub-Saharan African art in public French institutions, and to recommend courses of action for the restitution of these art objects. The Rhode Island protests over the Oba’s restitution at the RISD Museum were held a week after the Sarr-Savoy report was released to the public. 

In the Sarr-Savoy report, the case for the restitution of art objects is foregrounded by three key ideas. First, that colonization is a crime, and therefore all acts of looting or object collection under colonization are crimes. European museums, by extension, are “unwittingly the public archives of the colonial system” which must restore their looted objects. Second, that the exploitation of cultural wealth and natural resources is commensurable, due to the fact of material wealth generated by European institutions from the cultural heritage of former colonies. Third, that the restitution of art objects will encourage the “universalization” of cultural property by restoring communities’ access to their own cultural heritage. 

With these foregrounding ideas, the Sarr-Savoy report makes the argument that, because looted sub-Saharan African ‘art’ is in truth comprised of cultural objects that were forcefully assimilated under the framework of art, the restitution of these objects may not be towards national or private museums outside of Europe, but to their communities of origin where the objects’ cultural use will be independently determined. The Sarr-Savoy report, however, does not stand against using institutional processes—such as dialogue projects, training, and advice—between the French state and former colonial nations to facilitate the construction of art institutions in these former colonies. One such institutional process that is relevant to this case study is the Benin Dialog Group, a working group that is composed of leaders from Benin City, Edo State, the Nigerian government, and European museum professionals to initiate the temporary restitution of looted objects by means of loan to the Benin Royal Museum, newly conceptualized and yet to undergo construction. 

With the creation of this report as their context, the protesters who took action at the RISD Museum in 2018 released a list of demands which are available online and quoted here. This list was published under the group name ‘Unmake the Collection.’ 

“1. Recognize the looted status of this object and its responsibility to cease holding it after several decades. 

2. Initiate a process of disowning this object that was brutally taken. Disowning the object is the responsibility of the institution and the community that profit from the object and [hold] it against others. It should be pursued regardless of as-yet unanswered questions about to whom and how the object should be restituted. By disowning and not deciding on the object’s destination and future, we defer to the impacted communities the lead on finding answers. 

3. Reject the policy of excuses for NOT initiating such a process, including the logistical hurdles regarding the final destination of the object. In fact, even though the recipient and process of transferring the object may seem like obvious questions, which indeed they are, decisions about recipients are not prerequisites to the process of disowning. 

4. Acknowledge that impacted communities—not the museum—must lead further deliberations and future decisions about the future of the Benin bronze head once this object is disowned publicly by the museum. 

5. Establish a decolonization commission based on a commitment to reverse imperial violence and its consequences, and seek to bring together objects and rightful communities as a form of reparation. Such a commission should be equal parts community members, RISD administrators, and scholars whose work focuses on decolonization.” 

When the protesters arrived at the RISD Museum administrative offices, this list of demands was handed over. The administrators accepted the document and notified the protesters that repatriation was already in process, and that the Museum was already in contact with the Nigerian government. In the following months, the RISD Museum began to program public events focused on the Oba, such as a lecture given by Peju Layiwola, a Nigerian visual artist of dual Yoruba and Edo descent, whose art has addressed the ancient and contemporary meanings ascribed to Benin City. The Museum’s continued engagement with the Oba in 2019 was made known through an interview with Chief Curator Jan Howard and Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo, where they disclosed themselves as being in the process of “[seeking] out” more dialogue between the RISD Museum and the communities that the Oba originated from, this time mentioning both the Kingdom of Benin and the Nigerian government as opposed to solely the latter. As of Fall 2020, the RISD Museum published an article entitled “RISD Museum Effecting Change” that announced the Oba as a formally deaccessioned object. However, in this article the RISD Museum defined deaccession as this the “first step to restitution,” and clarified that until an appropriate restitution process is established, the Oba would continue to be held and displayed at the RISD Museum with updated labels reflective of its provenance.

Written by Joey Han

In 1897, as part of a punitive expedition, the British Empire sent troops to the Kingdom of Benin in present-day Nigeria to plunder the cultural artifacts of the royal palace as a means of exercising imperial control. The Benin Expedition of 1897, as it came to be known, saw the extraction of thousands of sculptures, plaques and cast objects of the Benin Court—many of which carried ceremonial and sacred importance—in the violent process of colonial occupation and imperial conquest. The objects deemed “spoils of war,” were subsequently distributed to a number of European and American museums, as well as to the private collections of British officials. (Greenberger) 

Among the western art institutions that eventually came to acquire one of the many artifacts looted from Benin was the Rhode Island School of Design, which has in its collection a bronze cast of the head of a ruler of the Kingdom of Benin, titled Head of a King (Oba). According to the piece’s accompanying information on the museum’s website, the bronze cast is one that would have been commissioned by the reigning king and placed on the royal palace’s ancestral alters. (RISD Museum). The piece, estimated by the museum to have been created in the 1700s, is undoubtedly one of the thousands of objects extracted in the Benin Expedition by British imperial forces. 

On the morning of November 30th, 2018, a group of Brown and RISD students and faculty, joined by local community members, crowded the stairs of the RISD Museum with a simple message summed up in a three-word slogan: Heads Up, RISD. The protest, co-organized by students and faculty, called for the RISD Museum to disown and repatriate the Benin Bronze statue head kept in its collection, and for museum workers to act outside of the voice and structure of the institution in the restitution of the object.   

The demonstration was largely a response to Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy’s report submitted earlier in the month to French President Emanuel Macron titled The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage, a report commissioned by Macron as a means of initiating a government effort towards the repatriation of stolen or looted cultural objects. Macron, having given a speech addressing France’s colonial history in Sub-Saharan Africa at the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, sought the help of Sarr and Savoy to provide a theoretical framework for the decolonization of museum spaces. In the week preceding the RISD protest, Macron and the French government had committed to efforts toward total restitution of cultural objects extracted from Africa, including but not limited to the artifacts looted from the Kingdom of Benin.  

Over the past few weeks, three years on from Macron’s declaration, a host of institutions in Europe and the United States have made the news for moves towards restitution. CNN announced this week that on November 10, 2021 France returned 26 looted objects in a ceremony presided over by President of Benin, Patrice Talon. The same article in CNN also mentions that “The German government announced in April that it aimed to start returning Benin Bronzes, copper alloy relief sculptures from the Kingdom of Benin, to Nigeria next year.” 

 The Smithsonian removed 10 objects from display and identified 16 for potential repatriation.  In October, Cambridge University’s Jesus College made the decision to return a bronze ancestral heirloom in its collection to the Nigeria’s National Commission in response to calls from its student body. 

In response to the protesters at the RISD Museum, RISD spokesperson Matt Berry said “We have initiated a process of communication with the National Commission for Museums and Monuments in Nigeria, which has been established to address this very issue. We see this as an opportunity to confront the histories of colonialism that exist within museum collections.” 

Following the RISD protests, an interview with RISD Museum curators Jan Howard and Gina Borromeo was conducted by online arts magazine publisher Hyperallergic. The interview detailed the curator’s perspective on the repatriation of the Benin Bronze Head, the processes and logistical/political complications of its return, the behind-the-scenes work of the museum as well as the difficulties that come with the positionality of the museum as an institution as well as the curators as individual actors. The two curators admitted the shortcomings of the institution in the handling of the issue, and the interview of course brings up a variety of complicated questions regarding the complexity of restitution and the historical and colonial politics of the museum.

On the page providing info on the Benin Bronze statue in its collection, RISD Museum’s website writes: 

“In 1897, following unsuccessful attempts at annexation, British forces sacked the Benin kingdom, killing many people, burning cities, forcing the reigning king into exile, and looting works of art and other treasures in a campaign known as the Benin Massacre. Soon after, museums and individuals throughout Europe and the United States began collecting Benin bronzes, including this one.

The staff of the RISD Museum acknowledges the histories of colonial looting that are inherent in geographically comprehensive museum col”

The sentence stops short midway through the word “collections.” While awkwardly embarrassing from a copy-editing standpoint, it is also kind of a perfect typo—perhaps ironically symbolic that the statement of acknowledgement of RISD’s culpability is an unfinished sentence, an incomplete sentiment.

Questions for Consideration

Written by Audrey Buhain and Joey Han

  1. The Kingdom of Benin spans what is now Southern Nigeria, in particular Edo State. Should repatriation be framed in terms of a Nigerian concern or an Edo concern over Benin Bronzes? 
  2. What does it mean to hold a sculpture of an individual in an art museum — is the purpose of a sculpture’s display to celebrate craftsmanship, or the person depicted in the sculpture? How then, might it be strange for pre-colonial monarchs to be displayed in institutions that were filled through imperial plunder? 
  3. Is the museum fundamentally unequipped to be an honoring ground? Can it ever function as an ancestral altar in the way that the Oba is meant to be displayed? 
  4. The Benin Dialog Group said “The [Royal Museum in Benin] will showcase the rich history and culture of the Benin Kingdom from the earliest archeological evidence to contemporary creative expressions, in recognition of the fact that Benin City continues to be a vibrant artistic centre.” Why is there a strong concern among European museums over retaining their possession of the Benin Bronzes, and a near invisible concern over collecting contemporary art from Nigeria and Edo State? 
  5. One of the RISD Museum protest organizers said “this assembly [is] a call-in for the museum to decolonize without delay, and… the intersections at which decolonization would take place: It is with this anti-imperialist orientation and alignment with struggles for Indigenous lands and objects, Black liberation, and a free Palestine that we desire for the RISD Museum to hear our call to disown the Benin bronze from its collections.” Where is the return of art situated alongside the return of Indigenous land? What can’t art do for land-based concerns, and in this light, why is art repatriation urgent?
  6. Can there be such thing as partial restitution, and is there purpose or meaning to intended repatriation?
  7. Why is it that ownership of objects is privileged in the first place? What necessitates the display and ownership of an object?
  8. To what degree can individual museum workers or curators be separated from the larger voice or context of the institution? 
  9. If a museum owns an object like a Benin Bronze, what are your thoughts on whether it should be displayed for public viewing, and if so, how?
  10. Are there ways to reimagine the museum? How does a museum restructure itself to separate from an institutional logic that is built on histories of colonial violence?

Key Concepts

Written by Audrey Buhain and Joey Han

  • Language as representation: This concept dispels language as a natural, non-constructed representation of meaning, and problematizes the logic that museums might use to identify a looted object’s claimant. The RISD Museum identifies ‘Nigeria’ and ‘Edo State’ as the Oba’s communities of origin, though it is unclear which physical communities in particular would determine its use as a cultural object, since these areas of land are unequivocal to groups of people. The modern-day oba and government officials of the Kingdom of Benin are a precise set of individuals that institutions identify as determiners of Benin Bronzes’ cultural use, and this has been reflected by the existence of dialogue projects such as the Benin Dialog Group. Apart from these more obvious language traps of geography in determining a claimant, it is worth considering the various communities in time that the king head represents. The integrity of Edo cultural continuity in the face of forces such as modernization and urbanization might render the king head less central to Edo culture than it was prior to monumental histories such as the Punitive Expedition, the Middle Passage, and the industrialization of Nigeria. Language as representation’s capacity to expand the logic surrounding this case study, for instance through the invocation of temporality and geography, destabilizes communities as static sites of cultural production, and acknowledges space for communities to hold a dynamic relationship with any given cultural object. 
  • Incommensurability: This concept recognizes the singularity of context, and cautions against the use of metaphorizing language to approach the various problems created by imperialism. To make the case for restitution, the Sarr-Savoy Report argues that the exploitation of cultural wealth and natural resources are commensurable acts. As evidence, the report cites the equivalence between material wealth generated by institutions whose collections are built from histories of imperial plunder, and material wealth generated by businesses whose operations rely on other nations’ manpower and raw materials. This comparison brings visibility to less recognizable systems through which former colonial powers continue to profit from former colonies, such as art and natural history institutions. However, it fails to problematize defining the exploitation of cultural wealth and natural resources through their respective relations to another object: money. Viewing money as a defining measure of exploitation assigns meaning to cultural wealth through monetary value, in the way that natural resources have predominantly been assigned meaning by businesses and governments. Although there are monetary dimensions to exploitation, a myopic focus on money yields to rather than questions whether a modern monetary value system can encapsulate all stakes of environmental and cultural exploitation. This neglects other modes of understanding the changes that imperialism wreaked upon former colonies, such as the lack of historical access to one’s own culture due to imperial plunder, and how this phenomenon can be measured and reversed. Invoking the concept of incommensurability into the Sarr-Savoy Report’s argument for restitution encourages more nuanced attention to how cultural exploitation operates and affects communities beyond finances. 
  • Double-gesture of inclusivity and exclusivity: This concept assists in assessing the outcomes of actions that seemingly decenter Europe and North America as the arbiters of art. As part of the Benin Dialog Project, European art institutions such as the British Museum initiated the long-term loan of plundered objects to the yet-to-be constructed Benin Royal Museum. These loans are coupled with advice and training offered by European museum officials for staff that the Benin Royal Museum will employ upon opening. This includes the construction of legal frameworks that will determine the timeline and conditions on which looted objects will be displayed at the new museum. These measures are a seeming precedent which treat restitution as an actionable rather than theoretical process. Yet a quotation on the Dialog Project’s website throws into question how transformative of a decolonial process this single-minded focus restitution can be: “The [Royal Museum in Benin] will showcase the rich history and culture of the Benin Kingdom from the earliest archeological evidence to contemporary creative expressions, in recognition of the fact that Benin City continues to be a vibrant artistic centre.” The need to specify the abiding value of art from Edo State and Nigeria at large raises the question: Why is antique Benin art valued so fiercely by European museums, and where does this situate the value of contemporary Nigerian art to these institutions? The lesser energy directed towards contemporary Nigerian art might point to the double-gesture nature of actions which ensure European museums’ continued access to the Benin Bronzes. Double-gestures are characterized by the validation of certain forms of art—in particular, art that displays craftsmanship aligned under European sensibilities—at the cost of invalidating others, and ultimately point to a sustained conceptualization of art as white property. In the scope of the Benin Bronzes, the high degree of negotiation might reflect European institutions’ decontextualization of Edo cultural objects into samples of high craftsmanship in lost-wax casting—or, a capacity for ‘civilization’—and their subsequent value to a Western museum. This decontextualization whitewashes the Benin Bronzes into artistic objects which uplift the museum rather than reflect monarchic and pre-colonial histories. Contemporary Nigerian art, less tethered to this less common artistic medium that was used to create the Bronzes, may therefore be less assimilable into the scope of art as white property.
  • Moves to Innocence (Decolonization is Not a Metaphor)
  • Decolonizing/free your mind (regarding the PR coverage of museums like the RISD Museum)
  • Consultation of expert opinion, external validation: RISD admits to having a lack of internal knowledge and expertise regarding the handling and repatriation process of the Benin Bronze, which led them to rely on the consultation of academic experts external to the institution. This is another facet of the situation that we can unpack and discuss together. There’s something to be said about the way modern Western thinking quells its own feeling of culpability by acknowledging positionality. An earnest Mea Culpa from representatives of an institution sometimes seems to be seen as sufficient/significant in counterbalancing the potential harm of holding onto looted objects. 
  • Possession of cultural goods automatically means absence of cultural goods in places of origin: When we see objects in museum collections, particularly historical artifacts and objects that have cultural/spiritual significance and value, it is easy to forget that presence of the objects requires absence of those objects somewhere else. Obviously, in some cases objects are relics of civilizations or periods that no longer exist, but there are also many objects that have traceable lineages and existing homes that they are absent from. 
  • There is also a basic underlying assumption that the museum also has some right to the object, even if that is not explicitly expressed. This is part of a western institutional logic regarding property (i.e. Whiteness as Property)

Resources

Gathered by Audrey Buhain and Joey Han

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