This article argues that the return of the Okukur Benin Bronze in late October 2021 captures the importance of restoring the traditional institution exemplified by the Benin monarchy as a custodian of cultural heritage and as a mechanism for ensuring that restitution works as a lever to meaningfully audit and address the burdens of history. It focuses on this formulation to assess ensuing dynamics from the attack that enabled Okukur’s plunder, emerging restitution of looted works of art, and the debate it sparked.Footnote 1 The research draws from archival materials, interviews, conference proceedings, royal correspondence, relevant literature, and public discourse.
Cambridge’s transfer of the ownership of Okukur to the Oba (king) of Benin symbolized a turning point that accelerated the movement for the restitution of cultural heritage.Footnote 2 The day after this breakthrough, the University of Aberdeen, which was the first institution to volunteer restitution, returned a sculpture of an Oba’s head for public display at a museum sited within the Oba’s palace precincts or at another agreed place. Neil Curtis of Aberdeen’s museums recalled that, given the item’s provenance from looting, “we didn’t feel we had a moral title.”Footnote 3 Similarly, Vice-Chancellor George Boyne stressed that: “It would not have been right to have retained an item of such great cultural importance that was acquired in such reprehensible circumstances.”Footnote 4
Burgeoning discontent about the enduring harm of colonialism and racial inequities is compelling various entities to return property stolen during past aggressions. As Ngaire Blackenberg, director of the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution, observed, “[w]e cannot build for the future without making our best effort at healing the wounds of the past.”Footnote 5 To put the scale of the injustices in perspective, over 90 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s material cultural legacy are in Western collections, a reality that makes it difficult to argue against restitution.Footnote 6 As France’s President Emmanuel Macron conceded, “African heritage cannot solely exist in private collections and European museums.… I want the conditions to exist for temporary or permanent returns of African heritage to Africa.”Footnote 7
Macron’s corroboration only came after decades of struggle for restitution had evolved into a “spectre” haunting Europe, as Benedict Savoy describes it.Footnote 8 Savoy discusses institutional reflexes, subterfuges, and political templates that colonial powers evolved to disavow restitution. For example, French legislative finesse classified African collections as part of France’s inalienable national heritage. Germany routinely asserted the unassailability of its title, retorting that its holdings were bought legally. Britain’s standard justificatory refrain questions Africa’s ability to properly protect its stolen patrimony. Yet, discoveries of widespread thefts revealed systematic failures of security at the British Museum.Footnote 9 This twist of poetic justice undercuts the claims of Africans’ inability to protect their artistic heritage and fortifies the urgency of demands for restitution.Footnote 10 The recent past has seen an uptick in high-profile returns of collections of heritage items, the Benin Bronzes being some of them.
Plunder and Its Aftermath
On 11 January 1897, a British colonial official telegrammed: “Acting Consul General protectorate and eight whites captured in Benin expedition and reported killed send gunboat District Commissioner Sapele.”Footnote 11 The ranking fatality was J. R. Phillips. On 16 January 1897, the imperial government ordered a manifestly disproportionate punitive expedition “to rescue any surviving members of the party attacked … and to take the City of Benin, & if possible the King himself, and to arrange for the occupation of the town.”Footnote 12 Scholars like Dan Hicks categorize this 1897 Benin attack as foreshadowing the ferocity of the twentieth-century world wars.Footnote 13
After the attack, the looted art pieces were trophied, displayed, and promptly memorialized in the Antiquities from the Kingdom of Benin and other Parts of West Africa in the British Museum, printed by the Order of the Trustees for sale. The preface extolled the “objects obtained by the recent successful expedition sent to Benin to punish the natives of that city for a treacherous massacre of a peaceful English mission.”Footnote 14 Justified as legitimate acquisitions for over a century by the colonial powers, such tragic events of cultural larceny are now unequivocally delegitimized in international law. Since at least 1954, looting inalienable cultural property has been recognized in international law as a war crime and a crime against humanity.Footnote 15 Moreover, current codifications of the laws of war that date back to the 1874 Conference of Brussels and customary international law enshrine norms that protect properties during warfare.Footnote 16
The existence of artworks that were looted was barely mentioned in the copious operational details of the military campaign. The scant acknowledgement was evinced by a description of “Ju-Ju Compound” adorned with “unique bronze heads, each head supporting a carved ivory tusk.”Footnote 17 A postscript by Phillips added “reason to hope that sufficient ivory may be found in the King’s house to pay the expenses incurred in removing the King from his Stool.”Footnote 18 Phillips’s allusion was the exception to reticence about the indigenous genius of cultural creativity and artistic tradition.
Ethnographically, the Benin Bronzes illuminate the rich artistic traditions, wealth of knowledge, and ritual lives of the culture that created and protected the treasures before they were stolen. The embodied culture did not exist in a vacuum. It was embedded in a society shaped by a civilization that was so distinguished it sparked racist speculations about its pedigree.Footnote 19 Benin’s royal dynasty has derived from the same lineage for eight centuries. The outstanding reach of the Oba’s influence and dominance was confirmed by British allegations about the stronghold that had to be destroyed to penetrate the region. For instance, repeatedly disparaging the Oba as a “Ju-Ju” priest-king whose only power consisted of the superstitious fear inspired by his “fetish” reputation, Phillips plotted to depose him because he “effectually blocked the way to all progress in that part of the Protectorate.”Footnote 20
Cognizant of the Oba’s power and authority, British colonizers recommended the cooptation of his office, albeit tokenized, to administer the coercive colonial policy of indirect rule.Footnote 21 A consequence of the bastardization of the traditional institution for colonialism was its perfunctory relegation in the governance hierarchy. Upon independence, Nigeria engineered political arrangements which undermined the value of the traditional institution that British colonialism usurped to “exercise hegemony on a shoestring.”Footnote 22 The country which was amalgamated in 1914 for the colonial mandate subsumed the Kingdom of Benin, arbitrarily derogating its historic sovereignty.
Contrary to building from the bottom up on the dignity of the indigenous civilizations predating colonialism, Nigeria’s 1960 political independence was imbued with the Westphalian notion of sovereignty, asserting the nation-state as a top-down Eurocentric imposition. In 1963, the nascent nation adopted the ideology of federalism to manage differences complicated by the colonial incursion. This restructuring layered central authority over subnational state units foisted on the local government arm. The institution and structure of traditional rulership was conflated for local government purposes, generating counterproductive hierarchies and perverse power imbalances that crystalized colonial injustices.
Today, the well-established force that the Benin monarchy exercised before the 1897 attack is obliterated in the constitutional, legislative, and policy principles that index the strata of authority and decision-making power in Nigeria. This illustrates the profound damage to the indigenous political framework under which a normative commitment to the Oba’s legal personality governed and gave meaning to the contested artefacts. This bureaucratic undermining of the traditional institution contradicts the unremitting dependence on the historical and functional competences of traditional rulership to mediate the needs of communities deprived of substantive welfare provisions by the state. Notwithstanding the increasing dependence on this office at the grassroots, the legal delimitations fortify constraints on its influence and feed the patrimonial tendencies of state power elites for arbitrary control.Footnote 23
Grievances about the disparity between the diminished legal status of traditional institutions and their continuous relevance at the grassroots stoke fierce power competitions. The next section of this article postulates these dynamics as a subtext in the tensions and controversies that trailed the restitution of the Benin Bronzes into a charged, contested political environment. Against this backdrop, it suggests that the conflict over the bronzes is about much more than ownership. It is partly rooted in tensions that plague the relationship between traditional institutions and formal state authorities. The conflict is a case study of the intricate struggle to claw back the authority of traditional rulership and to reclaim the integrity of its power.
Politics and Controversy of Return
Preparations for returning the Benin Bronzes prioritized constructing a world-class museum. The Benin Dialogue Group played a key role in the politics of this process. This was a network of experts from Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom along with delegates from the Edo State Government and the Royal Court of Benin, as well as from the National Commission for Museums and Monuments representing the federal government. The group conceived the Benin Royal Museum as a place of remembrance, education, and inspiration to showcase the rich history and culture of the Benin Kingdom from the earliest archaeological evidence to contemporary creative expressions.Footnote 24 Conversely, Godwin Obaseki, the then-governor of Edo State, which encompasses the former Benin Kingdom, endorsed the efforts of the Legacy Restoration Trust (LRT) to host, preserve, and exhibit returned artifacts in the Edo Museum of West African Art (EMOWAA).Footnote 25 At first glance, the governor prioritized Western ideas about safekeeping the cultural treasures without clearly examining the implications of such ideas for the question of ownership and custodianship. This error fueled a dispute with the Oba, who, in response, proclaimed:
attempts to divert the destination or the right of custody of the artefacts is not in the interest of the people of Benin Kingdom, to whom the Palace of the Oba of Benin provides leadership. The looted artefacts awaiting repatriation from Europe are the cultural heritage of the Benin Kingdom created by our ancestors and forefathers within the traditional norms and rites of the kingdom.Footnote 26
The provenance of the returned objects, which was not in question, traced the origin to the Benin monarchy, whose demands for the returns predated Nigeria’s existence as an independent sovereign state. However, international rules for state-to-state negotiation gave the federal government legal competence as Nigeria’s representative to accept the returning Benin Bronzes. This conditionality caused the Oba to broadcast that the Federal Government was the “only level of government that can take custody of the artefacts with a view to transferring them to their original owner and original place of abode.”Footnote 27
The disputation of the rightful destination and control of the returning cultural heritage triggered then-president Muhammadu Buhari’s intervention. He issued an order in favor of the Oba’s ownership.Footnote 28 Consequently, detractors impugned the presidential decree as a requiem that set back Western interests and consigned the returning bronzes to obscurity.
Navigating the nuances of Buhari’s resolution, Phillip Ihenacho of the LRT offered a stern rebuke of sensationalist media. Elucidating that the objects were taken from a kingdom that is now part of a state and a country that did not exist when they were removed, Ihenacho clarified: “There are delicate balances and overlapping responsibilities between federal, state and community leadership that need to be managed.… There should be debate and disagreement about what is the most appropriate outcome.”Footnote 29 He noted that it would take time to fully resolve the differences. Saliently, he lamented,
it seems fine for the West to take more than a hundred years to begin to act on restitution, but unforgivable that Nigeria does not resolve complex domestic and historical issues instantaneously.… Nigerians are grateful for the West’s finally considering the return of objects… But we have lost more than artworks and artefacts.Footnote 30
What can be learned from the complexities that Ihenacho articulates about how returns of the bronzes can bridge political history to repair conditions that changed because of the harm of colonial violence? In the remaining sections of this article, I want to build on Ihenacho’s exacting observation to proffer three main arguments. The first of these concerns the injury inflicted on the dignity and integrity of the traditional institution in state law, in policy, and in procedures. The return, if properly managed, can restore some of what was lost in the violent sacking of Benin. Restitution can become an opportunity to balance reciprocal responsibilities between different juridical authorities in the Nigerian state. The second point evaluates the difficulties that false understandings of the traditional institution pose for the implementation of cultural heritage law as a continuing consequence of colonial damage. The third explores possibilities of constructive dialogue to mediate governance tensions and reconcile public and traditional interests in the returned Benin Bronzes.
Logic of Tradition for Restitution
The events triggered by the returns reaffirm why history matters for critical conversations, strategies, and actions to address colonial injustice. Even a cursory reading of self-serving colonial accounts proves that what was lost due to the indiscriminate destruction in 1897 was more than the material objects pillaged. The spectrum of violence that entrenched colonial conquest spawned unquantifiable ramifications beyond the immediate losses suffered.Footnote 31
Although restitution entails restoring the circumstances that existed prior to the colonial violation, this is impossible for terminal injuries inflicted on radically transformed political economies.Footnote 32 Insofar as irretrievably lost lives, traditions, and values cannot be remunerated, restitution cannot redress irreversible tragedies that defined colonial policies designed to dismantle indigenous cultures, structures, and systems. The controversy about the returns illuminates how the distribution of power in the inherited postcolonial bureaucratic system perpetuates the harm of colonial dominance. An object lesson of the Oba’s resistance to the idea of EMOWAA as a surrogate of state interference is that merely returning the Benin Bronzes is not enough to heal the historic harm that the looting inflicted.
The Oba’s opposition is rooted in the severity and persistent impact of colonial violence on the traditional system of governance. The foremost loss that needs urgent repair is the integrity and vibrancy of the traditional institution which colonialism distorted and exploited. This tragedy is reinforced by the relationship with the postcolonial state, which shifted power from heritage political institutions in ways that confound the foundations of local governance.
Emblematic of the anomalous status quo are inequitable resource control and vexatious fiscal practices inconsistent with the ubiquitous ethnographic impact of the traditional institution at the grassroots. Against grave odds, the traditional institution continues to provide services that fill vast vacuums left by the state’s failure. The Nigerian state authority seldom gives financial support for these services.Footnote 33 To the contrary, it encroaches persistently on tributes, rents, and similar resources that were historically the prerogative of traditional sovereignty, which generates revenue for underwriting its mandate.Footnote 34
What gets lost in the conversation about the controversy is the harm to the public interest caused by colonial injustices, which are often elided from discourses about restitution. As the dispute over the iconic returns played out, the Benin community, frontline victims of these colonial injuries, sparsely featured as a key stakeholder and mainly seemed to be spectators refereeing the feud between the Edo state government and the monarchy. This erasure short-circuited difficult discussions about how to distinguish and accommodate the Benin people’s valid claims on the returns. The return of bronzes presents an opportunity to repair this wrong.
The Benin Bronzes controversy is a pointer to the perils of sidestepping difficult deliberations about the stakes of history. The next section of this article explores the contentious issue of ownership, especially the question of legal ownership and the competing canons and logic that enable and constrain ownership. It also explores the culturally relative concept of ownership as it concerns how the monarch’s claim on the returned bronzes intersects with the communities’ interest.
Ownership Within Traditional Norms
What lessons can be learned from the nature of property ownership in the legal system that predated the historic looting to deepen the ethic of restitution in tackling imbalances ingrained in the vestiges of colonial history? What does the Oba’s ownership mean under “native law and custom” and what are the corollary responsibilities of his rights as the owner?Footnote 35
President Buhari’s certification of the Oba’s ownership vindicated not only the Oba’s right. It also signaled an opening to espouse the monarch’s complementary responsibilities. I depart from familiar frames of analysis that curate the presidential decree as if it was terminal on the matter. Buhari’s decision suggests an approach to repair the grave breach resulting from colonial violence. Asserting the Oba’s ownership of the returned artistic heritage has the potential to both repair some of the original erosion of the monarchy’s juridical-cultural authority and legitimize the meaning of restitution within the indigenous context.
I explore what Buhari tried to do as a watershed to reconcile the public interest in the Benin Bronzes with restating the role of the traditional institution in achieving historical repair. The Oba did not see a conflict between the public interest and the notion of ownership implied in his use of the phrase “within the traditional norms and rites of the kingdom” in campaigning to reclaim ownership of the returns. The dominance of the community as a core organizing social principle in the 1897 Benin Kingdom and the corollary regime of communal property point to a reciprocity of rights and duties that temper the presumption of unqualified ownership from Buhari’s decree.
What is known about the legal dimensions of communalism brings into focus the crucial distinction of the Western conceptualization of private property, characterized by individual ownership that grants the conventional owner a bundle of rights that allows excluding others from enjoying the property. Approximating the pre-1897 attack conditions, the Oba’s right to exclude would not be absolute but rather mediated by a property regime wherein the community would be entitled to benefit from the property.
In Amodu Tijani v The Secretary Southern Nigeria, the privy council cautioned against a tendency to construe native title “conceptually in terms which are appropriate only to systems which have grown up under English law.”Footnote 36 Construing title to ownership as the property of the community in the various native jurisprudence systems, the court enunciated the real character of native title as “based, not on such individual ownership as English law has made familiar, but on communal usufructuary.”Footnote 37 The court reasoned that
Such a community may have the possessory title to the common enjoyment of a usufruct, with customs under which its individual members are admitted to enjoyment … To ascertain how far this latter development of right has progressed involves the study of the history of the particular community and its usages in each case. Abstract principles fashioned a priori are but of little assistance, and are as often as not misleading.Footnote 38
The court grounded its holding on the Report on Land Tenure in West Africa written by Chief Justice Thomas Crossley Rayner in 1898. According to Rayner, the notion of individual ownership was quite foreign:
but in every case the Chief or Headman of the community or village, or head of the family, has charge of the land, and in loose mode of speech is sometimes called the owner. He is to some extent in the position of a trustee, and as such holds the land for the use of the community or family.… He cannot make any important disposition of the land without consulting the elders of the community or family, and their consent must in all cases be given before a grant can be made to a stranger.Footnote 39
Moreover, the court opined that insofar as the chief is only the agent through whom transactions take place, he had to be dealt with as representing not only his own, but the other interests affected.Footnote 40 Affirming a prior opinion that ownership rights “were left entirely unimpaired, and as freely exercisable after the Cession as before,” the court held that where the lands to be taken were the property of a native community, the chief may sell and convey it. Footnote 41 But “he is to convey a full native title of usufruct, and that adequate compensation for what is so conveyed, must be awarded for distribution among the members of the community entitled.”Footnote 42 Furthermore, it is particularly noteworthy that the court underlined that any compensation paid to the chief for the property of a community was to be distributed by him among the members of the community or used for their benefit.
The Oba’s regular emphasis of his representative and custodial capacity and control by virtue of custom shows that the principle of title that the court’s elaborated is still in use in Benin. As the Oba explained, he remains the custodian of Benin traditional law and custom exercising proprietary rights over collective property, and that vests him with authority to deal with any artifact of historical, ancestral, spiritual, cultural, or religious rites of significance.Footnote 43 It follows from the Oba’s claims that the Benin Bronzes are still the property of the community and that he cannot deal with the returns independent of carrying along the community.
Merely restoring the Oba’s right to repossess physical ownership of the ritual objects is inadequate to remedy the communal harm of the historic wrong of the theft. It is important to respect the public or communal implications of the Oba’s custodianship. This can address mainstream anxieties about the consequences of custody by reconciling the Oba’s control with the best interest of the community in ways that strengthen the goals of restitution.
Law and Cultural Heritage Protection
What lessons can be learned from the still unfolding history of returns about the limits of the conceptual, policy, and legal frameworks for protecting cultural heritage? How might the Oba’s ownership mitigate rampant challenges of the rule of law that pose problems for preserving cultural heritage? Much of the discussion about the returning cultural productions dwells on the antipathy of European authorities towards states campaigning for returns. The focus here is on a novel approach that insists on centering the traditional institution represented by rulership like the Oba of Benin in such discussions. This institution personifies a heritage of indigenous agency whose repair is indispensable for meaningful restitution.Footnote 44 The exclusion of this dimension in both the international and national legal systems is a consequential gap in cultural heritage protection.
The premiere international treaty regimes adopted in the 1970s under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to protect cultural heritage neglected to recognize the system of traditional institution and authority.Footnote 45 This convention makes no mention of customary tradition, except reciting that the true value of cultural property can be appreciated only in relation to the fullest possible information about its origin, history, and traditional setting. This qualified acknowledgement confirms the canonical omission of customary traditions for substantive heritage protection in international law.
A key lesson that can be learned from the fact that the Benin artistic treasures were preserved for centuries by successive Obas is the potential of the traditional security system to enrich homegrown architecture for safeguarding the rule of law concerning heritage protection.Footnote 46 Before the 1897 attack, colonial reportage attested that Benin had a good measure of law and order.Footnote 47 Presently, there is no shortage of evidence about the intractable challenges of socio-legal control in Benin and across Nigeria. The precariousness of enforcing the rule of law at both the national and international levels adds to the exigency of harnessing the traditional institution to nurture change.Footnote 48 Insofar as the traditional institution is not recognized in the doctrines and practices that organize international law for cultural heritage protection, it has no official standing to enhance the effectiveness of such law.
Postindependence political machinations and legal strictures marginalized the role of the traditional institution.Footnote 49 Nevertheless, the institution persists, even if subjugated by the formalities of the Westphalian structure of the contemporary Nigerian state.Footnote 50 The Benin Bronzes controversy exposed the artificiality of the postcolonial state. It also revealed the problem of predicating the international legal order on the system of state sovereigns putatively imbued with autonomy over their internal and external affairs.Footnote 51 The conflict shows further that the traditional institution’s role in heritage protection in Nigeria is inescapable.Footnote 52
Nigeria ratified the UNESCO conventions without drawing on objective experience to qualify its consent with a reservation, understanding, or declaration that clarifies the overarching role of custom and tradition in its domain. The government’s elision of the traditional form of governance in agreeing to the international treaties regulating cultural heritage protection is reproduced at the national level: the constitution, which defines the apex of the domestic legal order, omits any mention of the traditional institution.Footnote 53
Aggrieved traditional rulers believe that their form of governance embodies a cultural order that shapes mores, which are necessary to safeguard the rule of law for wholesome self-determination and nation-building. They believe that the constitution should formally recognize the role of traditional institutions in grassroots governance and in preserving material, ritual, and religious heritage.Footnote 54 The well-established traditional governance apparatus that the British integrated for the colonial policy of indirect rule still performs vital functions: providing lifelines, goods, and services that help to offset the state’s abdication of the social contract obligations that justify its existence.Footnote 55 From the colonial era to the present, the entrenchment of the traditional institution in the social fabric made it vulnerable to attacks by successive governments that have perceived it as a threat.Footnote 56
Mindful not to romanticize traditional rulership as a panacea for widespread governance problems, participants at a cultural heritage conference welcomed efforts by the National Council of Traditional Rulers in Nigeria (NCTRN) to deepen the commitment of its members to value-based governance.Footnote 57 The NCTRN is an umbrella organization which is branded as a platform that relies on peer exchanges and priorities formation to enrich understandings about the rights and duties of traditional leadership and serves to strengthen the capacity of incumbents. Cooperating with the NCTRN may be a pathway to facilitate further dialogue with the Oba and to draw on his mission-critical commitment to traditional norms to bolster accountability in the best interest of the public about the returns of the celebrated bronzes. The Oba, who commended the overlapping interest of the NCTRN leadership at Okukur’s handover ceremony, has been forthright about his openness to a middle-ground.Footnote 58
Constituting a Way Forward
As the West gradually turns the corner in reckoning with the unjust legacies of the historical violence of colonialism, returns resulting from decades of struggles to repatriate looted antiquities to historical owners generate considerable conflicts in source communities. Whereas restitution discourses and practices tend to idealize Eurocentric idiosyncrasies by prioritizing conservationist preferences, for instance, similar sentiments forged a fault line in the domestic tensions surrounding the returning bronzes. In dispensing with the façade of national unity, the controversy ushers in promising conditions for purposeful collaboration to resolve the lingering damages of colonial violence. Buhari’s directive conferring custodianship of the returned cultural assets on the Oba of Benin provides a pathway to merge two fundamental tenets of restitution: restoring looted materials to their original provenance and rebuilding the custodial agency undermined by colonial conquest.
A notable change has occurred since the Buhari administration transitioned from office in 2023. In a stark policy flip-flop by the current presidency of Bola Tinubu, the National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM) will now take over the custodial responsibility for restituted objects.Footnote 59 The shift still recognizes the primacy of the Oba’s ownership. However, it reverts to adjudicating the question of possession by resurrecting conservationist priorities that the colonial powers used to rationalize cultural imperialism and theft with the excuse that the Benin Royal Court does not have the proper infrastructure to host the objects. The vacillation underscores the imperative for Nigeria to go beyond band-aid solutions in addressing the historical harm typified by the plunder of the Benin Bronzes.
Continuing to acknowledge that the Oba owns these treasures sustains the space for constructive dialogue about how to better achieve the promise of restitution. Yet, the political turnaround risks reducing the historic returns to episodic transactions instead of substantive opportunities to rebuild the relationship between material and intangible cultural heritage. There is more to restitution than merely returning the physical objects for display and exhibition as some curios, no matter where they are situated. The presidential redirection of the destination of the returning Benin Bronzes, even if as an interim arrangement, is not a substitute for compelling discussions that transcend the threshold of preservation and protection to explore how to progress from the materiality of the returns to repair ruptures to the integrity of intangible cultural heritage symbolized by custom and tradition.
Restitution spurs favorable conditions to resolve ambiguities about the value of time-honored ideals, norms, and practices of customs and traditions. It enables the environment to restore intangible cultural heritage that was lost and to lay the groundwork for substantively improving relational ethics, morality, and other dimensions of repairing dispossessed cultural patrimony. Meaningful restitution is not just about returning the stolen objects. Rather, it offers the opportunity to repair the past with respect to rebuilding the integrity of indigenous sovereignty in addition to remedying the overt theft of material cultural heritage assets. A paramount achievement of this theft enslaved traditional authority to the colonial agenda and institutionalized social realities that disrupted the organic trajectory for rigorous self-determination.
What happened with the returning Benin bronzes and the culmination in the presidential vindication of the Oba’s ownership right lend credence to the traditional institution. Conversely, what happened to EMOWAA is instructive for building on this historic moment in the restitution movement to countervail power dysfunctionalities. Presumably, EMOWAA is still on course to roll out a museum with a broader mission than housing the returning bronzes. However, its vulnerability to politicization came to fore as cronies of the administration that took over from Governor Obaseki urged revoking the certificate of occupancy of the land for the museum. The resolution of the question of ownership harbors the potential to model how to advance healing the harm of the past perpetuated in the present. This article proposes tapping into the opportunity created by the returns to engage and reconcile the positions of relevant stakeholders, and to re-center the traditional institution as an accountable custodian of collective heritage.
How can the validity of the community’s legal entitlement to being included in the enjoyment of collective property—upheld by judicial precedents like Amodu v. Tijani—be redeemed in the returns, augmenting the logic of restitution? And how can understanding the enduring meaning of the ownership of the stolen treasures—dating back to 1897—help make history accessible to promote cultural heritage and bridge the gap between the positions of the Oba, Governor Obaseki’s endorsement of the Legacy Restoration Trust, and the current federal government’s authorization of the NCMM to assume custody?
Although generations of Obas guaranteed the security of the “living cultural heritage” in the palace for use during rituals and festivities, the conditions of modernity are amenable to conserve them for posterity and share them with the world at large in a museum.Footnote 60 Monarchical custodianship can and should coexist with the ethos of material heritage museum. There is no inherent secularity in museum ethics. Neither the modern logic of conservation nor customary norms and rites preclude the Oba from choosing to re-sacralize the returning religious icons in the royal museum as historical memorials. Reconciling the sacredness of the antiquities in an ordinarily secular aesthetics museum is a matter of creative design.Footnote 61 However, deciding which path to follow deserves to weigh into consideration what serves the best interest of the community.
The official state act aimed at settling the controversy does not do justice to the intersection of the public interest in the complexities that drove the momentum for the returns. Yet, ownership presents a fitting paradigm to reconcile various interests and factor the realities of the modern day into thinking of how to restore elements of communal ownership. Since the Oba holds the ownership title to the returning treasures, akin to a trustee on behalf of the community, his status as the representative of the community requires due diligence to steward the sacred icons. The confluence of values embodied by the assets suggest various reasons to realize this goal. These range from the religious, moral, and philosophical to the sociocultural, economic, civil, and political.
The Oba’s insistence on a royal museum as an insignia of his ownership is a pragmatic pathway for the community to access and take part in enjoying the returns. Skeptics perceived the Oba’s claim that the returning treasures be housed in a museum proximate to his palace instead of in a state museum as a curious paradox for restitution. However, the Oba has expressed a shared interest in finding common ground, signaling that constructing a palace museum is not mutually exclusive with alternative possibilities and standards. It behooves the parties implicated in the controversy to persevere in constructive dialogue to figure out the best way forward.
The constraints of the relationship with the state force traditional rulers to forge a facility for improvisation. The Oba’s insistence on the royal museum is a function of the traditional institution’s adaptability.Footnote 62 The Oba’s allusion to the funding that the LRT attracted from European supporters is reminiscent of frustrations about the government’s monopoly of fiscal policies that excluded the traditional institution from state budget appropriations and abrogated the privilege of imposing levies on the community. Nonetheless, a vision of housing the returning objects in a palace museum as a revenue generation strategy to defray the costs of discharging the mandate of the Oba’s office to the community may not bear out readily. Expecting financial returns from commodifying the returns is contingent on enough demand to guarantee a threshold of fee-paying clientele in Nigeria.Footnote 63 On the other hand, the social value of the palace museum can translate into enormous benefit beyond monetary consideration.
Fostering community access to the cultural history represented by the artifacts may boost the monarchy’s legitimacy and sustainability. For instance, given how the horizontal politics of rallying public voices turned the tide on the question of restitution in Europe, situating the museum within the palace precinct can equally stimulate bottom-up change. Subject to design and implementation, the museum can amplify collective repair by enabling an environment for civic engagement to inspire voices from below simultaneously to legislate against neopatrimonial interferences with the traditional institution and to litigate against transgressions of customary norms by the heritage rulership.Footnote 64 The prospect of the infrastructure evolving into a double-edged sword for reform promises a win-win that can contribute to systematically strengthening both traditional and state institutions. As Stanley Ikem Okoye argues, the confusion of heritage with modern visual representation misses the primary reason art exists for a society as an arena for thought, philosophy, and debates about itself first, and secondly as an insightful critique of national culture and society.Footnote 65
Conclusion
Positing the empirical interrelatedness of material cultural heritage assets like the Benin Bronzes with intangible forms of heritage like customary norms and traditions in local settings, this article argued for the centrality of the traditional institution for practices and processes of restitution. It framed the conflict galvanized by the returning bronzes between governance tiers that were non-existent in 1897 as a vivid portraiture of the grievances against the state instrumentality for neutralizing the formal power and authority of traditional rulership. The disagreement between the Oba and Governor Obaseki brought into sharp relief the incongruity of purporting to protect, preserve, and promote heritage assets while circumscribing the traditional institution that give them cultural, ritual, religious, and related meanings and functions.
The Oba’s claw back against the state government’s interference suggests that tensions deriving from the diminution of the traditional institution came to a head in the fight over the returning Benin Bronzes. In the international regulation of inter-state relations, Nigeria’s federal government proxies for the polity. However, privileging the sovereign state as the recipient of returning cultural objects was not conclusive on the ownership question. The provenance of the Benin bronzes from the Oba’s lineage and their return to royal custody widens the opportunity to look back at history and to relive past heritage as a path to improve the present and the future.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Maria Kacandes, Rudi Gaudio, Daisy Danjuma, Owen Fiss, Adhiambo Odaga, Steve Tallman, Jane Eggers, Ngozi Udom, Cyndi Courtney, Timothy Arthur, Chris Derrell, and the editors of the JAH.
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