Today, Explained - Africa wants its stuff back

Episode Date: December 7, 2021

The world’s most illustrious museums are finally having to reckon with the stolen art in their collections. Today’s show was produced by Haleema Shah, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos from We've talked about Black Panther on the show before but never this one specific scene. Good morning. How can I help you?

I'm just checking out these artifacts. They tell me you're the expert. You could say that. It's the first time we meet a guy named Eric Stevens, aka Killmonger. He's played by Michael B. Jordan. Where's this one from? The Bobo Ashanti tribe, present-day Ghana. And what about this one?

That one's from the Edo people of Benin, 16th century. Now, tell me about this one. Also from Benin, 7th century. Fula tribe, I believe. He's at an art museum that certainly seems like it's supposed to be the British Museum in London, and he can't help but notice everything on display has something in common. How do you think your ancestors got these? You think they paid a fair price?

Or did they take it like they took everything else? Eric and some other bad dudes do some crimes and help themselves to the stolen goods. Hey, please, somebody, come help. There's an emergency right away in the West African exhibit, please, right away. Back in real life, some of the biggest museums in the world are having a long overdue reckoning about their collections. Back in 2019, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York had to give back a gilded coffin that was looted from Egypt. This year, they're returning an ancient Nepali sculpture. The Denver Art Museum is returning sculptures to Cambodia.

The National Gallery of Art here in D.C. is getting in on it, too. Since the death of George Floyd, there's been a real push to look at some of the issues around colonialism and more of an effort to repatriate and restitute artifacts that were looted during the colonial era, both kind of globally, but also a real kind of activism is happening in Africa to try and get these artworks back. This is Nazmat Badomasi. She's a foreign policy writer who splits her time between London and Lagos, Nigeria. And she's been reporting on one very specific set of stolen art, the Benin bronzes. Not all of the artifacts are actually bronze, but they're a collection of artworks from the Kingdom of Benin, which is in southern Nigeria. It's often confused with the Republic

of Benin, which is a country that is near Nigeria, but the two are not linked at all. A once mighty kingdom, now part of Nigeria, whose bustling modern day streets are still defined by the brutal invasion of the British back in 1897. When that part of the kingdom was annexed to Britain, a month prior to them being stolen, British soldiers came to the Kingdom of Benin demanding trade rights. The Oba of Benin, Oba means king in Edo and in the Yoruba languages, so the Oba of Benin had asked them not to come, but they came anyway. Some of the king's men killed seven of those British soldiers. And as a result of that, there was a punitive expedition.

British forces, around 1,200 soldiers, came into the kingdom of Benin. They burned down the city, they massacred a whole lot of people, and then they looted these artefacts. Historians have managed to sort of prove through correspondence that this act wasn't really about punishing the killing of the seven soldiers because one of the British consuls had actually written to the British government and said, you know, if we were to remove the king from his stall, there's a lot of artifacts and treasures in this kingdom

that could actually pay for it. Benin bronzes were traditionally commissioned by the Oba, or king. Prince Eden Akenzua has been demanding their return for decades. In his personal library, photos the British took when they burnt his great-great-grandfather's palace to the ground, hunting for loot. The British knew what they were doing. Yeah, they knew they were precious objects here. They knew they were looting.

I can read you out the quote of what he actually said, which is, I would add that I have reason to hope that sufficient ivory may be found in the king's house to pay the expenses in removing the King from his stall. to keep a record. So taking them away was like yanking off pages of our history. There isn't actually a sort of figure for how many artefacts were looted, but there is an estimation that it was around 3,000 artefacts, it may be more, that were taken, shipped to Britain.

And almost a month after the looting, they were exhibited at the British Museum and the rest were sold off to countries across Europe. They ended up almost, you know, across the world, apart from much of the African continent, unfortunately. So you have Benin bronzes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There are Benin bronzes in Germany, in France, Russia, everywhere, really. What makes them such an attractive item to display at museums around the world? I think it's because of their intricacy.

With the lost wax process, molten metal is poured into a mold that has been created with a wax model. Once the mold is made, the wax model is melted and drained away. The process means that each work is unique. Some of these artworks date back centuries. The first female to be depicted was Queen Edea. The most recognisable artefact from that collection is actually what's called the Queen Edea pedant mask. And the pedant is a sort of replica of the Oba's mother,

the king's mother. She was known to be a very powerful woman with great spiritual powers and authority that she deployed. And there's one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and there's also one in the British Museum. The original shows real attention to detail and, you know, very fine work in artistry. Look at the hairstyle, for example. The hair is in a kind of cone shape, and then

it's covered in a netting of coral beads. Coral beads, yeah. What are these bronzes worth? What is their present-day value? Some are worth up to four million

each. They are very, very valuable. They've sold at auctions for thousands and millions of pounds, despite the fact that, you know, people nowadays know that they were stolen, they were looted. And I imagine Nigerians haven't been happy about that for some time. What is the latest push to get them back look like? The most recent is when the Nigerian government did send a letter to the British Museum, officially again asking for these artifacts back. Not just the Benin bronzes, but all of the artefacts that were looted from Nigeria

and taken to Britain during the colonial era. The Nigerian government have served the legal letter to the British Museum, shared exclusively with Channel 4 News, demanding the return of their Benin bronzes, stating, by carting away these antiquities the nation of nigeria is denuded and deprived of her cultural essence our palaces and museums are empty

so far only a few artifacts have come back the the british museum has agreed to loan back some of these artifacts. So as the Met... Loan back to the country they stole them from? Yeah, so this is the controversial debate at the moment. How can you loan back something to a nation that you stole from them in the first place. That's the agreement that the Nigerian government has agreed to. I think from their point of view, they just want it to come back and they want the younger generation to be able to see some of these artworks. Because let's not forget, we're talking about 124 years. A lot of Nigerians actually have never seen a Benin bronze. They don't even know what it's like to sort of touch one. So for the Nigerian government,

it's just important that they come back rather than, you know, the issues around ownership. But for other countries, you know, like Ghana ownership is is really important when we're talking about restituting the artworks that were were stolen during the colonial era Tell me how you first got to see the Benin Bronzes and how you felt. So I grew up partly in Nigeria and then my family moved to the UK. I didn't know the background to them when I first saw them at the British Museum. I didn't know how they were taken. And two years ago, I was able to see them for the first time in Nigeria at the Yemisi Shilon Museum of Art in Lagos. And that's the first time I've ever seen a Benin bronze actually in the country that created it,

in the country that I was born in. And it was just indescribable. More with Nazmat in a minute on Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, R-A-M-P.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank.

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Nazma, we've been focused on the Benin bronzes, but I wonder how common

is this across the continent? How much African art is situated, displayed outside of Africa's heritage is held outside the continent. Obviously, by heritage, you know, these are the historical artifacts. That report was published in 2018. And do we know how much of that art was, you know, ill-gotten of it was looted during the colonial era, not forgetting that pretty much all but a few countries in Africa was annexed during the 19th century into various European empires. So are you saying that basically all of it was stolen or looted? Yes.

How much of that, you know, 90% of Africa's art that's in Europe and elsewhere is being returned right now? There's a lot of discussions about returning these artefacts. Not a lot is actually coming back. It's all coming back quite piecemeal. So we know that France has agreed to repatriate around 26 artefacts to the country of Benin. So we're talking really single figures. You know, they're not coming back in their thousands or anything like that.

So how many museums out there have these bronzes and are just absolutely refusing to give them back? It sounds like the majority? The British government have, basically, they have a stance that they will retain and explain objects. There are two acts within their legislature that stops the return of artifacts, and that is the British of artefacts. And that is the British Museum Act of 1963 and the National Heritage Act of 1983. So technically, the British Museum cannot give these artefacts back

unless the British government enact new laws that will allow for the return of them. They have point blank refused to do that. You know, you talk about these works of art being, you know, on display at the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, some of the most famous, illustrious art institutions in the world, where do they end up when they go back to Africa, if they go back to Africa? Well, there's been a kind of great push to open up new museums across the continent, because one of the biggest pushback against repatriation was that African countries could not house these treasures, that they didn't have the facilities to be able to keep them. opening up new kind of state-of-the-art museums. Within Nigeria itself, there is the Edo Museum of West African Art,

which is opening up in Benin on the former ruins of the old palace. There's also the John K. Randall Centre for Yoruba History and Culture in Lagos State that is looking to repatriate and restitute Yoruba cultural art. In Ghana, there's a sort of relaunching of its national museum. And there's another $30 million Pan-African Heritage world museum that is currently being built. Senegal of course in 2018 opened up the museum of black civilizations and you know they talked about reclaiming the cultural language and reclaiming the narrative of African history. You know, a lot of people were kind of spurred on to revisit history and revisit some of the crimes that were done to people of African descent.

Let's not forget that, you know, these artefacts weren't simply stolen. They killed thousands of people for them. All of these African countries fought strongly against colonisation. They weren't annexed quietly. It was very, very violently done. There's a great quote from the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngosi Adichie. She said, We cannot change the past, but we can change our blindness to the past. And I think a lot of African activists are making sure that European museums and just the world globally doesn't uphold this blindness towards what's happened. When we talk about this art that was stolen, we're told that they cannot be returned to Africa, for example, because Africans will not take good care of them. It is not merely condescending to say, I cannot return what I stole from you because you will not take good care of it.

It is also lacking in basic logic. Since when has the basis of ownership been taking good care of what is owned? This position is paternalistic arrogance of the most stunning sort. It does not matter whether Africans or Asians or Latin Americans can take care of the art stolen from them. What matters is that it is theirs. Nazmat Badomasi writes about Africa for foreign policy. She spoke to us from Lagos. Halima Shah produced this episode from Washington, D.C. It's Today Explained. you