Benin bronze heads, Cambridge University, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Photo Mike Wells. Cambridge University has quietly signed over 116 Benin bronzes and ivories from its Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology while dismissing objections from the Restitution Study Group and the Edo Afrodescendant Coalition. Is the museum washing its hands of the objects when giving them to a private claimant in Nigeria? How do communities ensure public accountability, preservation, and access – and what process should decide whether artifacts should remain in public trust – and where?
Pontius Pilate would have felt at home in today’s Cambridge University. The Roman provincial ruler’s hurry to wash his hands of an embarrassing problem (the King of the Jews) is echoed in the University’s eagerness to get rid of an unwanted colonial-era heritage: 116 Benin cast bronzes and carved ivories in its Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
The difference is that while Pilate’s renunciation was public, Cambridge University hasn’t had the guts to follow his example. Instead it has just sneaked out word of its handover of artifacts of world significance, with a market value in multi-millions, through a leak to the Observer newspaper.
Benin brass plaques, Cambridge University, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Photo Mike Wells.
The university’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology holds hundreds of artworks from Benin (the state in modern Nigeria, not the neighboring Republic). Four years ago curators set about trying to link the best of them to the British expedition which in 1897 deposed Benin’s Oba and ended his bloodthirsty reign: thousands of his regime’s cult objects were carted off as souvenirs, many of them crusted with the blood of human sacrifices. Thanks to their creators’ craftsmanship, most of these ended up, scrubbed clean of course, in museums round the world: what the expedition had largely seen as curios soon became valuable.
Dozens of Cambridge’s pieces appeared to the Cambridge museum’s curators to have firm links to 1897, but as I discovered via an FOI request and reported here, many more of the selected 116 did not. The museum’s most obvious finessing of its records concerned an executioner’s sword, displayed as such for a century, but which for the purposes of restitution to Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments suddenly became, less gruesomely, merely “ceremonial”.
The New York-based Restitution Study Group speaks for ten of millions who descend from West Africans whom Benin’s Obas enslaved and sold to transatlantic slave traders – those, that is, who hadn’t been crucified or beheaded as human sacrifices. Many of the famous “bronzes” were cast from bracelet-shaped brass ingots (manillas) which were the currency of this slave trade.
Drawing of a cross-section of a slaver ship in Brazil, from book by Robert Walsh, published 1830.
To the Restitution Study Group, therefore, these regime relics are literally “blood metal” and its campaign insists they be preserved in the world’s museums, evidence for future generations of their ancestors’ suffering and of West African rulers’ revolting trade in human beings. The group makes no claim to Benin’s carved ivory. Not to present an Oba with the better of every pair of tusks meant the death penalty; by 1897 West Africa’s elephants had been hunted almost to extinction, while the then Oba had secreted an enormous hoard of their tusks.
In 2023 Cambridge University announced it was about to deaccession 116 Benin bronzes and ivories and give them to the Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments. The Restitution Study Group sent a bare “notification of claim,” looking to halt the handover; and with astonishingly bad timing, Nigeria’s president decreed that all returned Benin artifacts would belong not to the National Commission for Museums and Monuments (i.e the people) but to Benin’s current Oba personally – a decree which his successor has upheld. Curiously, the decree doesn’t apply to Nigeria’s many hundreds of fine bronzes in national collections assembled by British curators and handed over at independence in 1960. Many of those can’t be accounted for today, and nor can some of the pieces presented to the National Commission for Museums and Monuments in recent years by museums in Germany, Netherlands and the UK – they’ve been vanishing.
Manillas, brass bracelets exchanged for slaves. These manillas were melted down to provide the metal used for Benin bronzes. Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Photo Mike Wells.
The museum’s handover in May 2023 was postponed with only days to go. Cambridge University wrote to say it was treating the Restitution Study Group’s bare notification as its full and final claim, denying the the organization any opportunity to put its case, to undertake informal discussions, or to submit its formal claim; all of which are called for in Arts Council England’s guidance in its “Restitution and Repatriation: a Practical Guide for Museums in England” – and despite the Museum Archaeology and Anthropology being accredited by Arts Council England.
Other museums have not reacted thus, and are in discussions: Cambridge University’s peremptory denial of due process puts it in a tiny minority. The Restitution Study Group at once appealed against being prevented from putting its case, and this appeal was finally considered by a five-person “Cambridge Benin artifacts appeal panel”, meeting in private and chaired by Lord Chris Smith, the Master of Pembroke College, on 19th February 2025. The panel’s decision was disclosed to nobody, least of all to the Restitution Study Group, despite many reminders and its urgent interest in the outcome.
Detail of watercolor image of the slave ship La Marie-Séraphique in harbor in Haiti in 1773. Musée d’histoire de Nantes. Public domain.
Finally, this January 13th, Mishcon de Reya LLP of Africa House, Kingsway replied on behalf of Cambridge University, advising Restitution Study Group that it had been ruled to be a third-party with no rights in the matter, and that its appeal had been rejected nearly a year ago: “Having checked with the University, we cannot trace a record of the appeal outcome having been communicated to the Restitution Study Group…. The University has asked me to pass on their [sic] apologies for this administrative oversight [sic]”.
For sheer arrogance, for disrespect of all procedural proprieties, the university’s furtive behavior throughout this affair has been remarkable. Surely a great university has lost its way if it can’t engage in debate, learn from history and conserve its artifacts, or recognize natural justice; and values process above outcome?
Just when Cambridge University thought it had seen off the Restitution Study Group, on Sunday (8th February) the University and its museum were hit with a closely-argued claim to the bronzes from another group, the Edo Afrodescendant Coalition, with members from the UK, Caribbean, the EU, Brazil and USA. How and when the University will respond remains to be seen.
But Cambridge University’s “administrative oversight” has had a useful result – for the University, at least. Uncontested and undisclosed, at some point in the last two weeks a committee signed over the university’s 116 Benin pieces to Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments, meaning they will at once become the property of the Oba, a private citizen who claims direct descent from Benin’s slave-trading, human-sacrificing Obas.
In the next few weeks there’s expected to be a handover ceremony, and on the University’s current form, maybe that will be in secret too, and announced only after the event.
Benin bronze heads, Cambridge University, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Photo Mike Wells.
History can be messy, and one might say the Benin debate boils down to “Stolen Goods vs Stolen Souls”, with perhaps no clear winner in today’s climate. The hand-washers of Cambridge plumped for the goods, and refused to hear from the souls; to Cambridge, these are just things, its property to dispose of as it sees fit. Extraordinary art from Africa, though with an unusually violent backstory; celebrated for a century and a quarter, and then – poof! – vanished again.
Other museums around the world, New York’s Met being a good example, have shown themselves ready to recognize competing claims, to display their Benin collections with accurate captions, and to conserve them for later generations to admire and to learn from. Descendants of Benin’s enslaved souls, yet to be born, and others of Nigerian descent but denied access to their heritage, may in future give thanks for their foresight in preserving them.
A version of this article first appeared in the Daily Sceptic.
