In the United Kingdom, the issue of restoring African heritage is regularly in the news. The country is full of museums in which visitors can discover paintings and ...

Restitution of African works of art: the embarrassing British heritage

Audio 04:13

The British Museaum, in London.

Text by: Claire Digiacomi

9 mins

In the United Kingdom, the issue of restoring African heritage is regularly in the news.

The country is full of museums in which visitors can discover paintings and sculptures from all over the world, but also works acquired during the time of the British colonial empire and which have now become embarrassing.

Publicity

With our correspondent in London,

When we have had the chance to visit the museums of London, we may first think of the Rosetta Stone, one of the flagship objects of the very famous British Museum.

It is the stele which made it possible to decipher the hieroglyphs, discovered in 1799 during Napoleon Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt, then recovered by the British.

Egypt has indicated in the past that it would like to repatriate the stone, but discussions have so far yielded nothing.

The current debate is more about what are called

Benin bronzes

It is a collection of hundreds of plaques and sculptures that once decorated the Royal Palace of Benin, a territory now located in southern

Nigeria

These works

were looted by British troops in 1897

and are now found in museums around the world and in private collections.

They are all over the UK.

Strictly supervised returns

But all eyes are on the British Museum, which holds the largest collection in the world of these Benin bronzes with more than 900 pieces.

Nigeria wishes to recover them and the British Museum is open for discussion but has no plans, for the moment, to return them.

In particular because of the British law and more particularly of the

British Museum act

of 1963. According to this text, the permanent restitutions of the British Museum can only be done in very rare cases. A process put in place to protect the works.

According to Barnaby Phillips, a former journalist and author of a book on Benin bronzes, the museum has its hands tied by this law: “

The directors of the British Museum and members of the board of trustees have often been accused, by the past, to hide behind this law and use it as an excuse not to do anything about these issues. But it is also true that the law will have to change so that the Benin bronzes exhibited in this museum are returned. And that will have to go through a majority of votes in Parliament

. "

And it is difficult to imagine a favorable vote with the current Parliament, which is predominantly conservative.

The government itself takes a dim view of the restitution debate.

The Minister of Culture rather calls for the "

explain and retain

" (

explain and keep)

Clearly, specify the origin and history of the works, rather than rendering them.

The impact of the Black Lives Matter movement

But positions are changing, and this is already the case with smaller museums, which are not national museums and are therefore more free.

Several have pledged to return bronzes to Nigeria such as the University of Aberdeen Museum in Scotland.

And then, according to journalist Barnaby Phillips, the anti-racism movements of the summer of 2020 and the questions that followed on the colonial heritage, helped move the subject forward.

So much so that, according to him, Nigeria seems better placed now than Greece, to recover his works.

Athens has been asking for several years for the return of the Parthenon marbles, exhibited in the British Museum.

A museum has even been built to accommodate them, but the British government has always firmly opposed it.

“

If I had been told ten years ago that there would be a better chance that the bronzes from Benin would return to Nigeria than the Parthenon marbles in Greece, that would not have seemed possible to me. I think part of it has to do with the Black Lives Matter movement and the so sensitive issue of racism. All this puts the British museums on the defensive about the bronzes of Benin, to a point that one would have been difficult to imagine only a few years ago

”, explains the journalist.

Further proof that this issue has grown in importance in the United Kingdom: two objects looted by the British in Ethiopia in 1868

were removed from an auction

in June, in the county of Dorset in England.

It was the Ethiopian embassy in London which had requested it to "put an end to the cycle of dispossession".

► Also to listen: Germany, the first country to return bronzes from Benin to Nigeria?

Restitution of African works of art: the embarrassing British heritage

Restitution of African works of art: the embarrassing British heritage

Strictly supervised returns

The impact of the Black Lives Matter movement

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