During a visit to Nigeria’s economic capital of Lagos late last year, I made time to drop in on the country’s national museum, and I am glad I did.
That is not primarily because of what I was able to see there but, somewhat paradoxically, because of what I did not find. Nigeria is Africa’s largest country by population and has as glorious and diverse a cultural past as one might expect for a country its size. But it is the modesty of the museum’s buildings and installations that helps illuminate a recent and ongoing global debate about the restitution, ownership, and curation of large numbers of artifacts looted from its territory, principally by Britain but also by others, over the last 100-plus years.
As a campaign by Nigeria and other African countries for restitution of precious artwork plundered by Europeans and placed in museums and private collections there and in the United States has gathered momentum, it has spurred a countermovement. Some people now say Africans have essentially disqualified themselves from rightful ownership of their own cultural patrimony because of recent corruption or morally repugnant practices in the more distant past.
A visit to Nigeria’s premier public museum offers a glimpse into the problem of corruption. Judging by the items on display, this institution—founded on a shoestring budget in 1957, when Nigeria was still under colonial rule—does not appear to be particularly ambitious. Part of that would seem to be due to inadequate funding in a country that has faced enormous development challenges during the six-plus decades since independence from Britain. But another part of the problem—and not a small one, according to many Nigerians I spoke with during my stay—has been pilfering over the decades, with priceless objects disappearing from the national collection and entering into private hands.
As someone who has loved African art throughout his life, both in terms of content and standards of presentation and preservation, I have seen more impressive collections of Nigerian works on other continents many times over the years. For some opponents of restitution, these are already reasons enough to reject the rising calls for rich countries to return what was stolen and carted away in the past. This argument goes that Africans disqualify themselves because they don’t know how to take care of things and that by being kept in rich institutions overseas, at least the wonders of Africa’s past cultural achievements will be conserved and kept on view for global publics, including Africans, to appreciate them.
This argument strikes me as specious on several grounds. Why, for example, should Africans have to travel overseas to see their own cultural products? One could spend the remainder of a column exploring the problems inherent to the idea of letting Westerners be the custodians of Africans’ past, but I’ll limit myself here to just one point among many: This approach would mean that only a very small minority of well-off people from the African continent could ever see the aesthetic glories produced by their ancestors.
As serious as this and other objections I have are, I have much bigger problems with those in the anti-restitution camp who have grossly escalated this ongoing struggle by saying, for example, that because the historical Kingdom of Benin, in what is now southern Nigeria, once participated in the slave trade and ritual human sacrifice involving war captives, the traditional rulers who descend from that polity should be disqualified from any restitution today.
For the unfamiliar, the art of Benin, especially its so-called bronzes (in reality mostly made of brass), is some of the most celebrated work of the entire continent. It was looted from Nigeria by Britain in 1897 during the sack of Benin’s capital. Earlier this year, Nigeria’s most recent president, Muhammadu Buhari, chose to restore ownership of whatever is returned to Nigeria to the current oba of Benin—the traditional monarch of the Bini people of Benin in Nigeria—instead of to a public museum.
To understand the grave defects of the disqualification argument, one must go back in time to revisit another major event that happened not far removed from the sacking of Benin. At the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, Europe’s imperial nations decided on a plan to carve up the African continent and parcel out its vast territories—which were rich in minerals, labor, and markets—among themselves to be turned into colonies.
The Europeans did not publicly justify their appropriation of an entire continent on the basis of might makes right, which of course it was, but sought, rather, to mask their power play on humanitarian grounds. They said they were taking over Africa, in effect, to save Africans from themselves, and they invoked the need to improve the “material well-being of the native populations.” Here, the wish to provide education to supposedly ignorant Black people was a particularly important motivation.
Somehow along the way, while extracting huge quantities of natural resources from the continent, implementing forced labor on Africans for European profit, and inducting large numbers of Africans into the fighting and logistical forces employed in two European world wars, these supposed humanitarian concerns were pushed to the background or forgotten altogether. This can be seen with special clarity with regard to education.
As I wrote in my recent book, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, around the time a wave of independence from Europe crested on the African continent in 1960, all of sub-Saharan Africa counted only 8,000 high school graduates. This is closer to the opposite of Europe’s proclaimed concerns for the continent than evidence of its sincerity or forthrightness.
The Europeans’ desire to be respected for their benevolence toward Africa actually has a much older and darker history. As I also documented in my book, during the early centuries of the slave trade, embarking Africans onto ships in chains to work them to death on plantations in the New World was given ideological justification on an earlier quasi-humanitarian basis. The Europeans were saving the souls of these “savages” by spritzing them with holy water as they climbed the plank. Their spirits were ostensibly being preserved from eternal damnation, even as they were being condemned to death in brutal and deadly-by-design agricultural labor camps.
So let us now return to the argument that because rulers of Benin once avidly participated in this slave trade, they are morally disqualified from custodianship of the most celebrated fruits of their own culture.
When Born in Blackness was published in Germany recently, I received numerous requests from television programs to discuss the fate of African art in European hands because of a lively anti-restitution movement in that country. More recently, I have received aggrieved letters from some quarters in Britain making similar arguments: that Benin disqualified itself because of its own actions in the past.
These writers would like to believe that because Britain very much belatedly began to combat the commerce in human beings from West Africa by stationing anti-slavery naval squadrons there in the early 19th century, it is the good guy in this sordid history. The British, in other words, are the moral opposite of Benin’s rulers—who, they say, would otherwise have continued in this trade indefinitely if it were not for London’s good offices.
What they neglect to consider due to ignorance, whether willful or deliberate, is that Britain, along with other European powers, had deliberately fueled the spread of warfare for the purpose of human trafficking in West Africa for centuries to satisfy their need for slave labor in the plantation colonies of the Americas. This is where their immense wealth from sugar and later cotton, as well as many other smaller but nonetheless important plantation crops, derived from. And these helped place Western Europe and eventually the United States in the top ranks of the world’s economic powers in the modern era.
Isn’t the moral flaw in these arguments obvious? Isn’t the inconsistency? For some, apparently not. When they finally wanted to, Europeans stopped trading in slaves and in some relatively modest way even helped police the end of this commerce from Africa. We thus should not hold against them the fact that they had extracted many millions of human beings from the continent for centuries beforehand, condemning Africans to the worst forms of exploitation and death, the argument goes. That European greed created these markets isn’t the important thing, we are meant to believe. It’s that they eventually changed course.
Africans, though—as in the case of Benin, we are told—supposedly remain so morally tainted that even now they can have no just claim to their own cultural products. Might, once again, is posturing behind morality as it seeks to make right by determining the cutoff point for being considered good.
How far, by the way, does one reach back into the past to qualify some as deserving of respect and eliminating others? What sorts of abhorrent acts should be given highest consideration? What is a disqualifying atrocity? It seems that the Westerners who would like to rule out the Kingdom of Benin of custodianship of its own patrimony haven’t thought very deeply or fairly about this either.
Who should respect Germany today, well short of a century after the Holocaust? What of the United States, which as the Hollywood blockbuster of the season, Oppenheimer, reminds us— while sparing us exposure to the horrific images—dropped atomic bombs on Japanese cities, incinerating them in an instant? Was this not a form of human sacrifice? What of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, who killed their own people by the tens of millions? Why should any of these countries be accorded any consideration today? Why do we not hold their taints permanently against not only historic leaders from the past but also against the generations that followed? Why is the human sacrifice of war captives by a Benin king long ago held up to justify keeping its art?
Maybe it’s because Germany, the United States, Russia, and China are big, wealthy, and powerful states and Benin, which Europeans refused to allow to form a state despite centuries of impressive self-rule and high cultural achievement, is not.
If people in the rich world are concerned about the preservation and quality exhibition of African art, how about doing something radically different from what Westerners did to Africans in the past? This could begin, for example, by helping to fund museums like the forlorn one I visited in Lagos as well as providing training for curators and other experts in preservation and restoration and even for law enforcement personnel who specialize in combating theft and trafficking. Just a thought.
