Recently Al Jazeera ran an item about a request to the British Museum by Nigeria for return of the Benin Bronzes being met with an offer of a loan. That set me thinking once again about an issue I first came across as an undergraduate. The following piece has turned out to be rather long, more than 3,600 words not including endnotes and references; nevertheless even at that length it cannot do justice to the questions it raises, and it leaves a lot not covered. Please bear with me.
The story of the Benin Bronzes.
In 1885 a British protectorate was established along the coast of what is now Nigeria – a ‘protectorate’ being, in simple terms, a territory that retains an appreciable amount of internal autonomy whilst accepting the authority of another power in external matters and accepting its ‘protection’, a system known in the days of the British Empire as ‘indirect rule’. In 1892 the protectorate was extended, by treaty with the Oba (king), to include the inland Edo kingdom of Benin. In 1897, however, at the urging of British traders who found that the Oba was exercising what were, to them, excessively tight controls on trade, a large but lightly-armed British force under Acting Consul-General James Phillips set out for Benin City. It’s approach was detected and it was ambushed, most of its number being killed, including Phillips. The next force, led by Commander R.H.S. Bacon and conceived as a punitive expedition, was soon dispatched, and after fierce fighting captured the city. Within two or three years of this, the Oba had been deposed and the territory absorbed into the British Empire. Classic imperialist strong-arm tactics, no surprise there.
After the capture of Benin City, a large number of artefacts were removed, including almost all of the sculpted brass plaques and other objects which would become known as the ‘Benin Bronzes’. Made by the ‘lost wax’ method, these artefacts were and are of exquisite design. These were eventually dispersed to museums in Britain, Austria, Germany, the United States, and the Netherlands. The British Museum retained seven hundred of them. In the 21c the largest collections are held in the British Museum, the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, and in museums in Nigeria, notably the Nigerian National Museum in Lagos.
What we know about Benin City in the period around the 1897 raid, we know almost exclusively from printed British accounts. One outstanding feature, mentioned more than once with the writer’s revulsion, is a terrain littered with corpses; firstly from Henry Lionel Gallwey:
At present the whole Benin country is, and has been for hundreds of years, steeped in Fetish. The Town of Ubini might well be called ‘The City of Skulls’ – I saw no less than four crucified victims during my few days there in addition to numerous corpses – some mutilated fearfully – which were strewn about in the most public places. The rule appears to be one of Terror […]
(“Report”, 348)
Just before reaching [Benin City] we had to pass through rather an unpleasant half mile of fairly open country. We presumed it was the place where all criminals’ bodies were deposited. The path was strewn on both sides with dead bodies in every stage of decomposition; skulls grinned at you from every direction […]
(“Journeys”, 128)
And then from R.H. Bacon:
The one lasting remembrance of Benin in my mind is its smells. Crucifixions, human sacrifices, and every horror the eye could get accustomed to, to a large extent, but the smells no white man’s internal economy could stand.
(88)
Bacon records finding a cache of the Bronzes in a building he took to be one of a series of storehouses:
The storehouses contained chiefly cheap rubbish, such as glass walking sticks, old uniforms, absurd umbrellas, and the usual cheap finery that traders use to tickle the fancy of the natives. But buried in the dirt of ages, in one house, were several hundred unique bronze plaques, suggestive of almost Egyptian design, but of really superb casting. Castings of wonderful delicacy of detail […].
(91-92)
Both Gallwey and Bacon, equally from the corpse-terrain and the fact that neither saw any evidence of the artisanship that produced the Bronzes, assumed that the Kingdom of Benin was in a wholly decadent and ‘savage’ state:
The Benin people at one time had the reputation of being great […] workers in metals. They undoubtedly practice these industries now, though we saw nothing of the kind going on during our few days in the place. We saw, however, many specimens of brass ware of very clever workmanship. (“Journeys” 130)
Beyond one blacksmith’s shop there was little sign of any native industry […] (Bacon 97)
Charles H. Read, Keeper of the Department of British and Mediaeval Antiquities and Ethnography at the British Museum, and his Senior Assistant Ormonde Maddock Dalton, writing shortly after the 1897 raid concur about the kingdom’s decadence, said: “At the time when Benin first became known to Europeans it was more powerful and prosperous than at any later period” (9, my emphasis). Portuguese adventurers had first visited at the end of the 15c, and experts subsequently dated a large number of the Bronzes to the 16c. Read and Dalton, however, place a different emphasis on the state in which the Bronzes were found, and display a level of erudition that Bacon did not have, notwithstanding his being the man on the spot:
We may safely infer, from the parallel practice at Dahome, and indeed in many distant parts of the world, that when a king died his house was shut up and never used again. This is almost necessitated by the West African practice of burying the dead man beneath the floor of his house, in which are also placed objects which he used and valued during his life. This last point has an especial interest for us here on account of the fact […] that many of the finer bronze panels were found heaped together in a disused building in the king’s compound. (ibid.)
Even their erudition, however, did not mean a whole understanding of what was to be seen at Benin City. Read and Dalton’s book is full of descriptions of the hierarchal sociology and the religions of peoples of the Niger region, as recorded in the 19c. Did Bacon regard the removal of the Bronzes as, somehow, a work of rescue from the oblivion of an abandoned ‘storehouse’ or merely the spoils of war? Did Read and Dalton regard their retention by the museums of the ‘civilised’ North-Western Quadrant to be an act of preservation and conservation? The charnel-house terrain’s descriptions will even shock readers who are more culturally aware, by today’s standards; who knows what was really going on, and whether there was some stern social lesson or profound ritual function, that we do not know and could not understand if we did, involved in the display of corpses? In Benin, history and custom was not recorded in any way we consider orthodox.
How about the Elgin Marbles?
I have very deliberately used the word “removal” so far throughout this article, with reference to the Benin Bronzes. There exists a very sharp binary debate in the world today, in the topic of artefacts housed remote from where they originally stood. I differentiate the two elements of this binary thus: conservation versus repatriation, or perhaps better expressed as legal title versus moral entitlement. I dare say that until I brought this matter up, some readers may have been itching to get to the comments field in order to castigate me for not saying ‘plunder’ or ‘loot’ instead of ‘removal’ – those who did not simply scroll down without waiting. To some – to many – the binary collapses into a clear and obvious singularity, to argue against which is unacceptable, unthinkable. Sarah Cascone in Artnews in 2014 nails her colours to the mast with this headline: “Benin Bronzes looted by the British Returned to Nigeria.” No doubt when Thomas Bruce uplifted the sculptured freeze from the Parthenon in Athens he was equally sure that he was rescuing from more than a millennium of Byzantine Orthodox Christianity and a few centuries of Turkish suzerainty, cultural items of which he, as a classically-educated man, bred up on ancient Greek and Latin at Westminster and Harrow Schools, at St. Andrews University and the Sorbonne, was the rightful cultural inheritor![1]
To the person who speaks for moral entitlement the issue is blindingly simple: no artefact removed from its original location – from its cultural history, as it were – has been obtained legitimately, and that’s that. It is ipso facto loot. The person who speaks for legal title relies on a multifaceted argument, often based on matters such as conservation[2], danger, footfall, and acquired cultural history. To replace every cultural object in its original setting would mean the end of museums worldwide, runs the argument, and with that the end of the conservation expertise that goes with those institutions, it being unlikely that such expertise would be fostered uniformly elsewhere. The destruction of Palmyra and the Buddhas of Bamiyan signals that the political climate of the world is not conducive to large-scale translocation, and the level of pollution in cities such as Athens would endanger outdoor installations of monumental works. A greater number of people visit the British Museum, thereby accessing its collections, than visit the original locations, and, as Professor J.H. Merryman of Stanford University says, “the Elgin Marbles have been in England since 1821 and in that time have become a part of the British cultural heritage” (6).[3] The advocates of legal title are often accused of sophistry, the advocates of moral entitlement of oversimplification.[4]
I headed this article “Who owns the Stones of Callanish?” but so far I have only talked about the Benin Bronzes and the Elgin Marbles.
For a moment or two I’m going to consider taxonomy. I have three distinct items – why am I taking them together? After all, they are very different. One was acquired by violence, one was acquired by trickery, and one stands where it has always stood. Two have been dispersed, one is complete. By looking at them that way, all we are doing is thinking of reasons for exclusion (which is actually what taxonomy is all about, much as we would like to think it is about grouping like with like). So let’s make an effort to see what binds them.
They are all collections rather than a single item.
They all have a presence in Britain.
I have seen all of them.[5]
The other factor by which I want to group them together is that of cultural disjunction. Starting with the Bronzes, then. The accounts of and roughly contemporaneous with the 1897 raid have their limitations, inasmuch as they are made with varying degrees of understanding and from the point of view of assumed cultural and probably also assumed racial superiority. However, they suggest at the very least a culture that has decayed from its height of some four centuries previous. The Kingdom of Benin no longer exists, although the Edo people certainly do, the territory having been swallowed up in the colonial fiction and subsequent independent establishment of Nigeria. Even in a specifically national museum there is still a distance between the culture that produced them and “buried” them, and the culture that displays them. The cultural disjunction between early 19c Greece and the classical city-state of Athens – the possible mind set of Lord Elgin – can be argued, but again the same can be said for the display in Athens in sight of the Parthenon as for the display in the British Museum.[6]
The standing stones of Callanish exist, undisturbed as far as we can tell, where they have always stood. Who owns them? “You do!” says someone, noting that I am a Scot by citizenship and that the Callanish stone complex is in Scotland. Here, surely, legal title and moral entitlement dovetail? I think not. The stones are on privately-owned land, though it has proved difficult to find the name of the owner(s), not that this is directly relevant. It at least establishes that I, even as a Scot, have no legal title to the stones. The site is managed by Historic Environment Scotland, an executive, non-departmental body with charitable status, with a visitor centre operated by Urras Nan Tursachan (The Standing Stones Trust). The stones are thought to date to the late Neolithic era, with use that probably continued into the Bronze Age. Interpretation of their construction and purpose is elusive and speculative; they certainly have no direct relevance for me in the 21c. In the more recent past, folklore has the stones as petrified giants who would not convert to Christianity, so that in the 17c their handed-down name was ‘fir bhrèige’ (‘false men’), or that on midsummer morning a being known as ‘the Shining One’ walks down the avenue of stones, his coming heralded by the call of the cuckoo; but these are not my legends, and my citizenship of Scotland can’t make them mine. As for me, so for most Scots, so even when something remains right where it always was, there is no guarantee of a meaningful cultural connection.
So what can any of us – Gael, Scot, Greek, Edo, or whatever – be said to ‘own’?
In order to break out of this binary bind, this unsquareable circle, this irreconcilable debate, we need to look at the whole concept of ‘ownership’. I ask again: what can any of us ‘own’? Nothing physical can ever be ours, no matter how we acquire it, no matter if we pay for it; even if its fashioning post-dates our birth, its molecules, atoms, debatable particles existed before us, and even if it is smashed at our death or cremated with us, those particles will exist when we are gone. Our ‘things’ are on loan to us, and we are transient. None of us can truly own the Benin Bronzes, the Elgin Marbles, or the stones of Callanish, whoever we are and wherever we place them.
The only thing that is truly ours is what we experience directly, moment by moment. That much is ours, no matter that it is intangible. Out of the three sets of artefacts mentioned in this article, the one I have seen most recently has been the small group of Benin Bronzes housed at the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow. I went to the museum, a few years ago, specifically to look at these because I had been studying the account of the forcible annexation of Benin, the removal of artefacts from the sacked city, the effect of these artefacts on the consciousness of people of the North-West Quadrant, and the modern issues of their location and ‘ownership’. I stood and looked at them, marveling at their beauty and sophistication, my thoughts wandering to what I knew of the 1897 raid and from there in a thousand directions. It mattered not at all, just at that moment, how coloured my thoughts were by my opinion about where these items should be; what mattered was the experience. Consider this thought by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a description of standing in front of what might be his old school desk:
[…] this table bears traces of my past life, for I have carved my initials on it and spilt ink on it. But these traces in themselves do not refer to the past; they are present; and in so far as I find in them signs of some ‘previous’ event, it is because I derive my sense of the past from elsewhere, because I carry this particular significance within myself.
(Merleau-Ponty 413, my emphasis)
This immediacy, this importation will-I-nill-I of significance, does not alter, whether I am in Kelvingrove, the BM, Lagos, or able by time-travel to peek into the burial chamber of a dead Oba. What I own is that moment of experience.
What does this moment of experience have to do with art?
This blog deals with literature, art, and so on, so there must be some kind of tie-in.
When I was an undergraduate, one issue we were guided to look at was the way in which artists of the North-West Quadrant misinterpreted items of African art, such as the Benin Bronzes, ignoring or failing to see their sophistication and searching instead for some kind of ‘primitive’ energy. One assignment required us to look at a photograph of a 17c Benin plaque housed in the Staatliche Museum für Völkerkunde in Dresden and to compare it with a 1911 sketch of the same object by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, an artist of the German Expressionist movement (see the illustration above). The assignment said “[…] outline the ways in which Kirchner alters his original model from Benin to make it look more primitive.” The supposition was that we were to show what we had learnt about European modernist misconceptions about African art. I decided, in answering, to challenge the premise of the question[7]. Here, slightly edited, is what I wrote:
This question’s basic premise – that Kirchner specifically ‘altered’ the original as a modernist response to ‘primitive’ art (Wood, 68) – is somewhat open to challenge. That there are profound differences between the two objects is undeniable, as is that one was drawn from the other; but does that really constitute ‘alteration’? It is worth considering the following differences: firstly in the cultural context of each, secondly in their physical nature, and thirdly the similarities and differences of detail.
The plaque was created by Benin craftsmen in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and had a specific purpose within the royal culture of Benin (Woods, 15; O. J. Eboreime quoted in Wood, 85-6). The sketch is by an early twentieth-century German artist, and one of only a handful of drawings by him of a Benin artifact (Catalogue, 77); although Kirchner’s life-studies of Black European nudes did try to capture a ‘primitive’ expression (Perry, 6), his Benin sketches are isolated examples of any direct African influence in his work. Given the differences in cultural context of each, it might be more accurate to say that they had entirely different starting-points, rather than one being an alteration of the other.
Next, the Benin original is a three-dimensional, bas-relief casting in a copper-alloy, and is the product of a lengthy and careful process (Woods, 6). The German object is a two-dimensional drawing in pencil on paper. Kirchner said of his own drawings: “The important thing about my drawing is its rapidity” (Ketterer, 92). Their method of execution, including the time taken and their materials and thus their basic physical nature, is different.
The basic composition of each object is the same, although the obvious differences are in the detail. The probable speed with which the sketch was executed has contributed to a distortion of certain features, for example the now grimacing faces, the position of the central figure’s feet, and the position of the partial figure top right. Kirchner has also added detail to each bottom corner, where the original has been broken. One clear omission is the partial figure top left; another is the central figure’s cross-belts. Close inspection of the plaque reveals small-scale, sophisticated decoration throughout; this is entirely missing from the sketch, perhaps most clearly in the hurried lines making up the central figure’s necklace, in the lack of decoration on all figures’ dress and accoutrements, and in the entire background. There has been an attempt to convey a three-dimensional effect, most noticeably in the dark shading under the arm of the figure on the right, but this has been almost totally abandoned in the rest of the drawing.
In conclusion, it might be more appropriate to talk about ‘alteration’ where two works which share more basic similarities. The many substantial differences evidenced above are significant, and might support in part the view that Kirchner’s drawing constitutes alteration in search of the modernists’ notion of ‘primitivism’.
In the end, I had to ‘wimp out’ and concede the point that the lesson was supposed to convey. New undergraduates are not supposed to display too much independent critical thought, I quickly learned, and even though I was being a bit of a renegade that is still very clearly a new undergraduate’s answer. Had I been answering the same question today, I would have been quicker to point out that the speed of Kirchner’s sketches could have meant an attachment of the artistic endeavor to the experience of the moment, and thus he was being true to that rather than false to the ‘original’ (the plaque). But my main point is that Kirchner ‘owned’ only the moment and its immediate experience; he does not even ‘own’ the sketch any more!
However, the experience was possible – and this shocking fact needs to be reiterated before it submerges in a sea of art criticism and phenomenology – because of the 1897 Benin raid. Simplistically, because we had Bacon we have Kirchner.
So what can we do about it? What can we do about anything?
History can’t be ‘fixed’.
The wrongs of history, even with the best will in the world, cannot be righted.
I’m sorry, this article isn’t really about Callanish after all. It is much more about the Benin Bronzes. But this much is true: in the 21c, on the one hand the world is getting smaller, and on the other the pettiness of nationalism and ethnism is on the rise again. This is a dangerous time for using artefacts as cultural footballs in a binary game. No matter what we do with the Benin Bronzes, whether they are on display in London, or Lagos, or Ulaan Bataar, whether we build a special museum right smack dab where the royal palace was, whether we reconstruct the sealed house of a dead Oba and leave them in there unseen, the disjunction has taken place and cannot be fixed.
At this point I shall refuse to venture a practical answer. If there is one, it will only become obvious if and when we all can free our minds from the shackles of the binary debate, from the irreconcilable “Here I stand, I can do no other” of legal title versus moral entitlement. Maybe the lesson about the ‘ownership’ of experience will help. I don’t know.
Good luck!
Endnotes:
[1] Actually, Lord Elgin originally had no intention of removing ancient marbles from Athens. The decision to remove from their position on the Parthenon and ship to England one half of the total frieze was taken by Philip Hunt, Elgin’s chaplain and representative in Athens. The terms of the agreement with the Ottoman Governor of Athens specified to “fix scaffolding round the ancient Temple of the Idols […]and to mould the ornamental sculpture and visible figures thereon in plaster and gypsum […] to take away any pieces of stone with old inscriptions or figures thereon” (I am not sure of the precise reference at present, but will insert it in due course, if I find it). Hunt persuaded the Governor to interpret that last sentence very liberally! Back in England, a parliamentary committee, having vindicated Elgin’s behaviour, authorized the purchase of the marbles by the State.
[2] Janet L. Schrenk, an academic of distinguished standing with a PhD in inorganic chemistry, makes the following observation about the Benin Bronzes:
The objects were probably not buried but had accumulated dirt while in the building. This may have been the house and burial chamber of an oba, and the objects closely associated with his reign […] This could account for the observation of heavily corroded surfaces on some objects, generally in large museum collections established immediately after the punitive expedition and thus less likely to have been heavily cleaned […] It is likely that at least some of the objects had a cuprite layer on their outer surfaces at the time they were removed from Nigeria.
(55)
Several points here are interesting. Firstly in the way she assumes that the phrase “buried in the dirt of ages” (Bacon 91) implies active burial rather than being passive to the fall of dust and detritus over time. Secondly, her concern is purely with the physical condition of the Bronzes; that is quite in keeping with the remit of the book to which she is contributing, of course, but nevertheless it illustrates perfectly the position that prioritises conservation.
It is also interesting to note that the condition of the Elgin Marbles has deteriorated during their sojourn in the BM, partly due to attempts at cleaning and conservation. Sometimes it must seem like a lose-lose situation!
[3] Though how he quite reconciles that with his citation of the 1954 Hague Convention’s principle that any cultural property is “the cultural heritage of all” is another matter (Merryman 9). His whole article is well worth reading, by the way.
[4] Take Sarah Cascone’s headline. Apart from the sweeping synecdoche of “The British” coming close to dumping guilt on a whole nationality, she says of the translocated artefacts that they have been “Returned to Nigeria.” Nigeria – a territorial delineation created by the colonial/imperial power, did not exist until 1914, seventeen years after the notorious raid. It became an independent, multiethnic state, with Edo people one of its minorities, in 1960. Thus any “return” is, arguably, little more than a geographical matter, and not a cultural one.
[5] As regards the Benin Bronzes, I have specifically and recently seen the small number displayed at the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow. Although I have been to the British Museum that was many decades ago; I can remember most distinctly seeing the Marbles but I can’t remember seeing the Bronzes.
[6] I do not, however, believe in the doctrine of the ‘killer argument’!
[7] I don’t say this to show ‘clever’ I am, but merely to illustrate that it is possible to look at things from a totally different critical position. I did pass the assignment, as it happens.
__________
Works cited:
Bacon, Reginald Hugh Spencer. Benin, City of Blood. BiblioLife, 2013.
(Text also available online at tinyurl.com/BaconBenin.)
Cascone, Sarah. “Benin Bronzes looted by the British Returned to
Nigeria.” Artnewsonline, 23rdJune 2014.
tinyurl.com/BeninLoot. Accessed 7thDecember 2018.
Catalogue of the Kirchner Museum, Davos, Kirchner Museum, 1992.
Gallwey, Henry Lionel. “Journeys in the Benin Country.” The
Geographical Journal, vol.1 No.2, 1893, pp.122-130.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773754. Accessed 7thDecember 2018.
—. “Report on visit to Ubini (Benin City) the capital of the Benin
Country.” Benin and the Europeans, 1485-1897, by Alan
Ryder. Longmans, 1969, pp.344-348.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by
Colin Smith. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962.
Ketterer, Roman Norbert. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Drawings and Pastels,
Alpine Fine Arts Collections, 1982.
Merryman, John Henry. “Whither the Elgin Marbles?” online,
Washington University in St. Louis.
tinyurl.com/MerrymanElgin. Accessed 7thDecember 2018.
Perry, Gill. “Primitivism and the ‘Modern’.” Primitivism, Cubism,
Abstraction: The early Twentieth Century, eds. Charles
Harrison & Francis Frascina, Yale UP, 1993, pp.3-86.
Read, Charles Hercules, & Ormonde Maddock Dalton. Antiquities from
the City of Benin and Other Parts of West Africa in the British
Museum. British Museum, 1899. tinyurl.com/ReadDalton. Accessed
7thDecember 2018.
Janet L. Schrenk. “The Royal Art of Benin: Surfaces, Past and Present.”
Ancient & Historic Metals: Conservation and Scientific Research,
eds. David A Scott, Jerry Podany, Brian B. Considine. J. Paul Getty
Trust, 1994, pp.51-62
Wood, Paul. “The Benin Bronzes and Modern Art.” Cultural Encounters,
ed. Richard Danson Brown, The Open University, 2008, pp.58-78.
Woods, Kim. “The Art of Benin.” Cultural Encounters, ed. Richard Danson
Brown, The Open University, 2008, pp.4-15.
Taxonomy Domine 