On Nov. 28, 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron made strides in the African art restitution movement. Macron spoke at the University of Ouagadougou in West Africa and directly addressed the history of African artifacts being stolen from their ancestral homes.
“I am from a generation of French people for whom the crimes of European colonization cannot be disputed and are part of our history,” Macron said.
These powerful words were far from the beginning of the century-long fight to return African art procured worldwide to the continent, but they were a spark that reinvigorated the advocacy movement heading into the 2020s.
Since Macron’s speech in 2017, museum curators worldwide have reevaluated their relationships with the African art they curate. One such museum is Iowa’s Stanley Museum of Art. Over the summer, the museum made history as the first museum in North America to restitute African artifacts
in Nigeria.
The ambitious project involved parties across the world of academia and was headed by the curator of African art at the Stanley, Cory Gundlach.
“[The speech] galvanized other nations to reckon with their colonial history,” Gundlach said.
Gundlach recounted the project’s origins when interest in pursuing the restitution increased.
“The focused attention to addressing the provenance, or the history of ownership, of these objects began right around the onset of the pandemic when the museum went into lockdown,” Gundlach said.
The movement to return these items is directly tied to the broader social awakening that occurred during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. A reinvigoration surrounding restitution coincided with the country’s debates regarding problematic statues, public art, and other intersecting forms of culturally charged art.
“People were stuck inside and reflecting. People were dying. So, people were grappling with their identities, with who they are,” Peju Layiwola, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation curatorial fellow at the Stanley, said. “With the Black Lives Matter movement and with these statues coming down around the world, people started looking outwards.”
For months during the museum’s lockdown, Gundlach and then-graduate student Mason Koelm began tracing the history of the artifacts. Upon examination of curatorial archives and purchase history, it became clear the Bronzes were originally stolen violently.
“These objects were part of the siege and massacre of 1897 when British soldiers invaded the Kingdom of Benin and burned the palace to the ground, stealing thousands of objects,” Gundlach said.
The soldiers then sold these plundered artifacts to the global market, spreading them over the course of a century to collections as far as Iowa, where they were eventually acquired by a former curator of the Stanley Museum in 2001. With documentation tracking the provenance of the Bronzes, Gundlach recommended a deaccession of the items from the university’s collection.
Deaccession is a regulation process for museums that involves officially removing items from their rosters before selling them. However, in the case of the Benin Bronzes, selling the artifacts couldn’t be further from Stanley’s mission.
Layiwola, whose guidance was critical to the success of the restitution process, introduced Gundlach to the King of Benin’s brother, the representative of the Oba, particularly regarding matters of restitution.
Meeting Prince Aghatise Erediauwa proved crucial to the museum’s mission to return the Bronzes directly to the royal family. While there have been previous cases of repatriation of items originating from the Benin Kingdom, the Stanley Museum’s direct return of the Bronzes to the royal family is groundbreaking for museums in the U.S.
The difference between repatriation and restitution may not be clear among people who advocate for the return of items from museums to their ancestral owners, especially since there is ongoing debate about the difference among curators.
In the U.S., repatriation involves a museum returning an artifact to the government of the country from which the artifact originates, whereas restitution returns an artifact directly to the descendants of whom it was stolen.
“In a case like this, where the art belonged to the Oba people before it was looted, it just makes sense in my mind to return it to them rather than to the Nigerian government — especially since the descendants of the king are still alive,” Anna Isbell, assistant professor of art history at the UI, said.
Isbell has studied similar cases regarding stolen art in the past, citing the looting of sculptures in Cambodia under Khmer Rouge’s regime.
“The pieces were sold on the black market, which is often what happens, and through multiple cycles of collectors end up in museums around the world,” Isbell said. “The ‘Kneeling Attendant’ sculptures were donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the ‘90s but were found to have been stolen from the Prasat Chen temple complex in Koh Ker.”
The Met repatriated the sculptures in 2013 a few years after receiving a request from the Cambodian government.
“It’s more often that those requests go completely ignored, though,” Isbell said.
The case of the “Kneeling Attendant” is similar to that of the Benin Bronzes. Extensive records provided curators with a clear provenance of the artifacts that made returning them simpler. However, much like the Bronzes, it took a new era of social consciousness to initiate repatriation discussions.
“We belong to an era where there is a massive reconciliation with colonial history, institutional racism, and ethics, generally. That’s a context that is usually absent from the handling of African art in museums,” Gundlach said.
The objects are commonly referred to as the Benin Bronzes, but they are made from wood, ivory, and brass. The moniker “Benin Bronzes” was a European device to categorize the stolen artifacts.
“They have a very strong spiritual significance within the culture of Benin, Nigeria. We spoke to the King of Benin, who is a descendant of the king who was on the throne when the palace was burned in 1897,” Layiwola said. “These are not objects that come from traditional deities. There is still a living culture surrounding the items — they hold relevance in the courts.”
At the time the items were made, Benin was a very organized society structured around guilds represented by the different materials used to craft the Bronzes, whether they embodied the work of Igbasanmwunin carpenters or Owinna wood carvers.
“In the same way the works are relevant to the culture, they also speak to the artistry and skills of the craftsmen,” Layiwola said.
The restitution ceremony held a great deal of weight for both the Oba people and the members of the Stanley Museum who delivered the Bronzes in person at the Benin Kingdom of Nigeria. Images from Nigerian photographer and documentary filmmaker Omoregie Osakpolor depict the beaming, joyous faces of people who were happy to have a critical piece of cultural history back where it belongs.
“Going to the palace of the king, going to that same spot that was sacked all those years ago, was a healing process for us and them,” Layiwola said. “Seeing the reaction of the king and the palace… it was an emotional ceremony.”
The Stanley Museum stewarded a hopeful celebration of the power of restitution.
“I hope that this visit from Dr. Cory Gundlach and Dr. Peju Layiwola to the Oba of Benin opens the door to many more restitutions from American museums directly to the Royal Court of Benin,” Prince Aghatise Erediauwa was recorded saying during the ceremony, according to a report from the Stanley Museum.
The general interconnectedness and collaborative nature of this victory speak volumes for the greater restitution movement as well as the broader community of organizations working for civil justice.
“We hope it encourages museums to go down a similar path,” Layiwola said. “We often hear that restitution is such a difficult process, but we want to teach that if you do it the right way, things go
very smoothly.”