Germany is physically handing over two bronzes to Benin and placing more than 1,000 other items from its museum collections in Nigeria’s possession, more than a century after they were seized by British soldiers from the once-mighty West African kingdom.
German Foreign Minister Analena Berbock and Culture Minister Claudia Roth will sign a restitution agreement with their Nigerian counterparts Zubairu Dada and Lai Mohammed in Berlin on Friday afternoon.
With immediate effect, the political agreement made Nigeria the property of 1,100 artefacts held by the Linden Museum in Stuttgart, the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne, the Museum of World Cultures in Hamburg and the State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony.
The museums and the Nigerian government will then negotiate the physical return of the individual objects, some of which may remain on display in Germany under custody agreements.
“The return is a milestone in the process of reassessing colonial injustice in the field of museum collections,” said Hermann Partzinger, head of the Prussian Heritage Foundation, the body that oversees many of Berlin’s museums. “By fully transferring the ownership of all our artefacts from Benin to Nigeria, we are taking a significant step.”
He said a “representative collection of objects” would remain in the German capital on long-term loan.
Two bronze objects from Benin – the head of an oba or king in 18th-century ceremonial dress and an expressive 16th-century relief depicting an oba accompanied by guards or companions – were to be handed over to the Nigerian government on Friday afternoon and travel back to West Africa with the delegation.
Bronze objects looted by British soldiers and sailors during a punitive expedition to Benin City in 1897 were auctioned off to European and North American museums in the early 20th century, with Germany providing the second largest collection in the world.
The two bronzes handed over to Berlin on Friday, chosen as representative of the typical style of the artefacts, were bought from the British by Eduard Schmidt, a German diplomat and employee of the shipping company Woermann Linie, who later sold them to a museum in Berlin.
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Two Benin bronzes have so far been returned to Nigeria from Britain at the initiative of universities that owned them – a rooster sculpture from Jesus College, Cambridge, and an oba head from the University of Aberdeen.
The British Museum, which holds the world’s largest collection of Benin bronzes, has refused to hand over its 900 objects, arguing that it is prevented from returning objects permanently by the British Museum Act 1963 and the Heritage Act 1983 Mr.
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