+International museums should repatriate colonial artefacts’.

With a specific focus on the British Museum

For Centuries, museums have been a pinnacle of culture and heritage in our society; housing great
feats of human engineering, science, art, craftmanship and cruelty. Institutions like the British
Museum hide under the pretentious guises of goodwill and paternity but in actual fact, they deny
millions of people around the world the opportunity to witness and appreciate priceless elements of
their culture and heritage. The items held ransom within the walls of institutions like the British
museum are part of a shameful chapter of European history which has left a lasting legacy of division,
poverty, and hatred; the victims of which cry out for the repatriation of their precious artefacts.
Picture this. It’s 1897. You are the son of the Benin Oba and you have just seen your mother killed
before your eyes, your people savagely shot, raped and pillaged and your father shamefully dragged
from his ancestral throne and exiled from his kingdom. Your oppressors take priceless works of art
created by master craftsmen in the 13 th century and leave you with nothing. This is the story of the
Benin bronzes, but this blueprint of pillaging and destruction was employed all over Africa, India, the
middle east, and southern Asia within the 400 years if the British empire. Laws were passed to
condone the crimes of the treacherous colonisers but that did little to hide the fact that what they did
was (and still is) an act of savage criminality and apathy. Perhaps they were a product of their time.
Victims of Europe’s infatuation with the developing world. However, what lies beneath is first and
foremost a lack of respect for human life and dignity, a complete lack of regard for culture and a
frenzied obsession with abduction, influence, and degradation.
100 years later in modern-day Nigeria, your great grand children gather enough money to visit the
British Museum. They stand in awe at its wonderful artefacts and striking pillars. They go down into
the basement and find the Benin bronzes. For a moment, they imagine the bronzes belonged to them
and then leave, turning their backs on artefacts that are rightfully theirs. These institutions create an
almost unreachable distance for many indigenous populations wishing to connect with invaluable
pieces of their ancestry. Perhaps they have truly become a part of British and European history over
time, but the cultural affinity to the land of their birth will always remain for these stolen artefacts.
The sickening notion that a jewel unearthed by your people on your very own soil rests as a
centrepiece for another’s crown or the wholly disrespectful fact that a key to understanding the
ancient Egyptian world arrived in Britain emblazoned with the words “Captured in Egypt by the
British Army” are stark reminders of how inappropriate it is for these artefacts to remain in Britain
given their more than questionable past.
The British Museum is just one cog in a gear system of colonialism, slavery, and abduction. A
shameful and cruel past supported by European museums’ seemingly harmless intentions to educate
and entertain. However pure these intentions may be, they are very much supported by the heinous
acts of their forefathers and items they looted. Repatriation is not a simple matter of exchange
between coloniser and colony, but it is the lowest form of reparation and restoration- a process
designed to rebuild bridges between ‘the West and the Rest’ and not so much rewrite the past but
innovate a better future for the artefacts and those who hold them dear.