The Return of African Antiquities and the Ambiguity of the “Romantic” Colonial: Nigeria Magazine and the Benin and Ife Bronzes

Abstract

The Return of African Antiquities and the Ambiguity of the “Romantic” Colonial: Nigeria Magazine and the Benin and Ife Bronzes Terri Ochiagha Introduction On 29 April 2021, the German government announced that a “substantial number” of Benin bronzes, looted amidst extreme violence from the Kingdom of Benin in present-day Nigeria by British colonial forces in February 1897, are scheduled for return to the country in 2022, to be permanently held at the Edo Museum of West African Art when it opens in 2025.2 The ownership of these antiquities, currently in the custody of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz) and the thousands of exemplars held in other Western museums, educational institutions and private collections, has been politically fraught for decades.3 Germany’s decision follows on the heels of recent agreements between the Legacy Restoration Trust—a Nigerian organisation tasked with the restitution of Nigeria’s artistic treasures, born out of discussions among the Oba of Benin, the Benin Dialogue Group, the Edo State Government, Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments—and a number of Western individuals and institutions.4 In recent years, the momentum of Rhodes Must Fall, Black Lives Matter and the Report on the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics (better known as the Sarr-Savoy Report5) has reinvigorated global debate around the restitution of African art, originally impelled by “African intellectuals, politicians and museum professionals just after 1960.”6 Contemporary conversations, concluded agreements and ongoing negotiations mark a historical watershed. The demands for the return of African cultural objects in Nigeria antedate self-rule, however. A traditional ruler, Akenzua II (1899–1978), the Oba of Benin, initiated the first documented demand for the return of looted antiquities—in this case two ceremonial stools—in February 1935.7 Almost coetaneously, the first sustained fight for the return of antiquities and the creation of museums in Nigeria emerged and found expression in a periodical linked to the colonial education department: The Nigerian Teacher (1933–36) and its successor, Nigeria. The founding editor, Edward Harland Duckworth, spearheaded the discussion of these matters in the magazine, in collaboration with fellow education officer Kenneth C. Murray, who eventually became Nigeria’s first Surveyor of Antiquities. Murray’s role as the “founding father of the Nigerian museum movement” has received a degree of scholarly attention.8 Duckworth’s involvement—which was mostly discursive, but occasionally manifested as direct lobbying—has been discussed but cursorily,9 despite the magazine’s key role in the dissemination of the value of Nigerian art in the colony and the metropole. Concentrating on the years of Duckworth’s editorship of The Nigerian Teacher and Nigeria (1933–1953), this article fills a gap in the long history of the returns movement by examining the magazine’s discursive interventions in the light of the colonial educational contexts that framed them. It argues that the magazine was central and not ancillary to the political manoeuvres that underpinned the fight for the return of antiquities, and zooms in on the connection between Nigeria’s “romantic” cultural militancy and its “adaptationist” educational ethos, as well as the psycho-political implications of Nigeria’s self-appointed role as arbiter of culture and artistic taste. Despite the considerable material and legislative achievements of Nigeria’s returns crusade, it operated in ideologically muddied waters that were simultaneously aligned with and at odds with changes in colonial policy in the wake of World War II, a fact that thwarted its cultural and educational potential. An unlikely champion of the Arts In 1931, Nigeria’s colonial Director of Education, E.R.J. Hussey, recruited Edward Harland Duckworth (1894–1972) with the title of Inspector of Education to reconfigure science teaching in Nigerian secondary schools, with particular emphasis on the elite government colleges. His work mostly consisted of mapping out pedagogical principles and reporting on their application in both government and mission secondary schools. Two years into their close personal and professional relationship (at this time, Duckworth’s inspectorial duties were becoming somewhat superseded by public relations administrative tasks at the Education Department’s headquarters), Hussey appointed Duckworth to revive the dormant Bulletin of Educational Affairs...