31 culturally significant items have been given back to the Nigerian government, including a bronze sculpture of a West African king that was in a Rhode Island museum’s collection for more than 70 years.
During a ceremony at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, a sculpture known as the Head of a King, or Oba, that was housed at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (RISD), was one of the items given to the Nigerian National Collections.
The kingdom of Benin, which is now in Nigeria, was pillaged and robbed by British colonial forces in 1897, and this is when the Benin Bronzes were taken.
“In 1897 the ‘Head of an Oba’ was stolen from the Royal Palace of Oba Ovonranwmen,” RISD Museum Interim Director Sarah Ganz Blythe said in a statement.
“The RISD Museum has worked with the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments to repatriate this sculpture to the people of Nigeria where it belongs,” Blythe said.
The pieces that were stolen in the late 19th century included 29 that the Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents voted in June to return to Nigeria and one object from the National Gallery of Art, officials said.
“Today, we address a historic injustice by returning the Benin Bronzes, magnificent examples of Benin’s culture and history,” Lonnie Bunch III, founding director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, wrote on Twitter.
“Through this repatriation, we acknowledge a legacy of cultural theft and do our part to return African culture to Africans.”
The Head of a King, which dates back to the 1700s, was donated by Lucy Truman Aldrich to the RISD Museum in 1939. According to a statement from the museum, it was purchased in a 1935 auction of Benin Kingdom artifacts from the Knoedler Gallery in New York.
The interior bears a French customs mark, indicating that it was once part of a French collection.
Despite not being able to link the sculpture to a particular French or British collection, the RISD Museum declared that it is almost certainly one of the looted artifacts.
An oba, or king, of the Edo people of Benin, West Africa, is represented by the bronze head. An incoming king commissioned the sculptures to honour a predecessor and were placed on ancestral altars in the royal palace, the museum said.
The repatriation is part of a worldwide movement by cultural institutions to return artefacts stolen during colonial wars.
In August, Germany signed an agreement to transfer ownership of the Benin Bronzes in its museums to Nigeria. The collection was described as the most extensive transfer of museum artefacts from a colonial context to date and covers 512 objects which ended up in Berlin in the aftermath of the 1897 looting.
The same month, the Horniman Museum and Gardens in London announced it would transfer a collection of 72 Benin Bronzes to the Nigerian government.
Abba Isa Tijani, director-general of Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments, said she hoped the latest transfer would inspire other museums to return African artefacts.
“We hope for great collaborations with these museums and institutions and we have already opened promising discussions with them concerning this,” he said in a statement.
“The entire world is welcome to join in this new way of doing things. A way free from rancours and misgivings. A way filled with mutual respect.”