The British Museum holds 928 objects from the Kingdom of Benin, taken when British troops sacked Benin City in 1897. It says British law forbids it from giving back any of them. On Oct. 15, a Black peer in the House of Lords said that answer is no longer enough.
“The British Museum is the largest depository of stolen goods known to man,” Lord Boateng, the Labour politician and former civil rights lawyer, said at a Chatham House event titled “Reckoning or rhetoric: Is now the time for reparative justice on the global stage?” He said the museum has talked about reparative justice without delivering it, and urged its friends to press the trustees for the full return of the Ethiopian Tabots, the Benin Bronzes and Asante gold.
Those three collections come from three Black nations: Nigeria, Ethiopia and Ghana. They are also a plain test of whether the language of reparations produces anything physical.
What has gone back
On Feb. 8, the University of Cambridge transferred legal ownership of 116 Benin objects held by its Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology to Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments, four years after Nigeria formally asked. Seventeen pieces stay at Cambridge on a three-year loan; the rest are to be shipped to Nigeria. “We now expect a domino effect,” the commission’s director-general, Olugbile Holloway, said. The Netherlands has returned 119 Benin objects, described as the largest physical return so far.
In 2024, 32 gold and silver pieces looted from the Asante Kingdom went to Ghana from the British Museum (15 objects) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (17). They are not a return. Ivor Agyeman-Duah, Ghana’s chief negotiator, said they came “for an initial three years and renewable for another three,” under loan agreements, and went on show at the Manhyia Palace Museum in Kumasi.
What is still held
The British Museum says the British Museum Act 1963 strips its trustees of the power to “sell, exchange, give away or otherwise dispose of any object” in the collection. Critics say the museum hides behind the statute, and that Parliament would change it if the museum asked.
The museum has not asked. Its director, Nicholas Cullinan, has ruled out pursuing restitution during his tenure, preferring partnerships and long-term loans, according to the Museums Association. The museum says it keeps “positive relationships” with Nigerian institutions through the Benin Dialogue Group, which has discussed loans of Benin pieces to the planned Edo Museum of West African Art in Benin City.
On the Ethiopian side, the museum holds 11 tabots, sacred objects that Ethiopian Christians regard as representing the Ark of the Covenant. Ten were taken at the 1868 Battle of Maqdala. They are not on public display. The museum’s stated long-term ambition is to lend them to an Ethiopian Orthodox church in Great Britain, not to Ethiopia.
The Asante loan agreements reach the end of their first three years in 2027.
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