By Valentine Amanze, Online Editor
Edo State government is to raise funds over the next two years to build a three-storey Edo Museum of West African Art (EMOWAA), where the Benin bronze repatriated from Europe and other parts of the world will be stored.
The state Governor, Godwin Obaseki, who disclosed this, assured that work on a research office to store the first returns would start in March next year.
He said that It would be part of an estimated $100 million regeneration scheme that would involve the excavation of the original walls and moats of Benin City, once the main hub of the Kingdom of Benin, which spanned much of what is now southern Nigeria from medieval times, until the British arrived.
The governor further disclosed that an independent trust had been set up to raise funds including representatives of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments and the royal palace of the Oba, or king, of Benin.
Obaseki said that the new museum would encourage foreigners to come to Nigeria to see the bronzes, widely recognised as among the masterpieces of African art.
He explained that the centre would try “to make the world understand that there was a civilization in sub-Saharan Africa that compared with what was going on in Europe 400 or 500 years ago.”
He said that Ghanaian-British architect, David Adjaye, would be overseeing the project.
Adjaye had told Reuters that it was “ridiculous” that Nigerians currently had to travel to Europe to see artefacts from their own culture.
“This museum is really for Africans first,” he said.
Recall that Obaseki said that discussions were underway about several returns that would be a boost for a broader movement building across Africa and beyond seeking colonial-era loot.
“The whole Black Lives Matter movement has … added some urgency to the conversation,” he said.
British soldiers seized thousands of metal castings and sculptures during a raid on the then separate Kingdom of Benin in 1897.
The “bronzes” – actually copper alloy relief sculptures, many showing court figures – were auctioned off and then spread among institutions from New Zealand to Germany and the United States, with the biggest collection in London.
The British Museum had long resisted calls for the full repatriation of its collection of bronzes – as well as of Ethiopia’s Magdala treasures and Greece’s ‘Elgin marbles’ – often citing legislation banning it from disposing of artefacts.
But Obaseki said that worldwide anti-racism protests, which have forced Western nations to re-examine their colonial pasts, had helped advance negotiations on finding a compromise.
Several museums including the British Museum and the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna have formed a Benin Dialogue Group to discuss the sculptures and work on displaying them in a museum in Benin City, some of them officially on loan, according to Reuters report.
