What Will Be the Fate of the Benin Bronzes?
The story of the Benin Bronzes is one of the bloodier, more shameful chapters in the history of the Western world’s "encyclopedic" museums.
Looted from the Kingdom of Benin in 1897 by the British in a punitive raid whose indiscriminate slaughter and wanton cruelty inspired The Hague Convention two years later, the artworks are today scattered across art institutions and ethnographic museums in Europe and the United States—a stain on the Western conscience that is ensanguined with the sins of colonialism.
Recently, the Oxford professor and Pitt Rivers Museum curator Dan Hicks wrote a book…
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