Perhaps the Oba of Benin attended the coronation of Charles III at the weekend. looked at it, saw all the pomp that the colleagues there in Great Britain displayed, the carriage and the gold, and compared it a little with its closer surroundings. Although he owns a Rolls-Royce Phantom from 2016, which could have cost around half a million euros at the time, his palace looks more like a Swabian master craftsman who did a lot of his own work to fulfill his dream of an apartment building with a Greek column entrance. Although Ewuare II is the Oba, i.e. the king of the old kingdom of Benin in present-day Nigeria, he only receives a flat-rate payment from the state and is otherwise primarily dependent on donations from his subjects. Which definitely pissed him off.
Ewuare II., 69, has been a hundredfold millionaire for a few weeks, maybe even a billionaire. At least on paper. In March, Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari gave him ownership of all the so-called Benin bronzes. A little more than 5000 of them are registered worldwide, very few of them are made of bronze. There are sculptures and metal plaques made of brass, gold, but also wood and leather, and some made of bronze. Most of them date from the period between 1450 and 1650 and show the history of the royal family, which knew no writing at the time. During a revenge campaign in 1897, the British stole most of the works of art and auctioned them off in London, from where they went all over the world, to 131 museums in twenty countries.
Nigeria and the kings of Benin have been demanding its return for decades and have long fallen on deaf ears in the West; they just break down there or get stolen, they said. In years of detailed work, curators, the governor of the state of Edo, in which Benin is located, and the Foreign Office have tried to build a bridge. The idea was: A museum will be built in Benin City, to which bronzes will come from all over the world: Governor Godwin Obaseki wanted to make the new museum a tourist magnet, a beacon for the entire region, and Ghanaian star architect David Adjaye delivered one Draft. At the end of 2022, Annalena Baerbock traveled to Nigeria and signed the return of the bronzes from Germany to the Nigerian state: Much should be able to stay on loan in Germany, the rest should go to the new “Edo Museum of West African Art” (EMOWAA), for which Germany has already paid four million euros. It is now possible that nothing will come of it because Nigeria’s president simply passed everything on to the Oba. Who now also wants to build his own museum. He had announced this many times before, but was rather smiled at in Berlin and London.
Politically, the Oba is officially powerless, but he has influence
Perhaps the visitors were not entirely aware that the Oba is politically largely powerless, but draws his influence from tradition: what the Oba likes, I like too, they say in Benin City. And he never liked the glitzy museum that the others wanted, he had long been at odds with the governor. He is said to have made the donation palatable to the president by providing campaign aid for his party. Now the Oba can apparently decide where the bronzes go. “The return of all stolen treasures will usher in a new era in Benin’s history and civilization,” he said recently. It remains to be seen whether this means purchasing a second Rolls-Royce or actually giving everyone access to the cultural treasures of mankind.
Ewuare II studied in England and the USA and is seen by many as a rather progressive ruler who fights human trafficking. But he also stands in the line of his ancestors, whose processing of their own history and their complicity in the slave trade is manageable so far.