Last episode, we began with a simple question. How do the artworks and artifacts that you see in a museum wind up in a museum? For a long time, me and her art world didn't ask questions. The Met got fooled by not probing deeply enough into the purported history that was given to us.
Guess what? My kids know it's looted. But the museum world is changing. Museums are now returning dozens of objects every single year.
It's like Olympic Games for restitution. Even though technically we legally acquired these, the origins of the acquisition was illegal, so therefore everything else was tainted as well. Today on Freakin' Amateur Radio, we will explore one dramatic case that isn't settled yet. The disruption of the attack on the kingdom cannot be over-emphasized.
Most important pieces went directly to the British Museum. They even took the boats from the doors. It turns out the stealing art can be relatively easy, but giving it back, that's the hard part. If the job is to purify yourself by getting rid of the art, yeah, put it in a pit, melt it.
The second episode in our series about returning art starts right now. This is Freakin' Amateur Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner. Matthew Bogdanos is a former Marine colonel who now runs the Antiquities Trafficking Unit in the Manhattan District Attorney's office. We met him in our previous episode.
We do not, under any circumstances, want to denude New York of its cultural treasures. If it's legal, great, we should keep it, but if it's illegal, then it should go back to the country of origin. But how does that happen? If a museum or a private collector on Fifth Avenue has a 3,000-year-old treasure that is found to have been looted or otherwise stolen, the country of origin may not even exist anymore.
So how does Bogdanos manage that? Every country treats these differently, but we have yet to have a country who hasn't just been over-the-top appreciative and extraordinarily gracious. We returned in antiquity to Iran. Wait a second, the U.S.
doesn't have diplomatic relations with Iran. What do I care? I'm not a politician. We returned a piece to the Palestinian Authority.
Now move the map to Southeast Asia, India, Thailand, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Pakistan. For that area of the world, these antiquities are idols. They're worshipped. And the number of times I have gone into a temple in India, in southern India particularly, and it's empty, and they're still worshipping the empty pedestal, or they have a photograph of an idol that was stolen, or they have a wax or wooden model, and now this goes in someone's Fifth Avenue apartment?
Get the hell out of here. I mean, are you kidding me? So we never lose sight of the fact that at the other end of our entire process, the prosecution, recovery, and repatriation, there's a community on the other side. Bogdanos makes all this sound rather clear-cut, and that makes sense.
He is a prosecutor. He's guided by the law, and the law, while complicated, is also decisive. It declares a winner and a loser. Legal possession or illegal possession.
But art is even more complicated than the law. Art is a place where our deepest spiritual values meet the marketplace. So that causes all kinds of questions. I mean, how do you put a price on art?
People do. It's a vast marketplace. And strange things happen when you mix the most spiritual with the most commercial. That is David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic.
In 2022, he published a piece called Who Benefits When Western Museums Return Looted Art? It's one thing when, you know, there's a war in Ukraine, and the Russian forces break into a museum in a Ukrainian city, and they take the artworks and equipment crates, and they take them back to Russia. And the war ends five years later, and there's a peace treaty. That art, we know where it came from.
It had a possessor. The possessors are still alive. Their institutions still exist. And we can arrange for the art to come back from Russia to the museum in Ukraine from which it was taken.
But when we're talking about lapses of 100, 200, 500 years, the whole concept of theft becomes kind of cracked. The second most famous Greek artwork in a European museum is the Pergamum Altar in Berlin, which is honored by a German archaeologist. Pergamum was a city on the west coast of what is now Turkey. The artists who made the work were Greek.
The king who commanded the work was of mixed Greek and Macedonian origin. And the taxpayers who paid for it spoke all the mingled languages of what was then Asian minor, Anatolia, and some of them were Semitic, and some of them were other vanished groups. So who gets it? Turkey?
Greece? Macedon? Syria? Because that's probably the place that's closest to the culture where people pay the taxes.
I mean, it's gone. That world is gone. So there's no one to give it back to. It's just an illusion.
I went back to Matthew Bogdanos, the prosecutor, with David Frum's argument. Now, there are those who would say that your position is noble but naive in that you are putting a physical piece of property into the hands of someone who may be a generation or ten generations removed from the origin, from either the creator or the owner. Those pieces might be sold into the black market, wind up in the palace of some Gulf state prince or a Chinese or American billionaire. So how do you think about those potential bad outcomes?
Let's see. I've been in three wars. I've had six combat tours. I'm a career homicide prosecutor.
No one has ever actually called me naive before. You're welcome. I've seen mass graves in Kosovo and Iraq. So no, I'm not naive.
I recognize the world. And that's where I get to say to you, we're not the Acme Judgment Company. We don't get to pick and choose. We have a burglary in the Upper East Side.
This person has 19 televisions, and 18 of them are stolen. When we catch the guy, do we get to say, you have 19, you don't need them back. We're going to keep them. We're going to give them to other people.
That's not how that works, right? And if our victim is a country whose political regime we don't particularly care for, tough. We actually have a very good relationship with the countries that we operate with on our level. So I'm talking about the Ministry of Culture or the Ministry of Antiquities.
We actually require that these countries sign a document at the repatriation ceremony promising that they will maintain the antiquity that's being returned and, wait for it, publicly display it. And is that document enforceable? Is it legally enforceable? Almost certainly not.
But here's how it's enforceable. The next time you have an antiquity from that country that's looted and you call me, am I really the person you want to piss off? Do you really want to say, I know we promised Colonel Donaldson in the Manhattan DA's office that we're going to maintain this and we're going to publicly display it, but you know what? Forget that.
Oops. And the next time we have an Iranian antiquity, Mr. Minister, I'm so sorry. Believe it or not, these countries really honor these requests.
In India particularly, it's really heartwarming. They will send us videos of the community receiving their idol back. And I'm telling you, it's insane. Like 50 people screaming and yelling and singing and chanting and they're holding this, you know, 150 pound idol up over their heads as they march it into the temple.
We've had these things in Cambodia. We see these ceremonies in Egypt. It's followed from the plane right to its resting place in the museum in Cairo or in Lebanon. We have ongoing relationships across the globe with all these countries.
It's in their best interest to honor their agreement with us. So we are not returning stuff that is then getting put on the market or being put in storage rooms. If you were looking for the single most interesting case of returning art or restituting or repatriating art, as various people call it, I would nominate the case of the Benin bronzes, although that name is a bit misleading. Some of the pieces are indeed made from bronze, but many are not.
And while there is today an African country called Benin, just west of Nigeria, the bronzes came from the historic kingdom of Benin in what is now Edo State in southern Nigeria. In any case, the Benin bronzes are a massive collection of art, artifacts, and religious objects that have been displayed for years in more than 160 museums around the world, including the Smithsonian in the U.S., the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, the Kelvin Grove in Glasgow, and especially the British Museum in London, which is the motherlode of Benin bronzes, and which plays a starring role in our story. The British Museum is surely one of the world's great museums. Some people consider it the greatest, especially for antiquities.
But others consider it, how shall we say this, a trophy case for the spoils of war. Here, putting it far better than I ever could, is the English comedian James Acaster. A long time ago, everyone in Britain got in a big old boat, and we rocked, and this will sound far, thanks, everyone in the world! And we got all the swank, didn't we?
And we took it back to Old Blighty. And we hid it, this is the clever part, we hid it, in a museum. Now, a few of you are sitting there, I can see your angry faces, like, So what? Fighters keep us shut up!
Hey man, a while ago, a lot of your ancestors stole loads of stuff from my ancestors? Yeah, I'm here to take them home. That's right, this is wrong. What do you say?
I don't think so! We're still looking at it! How true to history is James Acaster's version? Let's find out, by doing what we usually do, which is calling up the academic experts.
Hi, so my name is Professor Dan Hicks, I work at the University of Oxford, as a co-raitor at our anthropology museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum. Okay, so where does this story begin? Yeah, okay, so if we wind back to 1884, and Berlin, and the meeting of the European nations in the Berlin Congress. This is where they sit down with a map of Africa and say, you get this, I get that, that kind of thing?
Exactly, exactly. And so what is now Nigeria was part of the pink area for the British, but not part of empire at that point. Not turning them into colonies at that point. There are other entities, there are protectorates, there are areas controlled by the companies, in this case, the Royal Niger Company.
The Royal Niger Company was a trading firm that essentially served as an arm of the British government. So we have to imagine this as a corporate and a militarist form of empire. And really, this is all about palm oil, it's about the rubber industry. In 1892, the Royal Niger Company signed a trade treaty with the Oba, or King of Benin.
Within just a few years, it was decided that the Oba wasn't as cooperative as Britain would have liked, and they sent an expedition to Benin to work things out, headed up by one James Phillips. Things didn't work out at all. The group was attacked, and Phillips and most of his men were killed. The British response was what came to be known as a punitive expedition.
And of course, it's one of so many other expeditions that happened in these 1890s years. This expedition to Benin involved 10 Royal Navy ships and 1,400 soldiers, armed with the recently invented Maxim machine gun. The Benin defenders had machetes, pistols, and muskets. The British forces had no trouble taking the Kingdom of Benin.
They massacred the population, burned the city. They captured the Oba and sent him into exile. The destruction of the attack on the Kingdom cannot be over-effacized. That is Victor Ikaminor.
I'm an artist and a writer from Nigeria. Ikaminor is from Edo State, the historic location of the Kingdom of Benin. He is one of the artists who represented Nigeria's debut in the Venice Biennale in 2017. They kind of created a vacuum for us, you know, by removing an entire people's history.
This is what we would consider our library. A visual library for that matter was completely razed down, and what they didn't burn, they looted. That's right. What the British didn't burn, they looted.
Thousands of objects from the ceremonial halls of the Oba. These included bronze and brass relief plaques that told the story of hundreds of years' worth of Benin history, commemorative brass heads that had adorned the shrines of royal ancestors. They took carved ivory tusks, coral beads, brass bells, figures, and gaming boards, even household items like flasks, cups, bowls, spoons, salt shakers. The Western colonizers were kleptomaniacs.
They stole hairpins. They stole keys to the doors in the palace. And where did all this loot go? In the 19th and 20th century, there were four European countries accumulating African art.
It was France, the UK, Belgium, and Germany. That is Benedicte Savoie, a French professor of art history at the Technical University in Berlin. As for the Benin plunder? Most important pieces went directly to the British Museum, but the rest has been sold on the art market.
And the art market around 1900. It's the best time for the art market. You know, Picasso is a very young guy. All these avant-gards are interested in African art.
And the art market in Europe made a lot of money with all these objects. And the richest museums at that time in Europe were the German museums. Because German was a Reich, no? And if you are a Reich, an empire, you need a museum.
It was absolutely normal in Europe at that time to have huge museums in the capitals of empires, like British Museum, etc. So the Germans said, OK, we have only Comaroon, Tanzania, Togo, and Namibia right now. And let's buy things from Benin City, this very, very important, beautiful culture. And they bought a lot of bronze 600s only in Berlin.
Within weeks of this attack, the bronzes were on display in London, Oxford, Berlin, and elsewhere. And they were displayed, if we go back to the British Museum, they were displayed in the Assyrian Saloon, alongside objects from ancient Egypt, objects from the Bronze Age, from the ancient Near East. So the narrative was absolutely obvious. We have blown your culture back into the Bronze Age.
This is a dead culture. I'm not sure the narrative is as absolutely obvious, as Dan Hicks says. Still, the British Museum has been, for a few centuries now, a physical archive of one nation's enthusiasm for conquest and empire building. That era, as you know, is long gone.
And yet, the evidence, even the bloodiest evidence imaginable, like the Benin Bronzes, is still proudly on display. This is what we got up. We hit it. In a museum.
After the break, who is in favor of returning the Benin Bronzes to Nigeria? And who's against it? I'm Stephen Dovner. This is Freakonomics Radio.
We'll be right back. We've been speaking with Dan Hicks, a professor at Oxford. So I think I'm the world's first, well, I am the world's first professor of contemporary archaeology. And what is contemporary archaeology?
I mean, it's tautological in some ways, but I think it underlines something really important about all archaeology. Archaeology, in some ways, is the inverse of history. So in this case, in terms of the thing that we're talking about, the idea that empire, you know, actually isn't over. It's here with us in the present.
It's here with us in locations that include our museums. Hicks, remember, is also a curator at Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum. There's a part of my work there. We are responsible for one of the larger collections of the Benin Bronzes.
I know there was a tweet sent out in 2015 by a grassroots student movement. It said the Pitt Rivers Museum is one of the most violent spaces in Oxford. Tell me your response when you first saw that tweet. You know, I heard at that point, I'd simply never seen it that way.
I mean, this is one of those, you know, marmalade dropping moments of your career, right? You're halfway through your breakfast. And oh, right, let's think this through. So for me, it's all about learning from a new generation.
I mean, I'm now 50 years old, and it's the people who are in their 20s who are reading this material so differently and are showing us things that have been sitting in plain sight for so long. As Hicks began to think things through, as he puts it, his views shifted and hard. Today, he has a zeal that may remind you of a religious convert. Consider the book he published in 2020.
It's called The Brutish Museums, the Benin Bronzes Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. Here is a typical sentence. The sacking of Benin City in February 1897 was an... attack on human life on culture on belief on art and on sovereignty in just a few years hicks had become a flag bearer for the movement to repatriate the benin bronzes to nigeria nigeria by the way had been trying to reclaim the bronzes since the 1930s they began asking more insistently after gaining independence from britain in 1960 but not much happened in 2010 a consortium of western museums joined a few nigerian institutions to form the benin dialogue group the idea was to establish a new museum in benin city nigeria that would display the bronzes once the western museums decided to return them but once again not much happened until as it turns out the year 2020 as david from wrote in his atlantic article the george floyd protests of 2020 jolted the group into hyperactivity it might seem strange that the murder of a black man by a white police officer in america would trigger a global sentiment to return art looted from nigeria by britain some 130 years earlier or maybe not the parallels were as dan hicks might say hidden in plain sight here again is benedict savois now today the 21st century france the uk belgium and germany are yes like olympic games for restitution they are fighting for or they are struggling in order to be the first to restitute important collections savois herself has played a significant role in this restitution drama in 2017 french president manuel macron visited several former french colonies in africa like the british french colonizers had sacked and looted their way through sub-saharan africa and sent home thousands of treasures that are still on display in french museums during a speech at university in burkina faso macron said i cannot accept that a large part of cultural heritage from several african countries is in france savois who was already sympathetic to returning african art wrote an article calling macron's speech a revolution and macron promptly appointed savois along with the senegalese economist felwin sar to push the revolution along savois and sar visited museum directors and government officials in four african countries and they wrote a nearly 200 page report that macron apparently found so persuasive that he immediately promised to restitute thousands of objects to the country of benin and to loan money to build a new museum there but returning a massive collection of art and artifacts so weighted with history is not simple critics said the report was too ambitious and too academic to be realistic furthermore french law prohibits the removal of artwork from public collections at least for the time being the british parliament had similarly passed laws making it hard to de-accession works from their public museums although recent legislation has given museum trustees more leeway at the moment several museums in several countries have at least begun the process of repatriating african art and i think the most competitive tandem is between germany and france right now what's in it for them what do they gain by restituting it's difficult to say but it's obvious that the restitution has something to do with soft power with soft diplomacy you are speaking about art about beauty about emotions but at the same time you are doing something like i show you that i'm confident in your ability to protect your own cultural heritage or let me build a museum for you with my money or something like that it's not only about moving object from a to b or from d to c etc it's about a new art of relationship with these countries and for france france has a very very bad reputation in the former colonies in senegal in mali in burkina fraso in cameroon etc and i think emmanuel can try to do what he can in order to repair this very bad reputation so okay in the restitution olympics as you put it france and germany are fighting to be number one which knowing those two countries and their complicated histories and their current political situation maybe doesn't surprise me so much but the uk well i guess the uk is variegated there's some restitution going on but from what i can tell the british museum is not particularly interested in restituting not even talking about restituting it's very strange because in the 70s and 80s the uk was the motor of the discussion with ghana with nigeria and you have very important stakeholders in oxford and cambridge fighting for restitutions and also very normal people writing letters to the times saying we need to have better relations to ghana for example and now i think you're right the british museum the stage museums in the uk are very reluctant to speak about these topics they are observing the situation very carefully like you know like an animal observing a very difficult situation before he know what to do and i can understand it because as you say the british museum is a trophy of war like all museums museums have a golden face and a very dark face and we are used to know only the shiny face the sunny face and i think for a museum like the british museum if they will tell the truth about the history of collections it would be so disgusting that would be the end of the british museum not the end because it would be empty but the end because it's so disgusting that nobody will be very comfortable with visiting such a museum the british museum is a member of the benin dialogue group and they've given a few million dollars toward a proposed museum in nigeria but as for their plans to legally and or physically return their benin bronzes that's hard to say the british museum declined our multiple requests for an interview which seems to be what they do when anyone asks them to discuss the situation oxford's dan hicks has become perhaps the loudest voice of those scolding the british museum to change their ways this position is possible in part because his museum the pit rivers recently declared it will work to return the nearly 100 benin objects in its collection and how many benin objects does the british museum own that too is hard to say we still don't know how many objects are in the british museum from 1897 and all these other institutions don't have inventories because of years of underfunding and lack of investment so many of these are hidden away in the storeroom this is a story about what's in the storeroom not about what's on display in paris we have 69 000 objects from africa in the musée du quai bronis and only 1 000 on display so 68 000 are unvisible that's a scandal and the question is why why no museum in europe is able to explain why it is so important to have all this accumulation of african art in their basement since the british museum isn't talking i asked dan hicks to summarize the best argument they might make in favor of not repatriating their benin bronzes it's a what if you know it's a what if if you give back the benin bronzes they'll be sold on the open markets if you give back the benin bronzes there'll be a war and they'll be damaged by bombs if you give back the benin bronzes they're not going to care for these objects well enough there won't be inventories done in reality all those things that those myths say might happen if they're given back every one of them has happened to the benin bronzes here in the uk even the british museum has sold off objects that were taken in 1997 okay there might be a war one day in nigeria in the second world war whole museum and also liverpool museum were bombed in the blitz and there were benin bronzes that were burst into fragments by nazi bombs so all those things that the civil servants invented might happen if you return them actually did happen but they happened here in the uk when you listen to people like dan hicks and benedict savois and earlier matthew bogdanos you make the sense that repatriating looted art is a fairly simple matter until that is you ask a couple basic questions like to whom exactly are these pieces being returned and what exactly will become of them here again is david from author of the atlantic article who benefits when western museums return looted art when this issue really erupted in 2020 i was caught off guard by some of the simplicities that were being propounded and i went to nigeria place i'd never visited in order to do some reporting to reveal some of the real complexities that people need to think about if they want to think about this issue as a serious issue from grew up in toronto where his parents were avid collectors of african art much of their collection is now in the art gallery of ontario in toronto and i spent a lot of my life in and around the collecting world although i'm myself not at all a collector and why does he think the repatriation of benin bronzes is more complex than some people say they say well give it back to nigeria and the problem is what is nigeria because what i document in there are at least three major claimants inside nigeria to these artworks there are some minor ones too but they're three big ones and you can't toss it into the middle and say okay go scramble those major claimants are a proposed museum of west african art in edo state the national commission for museums and monuments and the current oba of benin city awari ii who is a descendant of the oba who was exiled by the british in 1897 and so when you choose one of those three claimants you're making a moral decision you have to accept it you have to bear it so the first claimant to the nigerian pieces this is the idea that got the most exciting and really revived this in the west was this proposal for a public private partnership of state of the art modern museum with integrity and an independent board that was proposed by the governor of the state although he himself would not be directly involved really impressive people nigerian business leaders some international people and they would run the museum it's had a variety of names it would be an independent museum of west african art in edo state in what is now benin city this is the future museum that european donors have been contributing to it would be built on the historic site of the kingdom of benin if you've been following the story and you've seen pictures in the papers drawing of a beautiful looking modern building that's the project you've read about it's going to be just what a museum should be and one of the things i describe in the article is how that dream met nigerian reality and was destroyed by nigerian reality that reality says from is a conflict between edo state and the current oba of benin he doesn't have political power but his enormous spiritual and religious authority within his kingdom and he says these pieces belong to my family and i want them returned to me and i have an idea for a royal museum which i will own and control from writes a long-standing feud between the oba and the current governor of edo state their families are historic rivals dating back to around the time of the british punitive expedition so from thinks the museum project is doomed to fail i mean i hope it does not fail because i think it's a beautiful thing i really admire the people who are involved in it but major projects like this that are associated with an individual governor in a nigerian state tend not to outlast that governor governor obasaki's time is limited and there's no indication that his successor is going to be interested in this and he also is fighting against the oba of benin and everyone i spoke to i spoke to a wide variety of people from many different walks of life churches and political systems agreed if there's a contest between the governor and the oba the oba is going to win as of now the edo museum project is still moving forward there's an archaeological dig underway to look for remnants of the benin kingdom and the museum's director ara disu told us by email that construction has begun on a collections and research center that will provide quote grade a facilities to host and care for artifacts and contemporary artworks but just recently the nigerian government by way of a presidential decree announced that all artifacts must be delivered to the oba of benin it has since been reported that 23 benin objects that germany had repatriated to nigeria have been transferred to the oba's collection i personally don't believe that the artwork that is returned to benin will be on public display in our lifetimes and maybe never i don't think nigerians have any workable plan to display the benin art that comes back to them in the next years so where will it go i think they'll end up in possession of the federal government of nigeria the nigerian state has chronic fiscal problems the nigerian state remains as you know not maybe as corrupt as it was when oil prices were higher but still a pretty corrupt state i don't believe that museum is ever going to be built so i think what will tend to happen without this return to nigeria is that some of it will end up as the private property of the oba especially some of the earlier more attention getting pieces and then if the flows continue they will end up in crates somewhere in a basement in a guja and maybe they will be safe and maybe they won't be but i don't think they will ever be displayed from points to another complicating factor that the european proponents of repatriation don't talk about the benin art is not the benin art is itself a monument to guilt we call it the benin bronzes but they're not actually made of bronze in most cases almost all of them are made of brass so the way they got the brass was they trade for it what did they trade well benin grew a particular form of pepper that was very popular with europeans in the 1400s and 1500s and they made textiles they exported some ivory but they especially exported slaves that they had captured and they used to build the wealth and power of their kingdom they sold them to the portuguese who then trafficked these people to giant sugar plantations the benin kings were slave sellers that's how they got the brass they turned into art so there's no innocence here the story of humanity until we reach the modern age where we can substitute knowledge for human labor and can make wealth out of the air is one of tremendous oppression of most people and that's true for every power holder by the wherewithal to command art so we can't reinvent innocence we all have to accept history as it is and then we have to starting now make our moral decisions based on the choices that are actually available to us and from things that in their rush undo the sins of the 19th century today's repatriation advocates haven't thought through all the implications look i think a lot of people want to do good that's a very laudable and wonderful impulse the danger is as you do good do you catch that little glimpse of yourself in the mirror and think boy i look good when i'm doing good and the moment that thought enters your brain the whole enterprise becomes a little different that's what i worry about look if you possess valuable artifacts or if you control valuable artifacts you have a form of power and power can never be exercised with perfect innocence in this guilty world so you must use your power responsibly knowing everything has a tragic story if you were advising the british museum on this issue what would you say i would advise them this is not a great moment to make this decision this may be a decision for your successor when you have an object that's 500 years old i think one of the questions you need to ask yourself is why do i need to make a decision today this object will be here 50 years 100 years now if i don't see a good answer today i can have confidence that my children and grandchildren they may see a good answer tomorrow so you don't choose a bad answer because you have to hurry hurry hurry to dispose of this 500 year old object sometimes you say let's just wait until there is a good answer now to that argument a counter-argument could be and i've heard this counter-argument from pro-repatriation people is that so what it doesn't matter these are stolen goods and the very least you can do is return them to someone related to or someone affiliated with the survivors of those whom they were stolen yeah i hear that argument a lot too and it's associated with above all a curator named daniel hicks who works at the pit universe museum in oxford england so it doesn't matter as you say just give it back who cares what happens to it well then why not burn it if the job is to purify yourself by getting rid of the art put it in a pit melt it or why not sell it to a russian oligarch and use the money to find british schools or british health care services if the goal is deaccession there are a lot of ways of deaccession you cannot abdicate your response you inherited this thing whatever its problems art lasts a long time the great pieces of benin are mostly made between about 1450 and 1650 they've outlived people kingdoms civilizations and they come with their own obligations of continuity with whoever happens to own them in any given particular moment when the british took these works in 1897 and they brought them to britain i don't think they right away knew exactly what they were going to do victor i can know again this is 125 years of history that people want us to sort overnight there was an entire british government at the time took an axe to a particular kingdom now that we're trying to rectify that history i think there will be some you know elbowing and pushing i don't particularly see that as a problem i mean corruption in government is not peculiar to nigerian government so i think that yes there have been like issues of where is the work going to go is it going to go to the palace is it going to go to the government of nigeria you have to realize when this thing happened there was no nigeria 1897 there was no nigeria it was just beneath kingdom there was no edo state it was just beneath kingdom i think that the world or whoever the critics are need to give a little bit of room because we just started having these works back we have been asking for works to be restituted over decades now and suddenly they woke up some of the institutions woke up and they said okay we are ready let's go right and yes now that they have agreed that they're going to return this work i think that people need to give us a little bit of space to decide how we want to structure these things on our own end after the break what did i have nor think when he first saw the mean bronzes in captivity in the british museum and we go see bronzes ourselves at least try to i'm steven dupner this is freaking out radio we'll be right back i would say i started making art quite early as far back as i was like four years old that again is the nigerian artist victor i have good memory of drawing in sand and drawing on the walls my grandfather's very expensive compound also i grew up in a home that has one of the earliest photographers in that part of the country my uncle who is 90 years old is a photographer that studied at the institute of photography in new york in the early 60s i realized that for you to create images and have people reflect upon what they are seeing was quite powerful so i never stopped today i caminor splits his time between lagos nigeria and the washington dc area i still remember that day very clearly when i first visited the british museum which was in 2017 i was preparing for an exhibition a solo exhibition in london called in the kingdom of this world i got in there you understand now i was emotionally charged to see these works it's not like i've not seen some of the bronze heads before maybe in books and stuff like that the british museum's benin bronzes are situated in a basement wing along with the rest of the african collection many of the objects had a ceremonial or religious purpose funerary masks for instance a funerary mask is supposed to be buried with somebody that is dead why are you having it in your museum why would i go and preserve it if that is what it was made for who told you was supposed to be behind glasses and be treated it's a funerary mask there are also brass plaques that once adorned the pillars of the obaz palace because benin had no written language the plaques were one of the chief repositories of the kingdom's history they told stories like storybooks the way a graphic designer will illustrate a storybook is the way a benin bronze maker would illustrate an entire story before the british raid there were over 1 000 plaques spanning hundreds of years of history the british museum owns nearly 200 of them so when you're looking at some of these plaques they are disjointed because it's like taking william shakespeare's macbeth or hamlet so you go to first act you tear the page off then you go to the last act of hamlet and you tear it off then you paste it on the wall and call it william shakespeare so if somebody is reading it yes you can read one piece i mean the sentences are nice the phrases are great you can quote from them but it's not the entire story until you put the entire macbeth on the wall then you will understand the story and the magnitude of what has been done to a book like macbeth and you know after a while i just got really emotional about looking at them all strong up there just like being art for art's sake which they were not they have never been the plaques were also meant to memorialize how certain rituals were performed recently the queen of england passed on and we saw the entire ceremony they are referencing a book for what we are seeing play out on tv nothing was just like don't arrive on right everything was documented so they can reference it the grandchildren will wear black on certain days people will visit so we had that documentation in our plaques on how things will be done in that same way then some foreigners pay and completely just young that whole history book and all of those things off the walls and then begin to string them together like they are beads you know bought in a cheap shop in vegas having learned what we've learned thus far about the peguine bronzes their meaning their history the punitive expedition that scattered them around the globe and the somewhat harried movement now to repair the past we thought it was time to go to the british museum to visit them for ourselves so we booked a flight for london dan hicks author of the brutish museums agreed to meet us there and give a proper tour of the peguine bronzes it was a damp and chilly sunday morning and we queued up with hicks to go inside i told hicks that we tried many times to interview a british museum official about the controversy over the peguine bronzes and the many other pieces in their collection that are considered contested objects it's absolutely one of the defining features of what the british museum is in the eyes of the public these days you know it's the jokes that won't go away why they call it the british museum if everything in it is stolen from other countries when are they going to give it all back it's really affecting the museum as a brand in any other sector if your brand was being so dominated by one issue that you were failing to address you would want to do something about it other than just keep your head in the sand that means i guess an obvious question why have they not the playbook from 30 years ago is still very much the one being used by the press officers of our national museums we're going to tough this one out we're not going to feed the media on this issue we'll keep quiet we'll occasionally say very small things that changes the subject we'll talk about the path in the marbles every time someone talks about the ben and bronzes we'll talk about easter island at any time someone raises the path in the marbles and so on the queue moved quickly and we got up near the entrance as we were about to pass through the main gate a security guard approach he did not like the look of our microphones anything like this is an absolute flat no so we really need to go to the press office okay we told him what we were doing that we've been trying for months to arrange a visit and or an interview with the british museum but we couldn't even get our calls returned so instead we brought this nice professor with us to give a chore so you're recording me right now yes right you didn't tell me that so i'm gonna ask you to stop please okay why are you doing that so our recording equipment was taken from us we were allowed to enter the museum without it we would just have to record dan hicks's chore of the benin bronzes on a couple of iphones we're gonna go down into the galleries into the basement right i mean they are not being displayed in the same way as let's say objects we mentioned you just are these african objects that we're going to be seeing are really controversial you know hidden away in the basement oh my god look at this gallery closed they knew we were coming they knew we were coming didn't they room 25 africa all of africa is down there is it not it is it is closed today but to be fair the museum apologizes for any inconvenience we asked the guard why the african gallery was closed he said he didn't know there was a sign announcing that the tour of the gallery would be starting soon led by a volunteer so we waited outside the roped off entrance we got to chatting with a visitor from scotland named shirley thompson who had come to the british museum with her husband ian specifically to see the benin bronzes i came on flight and it's closed yeah we came today and it's closed again so you came just to see the benin bronzes why i'm just curious because i've never heard of them and i've just started doing a university course and then read about them the fact i think in europe we got more in storage in europe than the people have cut back it blew my mind yeah now what do you think of it being returned i mean yes i mean i didn't even know about it in case you didn't catch that ian said even though we stole it as we were chatting with the thompsons the sign announcing the upcoming tour of the african gallery had been swapped out it turns out that the service councils when did that get changed well that was anticlimactic wasn't it we never were able to see the british museum's massive collection of benin bronzes but next time on the show we find another museum that's a bit more cooperative let's just hope there's nobody from our comms team spying on me we'll also hear from the secretary of the simsonian which has already returned its benin bronzes to nigeria and we still haven't given up on the british museum hello how do you do would love to go to africa with you that's next time on the show until then take care of yourself and if you can someone else too freekonomics radio is produced by stitcher and rendbud radio you can find our entire archive on any podcast app or at freekonomics.com where we also publish transcripts and show notes this episode was produced by morgan levy and mixed by greg rippon with help from jeremy johnston we had help in london from rob double and london broadcast studio and from zach lipinski our staff also includes ryan kelly katherine on cure alina kallman rebecca lee douglas julie camphor sarah lily eleanor osborne jasmine klinger daria clennert emma trill we are about it and elsa fernandez the freekonomics radio network's executive team is nilka ruth gabriel roth and me speak governor our theme song is mr fortune by the hitchhikers the rest of our music is composed by louise guerra as always thanks for listening i wonder if i could volunteer to leave the tour we better get you a credential we only have 25 minutes for you to take the exam the freekonomics radio network the hidden side of everything stitcher