I mean, I'm quite famous for not doing what I'm told. That's very convenient for our purposes, I have to say. You think we're 100% safe here? Well, we can just keep a brother on those three.
Well, yeah. Especially the man with the big fussy microphone. That is me with Patricia Allen in the Kelvin Grove Museum in Glasgow, Scotland. Allen is the curator of world cultures for the 11 institutions that make up the Glasgow museums.
This makes her responsible for all non-European objects in their collections. We have come to the Kelvin Grove to see a group of objects known as Benin Bronzes, artworks and artifacts looted by Britain from the historic Kingdom of Benin in what is now Nigeria. The last time I tried to see some Benin Bronzes in a museum, at the British Museum in London, our microphones were confiscated and then, as it turned out, all the Africa galleries were closed that day. Today in Glasgow, we are having better luck.
This is the head of an Uber. So all of these heads were made by ancestors. An Uber is a Benin king. A newly crowned Uber would make the head of the preceding Uber.
There are place on altars along with other offerings, including things like a bell, there's an even sword, maybe some of the ivory. What is that? That's a ceremonial sword carried by the Uber. I see.
Two of these heads, this head and another one that used to be on display at the Mungo Museum of Religion. The last meeting was brought to be an auction in 1898. So that was a year afterwards. A year afterwards, meaning after the bloody 1897 expedition in which British soldiers burned Benin City, killed much of the population, expelled the Uber and took home everything from the palace that wasn't bolted down.
Actually, as we heard in our previous episode, they took some of the bolted down stuff too. They even took the bolts from the doors, these ivory bolts. The western colonizers, we are kleptomeneks, they store hair paints. They store keys to the doors in the palace.
The British shipped thousands of objects from everyday tools to religious and historical objects back to England. Many of the best pieces went straight into the British Museum. Others were auctioned off to museums throughout Europe. For the British Empire, plunder was an important economic activity.
In recent decades, Nigeria has repeatedly asked for the return of the stolen artifacts from Benin. The British Museum has thus far refused, but many other institutions, including the Glasgow Museums, have begun to repatriate their Benin pieces. Today, on Freakonomics Radio, the third and final episode in our series on the economics, politics and ethics of returning stolen art. We have already learned how easily stolen art can still get into even the most prominent museums.
Let's talk about the gold coffin, the $4 million gold coffin. We've learned how quickly public sentiment has changed. If they will tell the truth, it would be so disgusting that it would be the end of the British Museum. And today on the show, what does it mean to be a museum in the 21st century?
Well, I always think that people go to the worst case scenario. Reporting from museums in Glasgow, London, Washington, D.C., and more, beginning right now. This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner. Okay, let's get back to Patricia Allen, curator of world cultures at the Glasgow Museums.
My role isn't so much front of how you're curating exhibitions at the moment. At the time of lockdown, I took up on myself to focus quite heavily on repatriation and restitution. I feel like I've read in your biography that you came to curation via perhaps archeology and maybe even biology. That is absolutely true.
I started as a microbiologist and then I moved into archeology and then ultimately into museum curation. So my amateur, unscientific brain, if it's looking for the most obvious connection between what you did, perhaps as an archeologist and what you do now, as a museum curator of world culture, the linchpin that my brain puts in the middle is looting. Am I wrong there? I have not made that connection before, but looting is big in both professions.
I have been on archeological sites in South America where you go off for the night and then come back and find that people have got in to the site and have dug everything out. Wow. So that is depressing, but also the reason I felt that this was important is that I'm not myself British. And when I got the job as curator, I was surrounded by my own heritage and I wondered how it got there and whether actually the British had a right to be storing it and hoarding it.
So I was like a mole for it. A mole not in the animal sense, in the spice sense. A mole in the animal sense is more like an archeologist, but this is a mole in the sense that I sort of got in there as one of the colonized. And I was really the only one at the time.
I've been doing this for 20 years now and everybody else is very much British or European if you're lucky. Where's your family from? Well, I was born in Brazil, so that's where part of my family is from. My mother is Singapore, Eurasian, and my father, I suppose he was French, but he was raised in colonial Africa.
And so we have from lots of non-British places. It's interesting. You got involved in a field where most of the curators and people on the museum side, it sounds like, were to be brutally reductive on the colonizing side. You're coming from the colonized side.
What was that like for you? People often say I pass. So nobody really knew I just had that sensibility. And I just, from the very beginning, the previous curator was showing some individuals, some Chinese dolls.
They were like dolls I'd had as a child. And so she was telling the others what the dolls were for. And I was standing there as a recent recruit. And I thought, actually, that's wrong.
Everything she said was wrong. And I tried to interrupt. But all I could say was, no, it's wrong. I had dolls like that.
And everybody looked at me and there was silence. That must have made you very popular. But it immediately made me question what on earth was going on because very little of this collection is appreciated. And so it's not given the same status as European art, a very small amount is on display, very small percentage.
And there are big diaspora communities here now and they don't get to see their own culture. But yet, we were keeping it. If you don't like it, just give it back. Is my feeling.
When someone like me and American comes to Scotland where we are now or England where we were just previous and we go to your wonderful and beautiful old museums, I have to say the more I've learned about this topic, the more those museums feel less like curated collections of the world's great treasures. And the more they feel like trophy cases, I guess. Is that too reductive? No, I think you've got part of the story there.
There were trophy cases. Now there are sort of harbingers of doom, particularly as we slide down the economic scale. I think of them as big sort of, almost like warehouses of loot. They are part of the history.
And for a long time, when I already years as a curator here, I could only display this material in terms of the British sensibility. It was another way of interpreting Britain's place in the world. And now we are back in the gallery at the Kelvin Grove Museum where Alan was showing us around earlier. She leads me to the display case we came here to see of the Benin bronzes.
So the Benin palaces were decorated with these bronze plaques and we have a fragment of a plaque. The British Museum in London is thought to possess nearly 200 of the Benin plaques which portray centuries worth of Benin history. The Glasgow Museum's one fragment shows a man standing his head in profile with long straight hair and finely patterned sleeves. It was made by a known artist, the master of the circle cross, would represent a Portuguese soldier or sailor who traded with Benin in western Africa extensively from the 14th century onwards.
And a lot of the copper that was the basis of these pieces came from Europe. It was a huge amount of trade from maybe the 10th century on with West Africa, the Marlion Empire. Highly sophisticated travel, great trade, routes and networks throughout Africa. So when someone says that these African countries wouldn't have been able to care for and preserve their art were it not for the British.
They'd done it for hundreds of years. Absolutely. The license of years, I mean the earliest record of arms melting is within Sahaar in Africa. In the spring of 2022, Glasgow Museum is publicly committed to returning the Benin objects from its collection to the federal government of Nigeria.
Glasgow Museum is currently holding 19 pieces that we have identified as coming from Benin, probably taken during the punitive expedition of 1897 by Britain. But the ownership has effectively been transferred to Nigeria. The Glasgow Museum's have also announced the return of seven antiquities to India and more than two dozen artifacts to the Lakota tribe of Native Americans. What led to the decision to repatriate all these pieces?
Well, I was approached to discuss this and I had already earmarked various pieces that I felt we should not have because I feel that as a museum service we really shouldn't be fencing stolen goods. I'd identify them through research because most of them come with quite extensive notes and one was a confession of theft. It ran for four pages. Wow.
Why would one put down in writing a confession of theft? Because he thought it was more of a confession of entitlement. A confession of entitlement. Consider this yet another reminder that many artifacts in the world's great museums were plundered during an era when plunder was the norm.
I would say that the standards of excavation have been completely reversed. That is Andrea Bayer, Deputy Director for Collections and Administration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. We also heard from her in the first episode of the series describing how only recently the Met paid $4 million for a gold coffin that turned out to have been looted from Egypt about a decade ago. Bayer admitted the Met's failure.
We asked a certain number of questions, but we did not ask nearly enough questions about it. The Met was founded toward the end of the 19th century. Its first director was an Italian-American soldier and amateur archaeologist. There is no one in the museum field today that would follow the path that our first director, Luigi Palmadicius Nola, would have followed in which he was able to excavate the Met's first director.
He was able to excavate and remove thousands of objects from Cyprus, which he then was able to sell. That is a paradigm that no one would follow now. Still, the Met has recently had dozens of looted artifacts seized from its collections and returned to their countries of origin. Just last week, the Met announced a new research unit to help weed out looted or stolen acquisitions.
But even when a museum does uncover an ill-gotten object, repatriation is not a foregone conclusion. The Glasgow Museums, for instance, repatriated their first Lakota object in 1998. Around the same time, they received a request from Nigeria to repatriate a Benin object, Patricia Allen again. They turned that down straight away.
Why was that one turned down? They felt that there were issues with Nigeria, where the objects would go, whether they'd end up. There was a certain amount of judgment. What do you mean by there were certain judgments or issues there with Nigeria?
Well, I found a letter once from our then director saying that, you know, would they be so quick to refuse a similar request if it had been from Native Americans? There was a certain level of sympathy towards, because the Scottish love a bit of the Wild West. But Nigeria not so much? It would seem that way.
And I'd find this letter when I was researching writing a paper. But it was from our then director and posting that question and thinking that maybe they should have something more objective. To be fair, the repatriation of the Benin objects is complicated by the fact that there are several potential claimants, including the Nigerian government and the current Benin Oba. He is a direct descendant of the Oba who was exiled by the British in the 19th century.
Just recently, things got even more complicated. The outgoing Nigerian president declared that any repatriated Benin artifacts must be handed over to the Oba. On the one hand, this makes sense. He is a descendant of the man from whom the objects were stolen in the first place.
But from the perspective of a European museum, this means the repatriated Benin bronzes are less likely to remain accessible to the public. Still, the issue of repatriating art is much broader than this one set of artifacts. To that end, the Glasgow museums have created a set of criteria to help guide the process, something more objective in Patricia Allen's words. There used to be five criteria on this list.
Now, there are four. The current criteria are one, the status of those making the request, which is their right to represent the descendants of the community, to whom the artifacts originally belonged. The second one is the continuity between the community that created the objects and the current community on whose behalf the request is being made. So there has to be a connection, a continuity there.
The third one is the cultural, historical and or religious importance of the objects to the descendant community. And the fourth, which is not necessarily that important anymore, is how the objects were acquired by the museum. But that's really to put the onus on the museum to prove that these objects are genuine. And what is the old fifth criteria?
The fifth was the fate of the object if returned. In that case, you were supposed to have a museum where it returned the objects to another museum. It made it very difficult for indigenous communities in particular to put in a claim because many don't have those facilities and those resources. By taking that criterion away, acknowledging that what you're returning is it'll got in gains if you like, gluten material, that we are effectively either facilitating robbery by sort of laundering this material or actually directly doing it ourselves.
That as thieves, we don't really have the right perhaps to set conditions on the return of stolen property. At this point, you may find yourself wondering if museums are full of objects that were essentially stolen and if museums are starting to return those objects, will they have anything left to show? You know, I never go to the extreme because that's not an answer. So what is the answer?
I'm Stephen Dunder. This is Reconymic's Radio. We'll be right back. In early 2022, Nigeria put in a formal request on behalf of the Oba of Benin to repatriate the stolen Benin objects that are in the collection of Glasgow museums.
The request was made to the Glasgow City Administration Committee, which controls the museums and the city agreed to the return. Does this mean the Benin objects will be leaving Scotland and heading to Nigeria? Not necessarily. Here again is curator Patricia Allen.
We haven't established the full details, but it's possible that we'll hold them for a while. We'll have to transfer their ownership officially on paper so that they become theirs that we have on loan. They're quite keen on that approach because they have had so many offers from across the world. Germany is giving everything back and that's hundreds of objects.
The Smithsonian? The Smithsonian is giving back also the Pitt Rivers, Oxford, Cambridge, the Horniman Museum. Aberdeen gave their soul over his head back last year. So you're saying that there's a glut of Benin bronzes returning to Nigeria now?
Well, I don't think they describe it as a glut. It's just they haven't quite got the infrastructure in place. And so in the case of the Glasgow Museums, it sounds as though the Nigerian government or the parties that represent the government they're dealing with would prefer that you keep them here on loan and on display, perhaps? Yes, I think that is certainly one option because the museum in Edo State doesn't have storage, so they're building something within Lagos where the security is better.
They had to change the indemnity because the cultural sector did not have sufficient indemnity, so it's now government indemnity. Indemnity we mean insurance, yes? This is art. This is high art.
Gradually their storage facilities will be developed and then gradually take everything else back. The Glasgow Museums plan may be complicated by the recent announcement that the Nigerian government will hand over repatriated pieces to the Obah himself, but remember, Nigeria has been asking for the Benin bronzes for decades. I asked Alan why the Glasgow Museums finally acquiesced? As a result of Black Lives Matter, what sparked an interest are revisiting of the whole subject of cultural repatriation and restitution of objects is an awareness that maybe we did sort of bad things.
And it came out of Black Lives Matter, the connection with that and atonement for transatlantic slavery. And so Benin was first in line really. Well, the murder of George Floyd and all the challenges that brought with it really were crucially important and meaningful to me as a historian of Black America, as a historian of violence in America, those moments really transformed me. That is Lonny G.
Bunch III. But also part of my job as a historian was to contextualize this, to say that this is not new unfortunately, this will happen again in the future, and the challenge really is to understand that the struggle for fairness in America is a perpetual struggle. And that you never get to the promise land of equality, you only aspire to get there. And so it was really important for me to see that museums, especially the Smithsonian play a role when a nation was in crisis.
Bunch is the Secretary of the Smithsonian based in Washington, D.C. Sometimes called the nation's attic, the Smithsonian is a collection of 21 museums, 21 libraries, a variety of research and education centers and the National Zoo. Bunch has worked on and off at the Smithsonian since 1978. He became Secretary in 2019.
Before that, he was Founding Director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. We started with no staff, no collections, no site, and no money. And how would you build a museum collection from scratch? We knew we wanted to tell stories around the Civil War.
We knew we wanted to tell important stories about women and work. And we wanted to talk about the impact of culture. And then what we did is we went around the country in an antique road show way and asked people to bring out their stuff. It was really to preserve, to help them preserve Grandma's old show all of that 90th century photograph.
And then if people wanted to give things to us, the first thing we did was say, give it to local museums. We wanted people to benefit in local museums from the Smithsonian's coming to town. But if it was extremely significant, obviously it came back to Washington. In the end, they collected a lot.
40,000 artifacts, of which 70% came out of the basement's trunks and out of people's homes. This was an entirely different approach than how the first director of the Metropolitan Museum looted artifacts from archaeological sites, or how the British Museum stocked itself with plunder from Britain's empire building. The British Museum in some ways is a colonial creation that so much of what it collected initially were things that would help them celebrate British identity. Some from internal, others from India, Africa, other places where the British colonized.
The difference with the African American Museum is first of all, this was going to be a museum that shared authority and was shaped by community. But in essence, we collected people's stories. The goal was that the artifacts were really the way to give people a sense of ownership. They were doing artifacts that sometimes seem common, like an old 19th century iron or a wash pot.
Suddenly people could see that they were shaped by this history and they could tell the stories of their own parents and grandparents. This experience of creating a museum from scratch led Lonnie Bunch to think more broadly about how any museum builds its collection. And this led to a new institution-wide collections policy at the Smithsonian. I asked a group of curators in 2021 to think about an ethical returns policy, to really think about what should we do with material that is problematic.
But I didn't want it simply to be, how do you deal with a problem? What I wanted it to be is to say that as important as scholarship, as provenance, as resources to acquire these collections, equally important is the ethical considerations of how we got them. And so what I wanted to do is to basically add that equation into the mix so that therefore, no matter what we did, ethical considerations could, in some ways, trump scholarship and other issues. I just wanted to make sure that ethical considerations were as important as anything else in determining what you acquire and what you maintain.
Based on this new policy, the Smithsonian might deaccession a piece from its collection and return it to the rightful owner, or it might enter into a shared stewardship arrangement with communities or descendants who have made claims to the objects. For example, there are several native communities who, instead of saying they want material repatriated, they said, you're better at preserving it than we are, let you keep it as long as we know it's there. So I think it really was a process that would allow us to either return, to negotiate and work effectively with community or with the owners, and then if the choices made, these materials can stay with us. Among the museums that Bunch oversees in addition to the New Museum of African American History is the Museum of African Art.
This museum had over the years accumulated many artifacts that had been looted from Benin by the British in their 1897 punitive expedition, brass plaques, ceremonial heads, jewelry and more. They had come to the Smithsonian primarily by donation from wealthy collectors like Joseph Hershorne and from institutions like the Walt Disney Company, which had bought Benin Art from the collectors Paul and Ruth Tischmann. Under the Smithsonian's new collections policy, Lonnie Bunch committed to repatriating these pieces to Nigeria. For some guidance, he turned to an institution that had much larger holdings of Benin Bronzes.
I would say a year ago I had conversations with the British Museum just to understand where they were with this whole process. The British Museum, remember, has thus far decided against repatriating their Benin Bronzes, although that could change at any moment. And then I had conversations with people from the Nigerian Museum community to understand their thinking. In essence, it was a period of negotiations because I wanted to make sure that ultimately we were going to return ownership, no doubt about that.
But I also wanted to see if there were a way at least the percentage of this could remain in the country for the people to see. Here's what the negotiations led to. The Smithsonian sent 20 of their Benin objects back to Nigeria, while nine more will stay at the Smithsonian on a long-term loan. We had a formal ceremony where representatives of the Nigerian government and I signed a transfer document that gave ownership back, and then ultimately a document that would agree to the long-term loans.
We liked the idea of being able to have some material on long-term loan that would allow us to both talk about the beauty and creativity of the Benin Bronzes, but also about the process. So what do we think about this kind of arrangement, where a museum returns a portion of its contested collection and works out a long-term loan for the rest? I'm kind of excited about this. It actually is a place where really efficient outcomes are going on.
That is Tom Wilkening. As you can probably tell by his praise of efficient outcomes, Wilkening is an economist at the University of Melbourne. His specialty is called Market Design. And Market Design is the branch of economics that's interested in designing the rules for market's auctions and economic institutions.
Wilkening, along with the University of Chicago economist Michael Kramer, analyzed the market for antiquities. The antiquities project started with discussions with Suzanne Bleer and Michael Kramer about 15 years ago. Suzanne is a professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and she was really interested in whether economics could offer ways to reduce the size of black market antiquities and help protect African art in general. Most countries already have laws to protect the export of their cultural antiquities.
I would say export bans are partially effective in the sense that they make it more difficult for people to illicitly dig up objects and move them abroad, but they're obviously imperfect. Wilkening and Kramer eventually wrote a paper called Protecting Antiquities, a Role for Long-Term Leases. So the main argument of our paper is that we're asking whether we can complement export bans with fixed-ration long-term leases. Our view is that they can strengthen incentives for maintaining and identifying antiquities and antiquities sites, but because we're going to be restricting to leases, our view is that that's going to allow countries to preserve their cultural patch money for the future or in the long run.
Let's say 10 years from now, Nigeria is able to recover all the venom bronzes that were looted in 1897. They're going to have the same issue that museums have all over the world, which is that they'll have more objects than they can actually put in their museum at one time. Now, there are two ways to deal with that. One you can create giant storage, and you can store everything and keep it at home.
And the issue there is that still costly. You still have to maintain and protect that storage system. An alternative would be to allow at least a subset of those things to be leased abroad as a way of basically generating either revenue or in-kind transfers for protecting museum-source sites. This is essentially the arrangement that the Smithsonian has worked out with Nigeria.
This idea is not new, by the way. I would view the King Tut exhibit as a very good template for how to do traveling exhibits. The Tomb of King Tut, or Tutin Kamehoon, the boy king, was excavated in Egypt by the British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922. It included a stunning gold funerary mask and a variety of other objects.
If you look at Egypt, their King Tut exhibit that has gone all over the US, that's essentially a lease system where they've leased off parts of King Tut objects to a third party. That third party has shown that all around the world, and the revenues have gone back to the Cairo Museum. That sort of thing is a way for governments to turn something that right now is something of a cost into something that would be a resource. And it also solves a little bit of this problem of, you know, there's a value for keeping things at home.
There's also a value for people in the rest of the world being able to see them. So that's one established method of leasing antiquities. Willkiting and Kramer have some other ideas. One is for objects that haven't yet been excavated.
In these cases, the right to lease could be granted in exchange for performing the excavation. The British Museum, for instance, could fund and operate an excavation in Syria. The museum would have the rights to exhibit the objects that are found while the objects would officially still belong to Syria. The researchers have a third idea too.
So the third scenario is probably the most controversial one, which would be offering leases to individuals who reveal objects that are already out of the country. In other words, amnesty, essentially, to individuals or institutions who possess objects that were originally looted. In this case, the country of origin would say, yes, those things belong to us, but if you, the illegitimate owner, acknowledge that we are the legitimate owner, you can hang on to them under the terms of a lease. So is this third half of repatriation the best way forward?
We'll find out in a minute. I'm Stephen Dovner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.
Last year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced an agreement with Greece regarding a large collection of antiquities that had been acquired over the years by the American billionaire Leonard Stern. Here again is Andrea Bayer, Deputy Director of Administration and Collections at The Met. Mr. Stern owned approximately 160 important Cycladic objects.
He got us into a discussion with the Greek government and with the Cycladic Museum in Athens about this somewhat complicated but logical path forward. The Cycladic objects are primarily marble figures and vessels carved thousands of years ago in the Cyclades, a group of islands off the Greek coast. The complicated but logical agreement that Bayer mentioned will put Leonard Stern's personal collection on display at The Met for 25 years, starting in early 2024, but the objects will ultimately belong to Greece. And then at the end of 25 years, there will be a further discussion to see whether some or all of them remain for an additional 25 years and then they will go back to Greece.
At the same time, we're also in an agreement with the Greek museums to do some fundamental research projects with them to publish these objects. Even before the Met exhibition opens, some of these pieces will be put on display in Greece and after 10 years at The Met, some of the collection will travel to Greece in exchange for other Cycladic works to be displayed at The Met. Why such a complicated arrangement? Because we are convinced that given the complexity of the world we find ourselves in, these kinds of situations are going to arise and we want to help find solutions that are satisfying to all partners.
It's worth noting that Leonard Stern did not donate his collection directly to Greece. He donated it to a Delaware-based nonprofit called the Hellenic Ancient Culture Institute, whose board members have close ties to the Greek culture ministry. Here is the legal scholar Patty Gerstenblith, whose specialty is cultural heritage. It has gotten a lot of disapproval amongst Greek heritage professionals.
I find it very problematic because what we have is an agreement between a private museum and a US corporation in which the collector gets his tax benefit. The objects, most of them are many of them stay in the United States and this museum in Greece gets a benefit. Gerstenblith is concerned that Greece doesn't have control over the collection even though they have been given ownership on paper. She thinks the Smithsonian's arrangement with Nigeria over the Benin Bronzes is a better model, but the economist Tom Wilkening is more sympathetic toward the Greek arrangement.
It's not a place where I'm an expert, but most of that collection looks like it has very strong providence. What Wilkening means is that the Leonard Stern collection isn't obviously full of looted or stolen objects. And so it wouldn't have been something that Greece would have gotten back without some sort of agreement. And it's something where all parties essentially have won.
In the short run, those things are shown at the Met. That was the place where Leonard Stern wanted to donate his collection in the first place. In the long run, Greece gets all of its objects back and can control its cultural patrimony. And so that looks like maybe a nice blueprint for a number of these cases of trying to either return objects or get collections back into the hands of the country of origin.
So this approach of pairing repatriation with Elise agreement has helped resolve some of the thorniest disputes around contested artifacts. Maybe it will eventually provide a solution for one of the longest running and most controversial disputes of this type. The British Museum's ownership of the Parthenon Marbles. That's the set of sculptures removed from the Parthenon in Athens by the British diplomat Lord Elgin in the early 1800s.
Greece has long argued that they were taken illegally and should be returned. A few months ago, it was reported that the chair of the British Museum was in secret negotiations with the Greek Prime Minister over some kind of settlement, Andrea Bayer again from the Met. The only thing I can mention about the Parthenon Marbles is that every time I read one thing, I almost immediately read its opposite the following day. So I know that they're in deep and difficult discussions back and forth, but I don't have the crystal ball that tells you how it comes out.
The British Museum is famous for not saying much publicly about their various controversial holdings, including their Benin Bronzes. We discovered this first hand during our months of reporting for the series when we couldn't even get a museum spokesperson to engage with us to say nothing of a more senior official. And then, as I mentioned earlier, we went to London to see the Benin Bronzes for ourselves accompanied by the Oxford professor and author Dan Hicks, but the Africa galleries happened to be closed that day. And even before we got into the museum, security guards asked us to surrender our recording equipment.
Anything like this is an absolute flat-nope. What happens is we get a lot of trouble with protesters with a view to discredit the museum. So this is why we take the timeline. In case you missed that, the guards said the museum takes a hard line because they get in a lot of trouble with protesters.
Not long ago, for instance, there was a large demonstration against one of the museum's big sponsors, BP, the giant oil and gas company that's headquartered in London. The museum is essentially displaying stone and artefacts that are ironically taken from the spaces where individuals speak for our affected by BP's extraction. After our visit to Glasgow, where the curator, Patricia Allen, showed us the Benin Bronzes that the Kelvin Grove Museum plans to return to Nigeria, we went back to London and I tried once more to see the much larger collection of Benin Bronzes at the British Museum. No professional recording equipment, just an iPhone, so you'll have to excuse the audio quality.
Okay, proceeding in front door, I've been through security heading toward the Sainsbury Gallery, which means going through the big Rotunda. Okay, we go toward Africa. I think it's open, there it is. Okay, and the sign says there isn't a tour, and I think I see her coming, perhaps.
Hello, how you doing? I would love to go to Africa with you. Thank you. I'm Stephen, what's your name?
Anne is a volunteer who's been giving tours at the British Museum for years. She's originally from southern Germany. Several German museums, by the way, have been repatriating their Benin Bronzes to Nigeria and leads us downstairs into the Underground Africa Gallery. It's a small tour group, just me and a family from Ireland.
Nearby, some school groups are also touring, so it's pretty noisy. Anne notes that some of the objects we'll see were acquired by bloodshed. Some objects have come into the museum as a direct result of the trip to the French Museum, and many relate to the European colonization of large parts of Africa. She shows us some contemporary works, some ceramic pots, and finally we make our way to the Benin Bronzes.
The main attraction is a grid of the famous wall plaques that have been stripped from the Benin Palace, some of them 500 years old, each plaque representing a key moment in the history of the kingdom. The Nigerian artist, Viktor Ihaminor, told us earlier what it was like for him to first see how these plaques are displayed at the British Museum. They are disjointed because it's like taking William Shakespeare's Macbeth or Hamlet. You go to first act, you tear the page off, then you go to the last act, then you tear it off, then you paste it on the wall, and call it William Shakespeare.
I mean, the sentences are nice, the phrases are great, you can quote from them, but it's not the entire story. There are many other Benin objects here, besides the wall plaques. A large cast head of an Obah or a Benin king, as we learned earlier, each new Obah would commission a sculpture of his predecessor to be mounted on an altar. There is an impressive sword with a cross motif made of iron and brass, a large and beautiful cockrel cast in brass.
The wall labels describe not just the objects themselves, but who gave them to the British Museum. The most frequent donor from what I can tell is the UK Foreign Office, the British Aquilent of the US State Department. In most museums, this might stand out, but here, where many of the treasures are the physical emblem of conquest, of empire building, of punitive expeditions, like the one that happened in Benin in 1897, I guess it makes sense that the foreign office is such a major donor. And our tour guide does mention the punitive expedition that brought the Benin bronzes to the museum, and then a woman in our tour group speaks up.
What was a bit of a massacre, wasn't there? Yes, Anne agrees. It was a bit of a massacre. She says the British Museum acknowledges this and adds that there have been talks lately with the Nigerian government.
I think there's a lot of compassion involved. I think as the museums have handed us back to Germany, there's been a couple of years. That's right, yes. But I can only say for myself, maybe if that is possibly not the right post-trust now, but this is my personal personal.
There's such a lot of controversy about me, of course. It's a little hard to hear Anne, but she says, I can only say for myself that repatriating the bronzes is possibly not the right course just now. When the tour was over, and Anne had gone back upstairs, I asked the woman from our tour group, her name was Nula, what she thought about the British Museum's position on the Benin bronzes. British Museum is holding out.
We're going to talk about that, she may have a point maybe if this museum is ready, I don't know, I had to third that part of it. There is a bit of campaign going on, but it's also like that they have a moment to be pieces, half of which aren't even being exhibited. That's the other thing, like the other thing, like the other thing, the archive, so that's the other part of it that seems a bit off like, you know. It's not like they're displaying them all here anyway.
Were you surprised by her opinion? It's what I'd expect. Well, it's just in the sense that she's just working here. But I thought from a volunteer it might be a little different.
She probably gets the museum perspective on it, she hears it. I don't know, that's why I just, you know, she's German, I wonder what she'd say about Germany having a different take on it. My visit to the British Museum made me want to go back to Lonnie Bunch, the Smithsonian Director, for some perspective. I recognize you're an historian and not a psychotherapist, but when we think about the British Museum and what it represents two Great Britain, I wonder if one of the challenges is that the museum, to some degree, does represent the empire that is essentially gone.
But in addition to that, their current democracy is fragile, and in a way the museum itself represents a fragile, national psyche. Do you think that is perhaps complicating this issue for them? It's crucially important to recognize that cultural institutions like the Smithsonian, like the British Museum, are part of the glue that holds the country together through the way it shapes our identity. One of the things that you see in the UK, really even going back to the commemoration of the Bicentennial of the end of the slave trade, is you begin to see this grappling with what does it mean to be British?
And how does there room for everybody not to just be part of the empire, but to show how that has shaped profoundly who the UK is? And I just think that's a fascinating dilemma and challenge. I'd like you to talk about the role of a museum in the modern era, especially older museums. And when people object to the return of works that are in museums, one argument is that if you pull this thread, the whole thing comes undone.
Well, I always think that people go to the worst case scenario. When we began to do repatriation of Native materials, the notion was everything would be gone. That's not true. But what is true is that museums can no longer simply be what they once were.
They can no longer simply be collections of material that really tells old stories, not new stories. Museums have to recognize that they have an obligation to make their community better, whether that is raising issues of social justice, whether it's raising environmental issues. Now, when I walk in one of the entrances to the Natural History Museum of the Smithsonian, I'm greeted by this lovely Maui Stone figure from Easter Island. Yeah.
I'm just curious about a fellow like him. How was he acquired? Is something like that potentially liable to reclamation? It could be.
I don't know the specifics of that at all. The goal is to basically recognize that if these issues get raised, you've got a process to move forward to handle. Rather than either being at Hock or rather to be under the whim of a particular director or curator. Let me ask about a potentially different objection for a modern museum audience at the main entrance of the Natural History Museum at the Smithsonian.
There's this amazing wild African elephant that we are told by the tag was killed by a big game hunter in Angola in 1955. Would the museum accept that elephant today? You know, I don't know. I think that we would really look at it from different points of view.
That's for sure. And then, you know, depending upon the educational value, depending upon how we received it, they would be questions to be asked. What I love about it is we get to ask those questions. You have a hard job, I mean, just you.
It's not just you, but these are hard questions, aren't they? You know, I think that the job of good scholars, the job of the Smithsonian, is to tackle the hard questions, not to easy ones. And that, yeah, there are days I'd love to have an easy month, but the reality is museums matter. They matter because they have to have a contemporary residence.
This is something you need to grapple with. And I think the question really is, are you institutions that look back or institutions that look ahead? Thanks to Lonnie G. Bunch III and all the museum curators and directors who spoke with us for this series.
Thanks to the scholars and researchers and prosecutors, a huge thanks to producer Morgan Levy, and thanks especially to you for listening. Coming up next time on the show. Really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, that's not happening on this podcast. It's happening.
A one-on-one with Ari Emmanuel, the most prominent talent agent in the world, and that's not even half of what he does. Trying to buy a company is about how you can last through the brutality of it. Emmanuel talks about the companies he's bought and wants to buy, talks about his famous brothers, Ram and Zeke, and he tells us the secret to his success. I am not afraid to call people.
I'm not afraid to ask a lot of questions. I'm not afraid to get a lot of information. That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself.
And if you can, someone else too. Free economics radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app or at freeconomics.com where we also publish transcripts and show notes. This series was produced with great skill and care by Morgan Levy.
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