Media News

Hardly a day passes by without some call for the return of the stolen cultural objects of Benin. In the whole of Africa people are incensed when they hear about the unjustified invasion of Benin by the British in 1897 and above all, the looting and burning of Benin City. Most Africans cannot believe that the europeans who preached Christian morality could at the same time have been involved in stealing cultural objects of Africans, who according to european propaganda had an inferior culture. Many an African is even more infuriated to realise that the so-called primitive objects are on show in respectable museums in the United States, Britain, Germany and France that refuse to contemplate the return of these objects. One starts wondering about the relations between the museums and the plunderers.

There are growing signs that people in the ruling classes are beginning to feel the pressures of the demands of the masses and will, sooner or later, have to give serious consideration to these frequent demands. Above all, they will have to convince their own people that they are not collaborating with the europeans and Americans in depriving the people of their urgently needed cultural and spiritual objects. The article below, published in the Nigerian Tribune, reports on the demand by the Governor of Edo State, from Benin City where the memories of the British atrocities against that city and the Benin Kingdom are alive. It is significant that the call was made at the launching of a book on Oba Ovonramwen, the valiant king whose resistance to British imperialism led to his exile, the looting of his capital and the destruction of the Benin kingdom that had been in existence since the 13th century.

If you saw the King they captured
He is like the python of the water.
But if you saw the white man who captured
Ovonramwen
He is skinny like a twig.

The day finally came;
The inevitable happened.
Aigubasmwin-nogie,
The eldest son of Ovonramwen,
Prepared to go to Calabar.

When he arrived,
He called on the white people.
He said, “I come to plead with you
That you give me my father’s corpse
That I can take it to Benin to inter”.

The white people refused.
They said, ”We can’t allow this.
We can’t allow this.
Today makes three days
Since the lump of chalk was buried.”
Ovonramwen the mirror, the
fair-complexioned one!
(Extracts from “Praise Songs to Oba Ovonramwen”, African Arts, summer 1997, pp42-43)