Since the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in 1960, following the process of independence from the United Kingdom, various official bodies and Nigerian civil society organizations have been calling for the restitution of the Benin Bronzes from the Western institutions that count them among their possessions. With the decolonization processes’ development on the African continent, and later also of the different claims organized around the restitution of heritage obtained by force or illegally, progress was made in the articulation of the Nigerian state with civil society groups such as the Art Loss Register or the UNESCO restitution committee. In this regard, one of the most significant actions was the formation of the Benin Dialogue Group (BDG) in 2007. This multilateral, collaborative working group is composed of delegates from Western museums holding Beninese artifacts, representatives of the Nigerian government, the Royal Court of Benin, and the National Commission for Museums and Monuments. While the BDG has achieved some returns from the University of Aberdeen (Scotland), Jesus College, Cambridge (UK) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (USA), progress has been modest according to the number of pieces and total holding institutions. These are estimated at 4880 objects held by 129 institutions outside Nigeria, according to the database of the Digital Benin project, launched by the BDG in 2020.

To complement through new and original ways the results obtained through diplomatic channels, international forums and even joint initiatives such as the BDG, a guild of Nigerian artists and artisans (the Ahiamwen Guild of Benin) developed a restitution proposal that consists of exchanging the looted objects for contemporary and new pieces made by themselves with the same techniques and ancestral materials as the “original” Benin Bronzes. Specifically, one of the pieces offered is the plaque “The Return of Eware I” to the British Museum in London. This institution has the largest number of these pieces in the world, reaching the number of 944. The vast majority of them were given to the Museum by the Admiralty of the United Kingdom immediately upon their return from the “punitive expedition” of 1897.

Members of the Ahiamwen Guild such as its founder and author of the plaque, artist Osarobo Zeickner-Okoro, maintain that the pieces on offer are fully linked to those looted by the simple fact that the communities of the Edo ethnic group originating from the ancestral Kingdom of Benin never stopped making them, before, during and after the plundering they suffered. The permanence of the techniques, traditions and materials used implies, for these artists and the community they represent, that the criminal acts associated with the colonial past continue to extend their consequences in the present by portraying their civilization as dead and closed in the past. In making the contemporary bronzes, the communities highlight the re-actualization of the trauma they suffered and its contemporary relevance. This fact is also underlined by the organization of the artists who make the objects in guilds such as the Ahiamwen: this was the organizational form that the artisans had in the ancient Kingdom of Benin, with the explicit indication by the Oba (equivalent to a king) to preserve the history and the events that occurred in the kingdom and in the court, functioning as an instance of cultural memory. The very name of the contemporary guild, Ahiamwen, means “bird” in the Edo language and refers to the “bird’s eye view” needed to approach Beninese history as a whole.

In this way, the Ahiamwen Guild attempts to change the terms of the debate by pointing out that not only human lives, land and resources were part of the plunder of the “punitive expedition”, but also the heritage, history and culture of a people who, in order to recognize themselves and continue their traditions, are forced to resort to reproductions of foreign institutions. On the other hand, the artists recognize that the exchange proposal is conceptually and symbolically significant but with little concrete likelihood that its terms will be accepted. However, the purpose is for the British Museum to at least acknowledge the modern culture of the Kingdom of Benin, its vitality and its link to the past by incorporating the new bronzes among its holdings.

In 2018, the British Museum officially communicated that the question of accepting the offer and carrying out the exchange is a discussion that will only take place between the institution and the Guild, although it considers it a generous and interesting proposal. The museum also stated that its director, Hartwig Fischer, had an audience with the Oba of Benin in 2018 that “included discussion of new opportunities for sharing and displaying objects from the Kingdom of Benin.”

Three years later Zeickner-Okoro declared, after meeting with two curators from the Museum’s Africa Department, that the institution had accepted his donation and expressed interest in acquiring several works by other Guild artists. However, following these statements, a spokesperson for the Museum acknowledged the meeting with the Director of the Ahiamwen Guild and said that “at this time there has been no formal discussion of acquiring these objects for the collection,” further ruling out the possibility of an exchange.