Cambridge University Secretly Hands Over 116 Benin Bronzes to Descendant of Brutal Slave-Trading King

Pontius Pilate would have felt at home in today’s Cambridge University. The Roman provincial ruler’s hurry to wash his hands of an embarrassing problem (the ‘King of the Jews’) is echoed in the university’s eagerness to get rid of an unwanted colonial-era heritage: 116 Benin cast bronzes and carved ivories in its Museum Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA).

The difference is that while Pilate’s renunciation was public, Cambridge University hasn’t had the guts to follow his example. Instead it has just sneaked out word of its handover of artefacts of world significance, with a market value in multi-millions, through a leak to the Observer newspaper.

The university’s MAA holds hundreds of artworks from Benin (the state in modern Nigeria, not the neighbouring republic). Four years ago curators set about trying to link the best of them to the British expedition which in 1897 deposed Benin’s Oba (tribal king) and ended his bloodthirsty reign: thousands of his regime’s cult objects were carted off as souvenirs, many of them crusted with the blood of human sacrifices. Thanks to their creators’ craftsmanship, most of these ended up – scrubbed clean of course – in museums around the world. What the expedition had largely seen as curios soon became valuable.

Dozens of Cambridge’s pieces appeared to MAA curators to have firm links to 1897, but as I discovered via an FOI request and reported here, many more of the selected 116 did not. The museum’s most obvious finessing of its records concerned an executioner’s sword, displayed as such for a century, but which for the purposes of restitution to Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM) suddenly became, less gruesomely, merely ‘ceremonial’.

The New York-based Restitution Study Group (RSG) speaks for ten of millions who descend from West Africans whom Benin’s Obas enslaved and sold to transatlantic slave traders – those, that is, who hadn’t been crucified or beheaded as human sacrifices. Many of the famous ‘bronzes’ were cast from bracelet-shaped brass ingots (manillas) which were the currency of this slave trade.

To the RSG, therefore, these regime relics are literally ‘blood metal’ and its campaign insists they be preserved in the world’s museums, evidence for future generations of their ancestors’ suffering and of West African rulers’ revolting trade in human beings. The group makes no claim to Benin’s carved ivory. Not to present an Oba with the better of every pair of tusks meant the death penalty; by 1897 West Africa’s elephants had been hunted almost to extinction, while the then Oba had secreted an enormous hoard of their tusks.

In 2023 Cambridge University announced it was about to deaccession 116 Benin bronzes and ivories and give them to Nigeria’s NCMM. The RSG sent a bare ‘notification of claim’, looking to halt the handover – and with astonishingly bad timing, Nigeria’s President decreed that all returned Benin artefacts would belong not to the NCMM (on behalf of the public) but to Benin’s current Oba personally – a decree which his successor has upheld. Curiously, the decree doesn’t apply to Nigeria’s many hundreds of fine bronzes in national collections assembled by British curators and handed over at independence in 1960. Many of those can’t be accounted for today, and nor can pieces presented to the NCMM in recent years by museums in Germany, Netherlands and the UK – they’ve been vanishing.

The MAA’s handover in May 2023 was postponed with only days to go. Cambridge University wrote to say it was treating RSG’s bare notification as its full and final claim, denying the RSG any opportunity to put its case, to undertake informal discussions or to submit its formal claim, all of which are called for in Arts Council England’s guidance in its ‘Restitution and Repatriation: a Practical Guide for Museums in England‘ – and despite the MAA being accredited by ACE.

Other museums have not reacted thus, and are in discussions: Cambridge University’s peremptory denial of due process puts it in a tiny minority. The RSG at once appealed against being prevented from putting its case, and this appeal was finally considered by a five-person “Cambridge Benin artefacts appeal panel”, meeting in private and chaired by Lord Chris Smith, the Master of Pembroke College, on February 19th 2025. The panel’s decision was disclosed to nobody, least of all to the RSG, despite many reminders and its urgent interest in the outcome.

Finally this January 13th, Mishcon de Reya LLP of Africa House, Kingsway replied on behalf of Cambridge University, advising RSG that it had been ruled to be a third party with no rights in the matter, and that its appeal had been rejected nearly a year ago: “Having checked with the University, we cannot trace a record of the appeal outcome having been communicated to the RSG. … The University has asked me to pass on their [sic] apologies for this administrative oversight [sic].”

For sheer arrogance, for disrespect of all procedural proprieties, CU’s furtive behaviour throughout this affair has been remarkable. Surely a great university has lost its way if it can’t engage in debate, learn from history and conserve its artefacts – and if it can’t recognise natural justice and values process above outcome.

Just when Cambridge University thought it had seen off the RSG, yesterday (February 8th) the university and its museum were hit with a closely-argued claim to the bronzes from another group, the Edo Afrodescendant Coalition, with members from the UK, Caribbean, the EU, Brazil and USA. How and when the university will respond remains to be seen.

But Cambridge University’s “administrative oversight” has had a useful result – for the university, at least. Uncontested and undisclosed, at some point in the last two weeks a committee signed over Cambridge University’s 116 Benin pieces to Nigeria’s NCMM, meaning they will at once become the property of the private citizen who claims direct descent from Benin’s slave-trading, human-sacrificing Obas.

In the next few weeks there’s expected to be a handover ceremony, and on the University’s current form, maybe that will be in secret too and announced only after the event.

History can be messy, and one might say the Benin debate boils down to ‘Stolen Goods vs Stolen Souls’, with perhaps no clear winner in today’s climate. The hand-washers of Cambridge plumped for the goods, and refused to hear from the souls; to Cambridge University these are just things, its property to dispose of as it sees fit. Extraordinary art from Africa, though with an unusually violent backstory, celebrated for a century and a quarter, and then – poof! – vanished again.

Other museums around the world, New York’s Met being a good example, have shown themselves ready to recognise competing claims, to display their Benin collections with accurate captions, and to conserve them for later generations to admire and to learn from. Descendants of Benin’s enslaved souls, yet to be born, and others of Nigerian descent denied access to their heritage, may in future give thanks for their foresight.