Switzerland Returns 18 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria

This week, Switzerland returned 23 artifacts including carved tusks, commemorative heads, and ornate staffs to Nigeria. Eighteen of these antiquities were Benin Bronzes formerly held by three Swiss museums: the Geneva Ethnography Museum, the Museum Rietberg in Zurich, and the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich. The remaining five items surfaced amid separate criminal proceedings: one bracelet and four monoliths from Nigeria’s Niger Delta region. Officials turned all 23 over during a ceremony yesterday.

The Benin Bronzes and the Parthenon Marbles remain the most fiercely disputed objects held throughout international museums today. The U.K. is at the heart of both cases. The empire stole most of the Benin Bronzes during its brutal invasion of Benin City, known as the Punitive Expedition of 1897. Royal craftspeople created these ivory and metallic pieces for the kingdom’s Obas, to serve spiritual and political purposes. Following their theft, the Benin Bronzes were scattered across hundreds of global museums via previously unrestricted channels.

Repatriation talks started in 2010, 50 years after Nigeria achieved independence, per Berlin’s Humboldt Forum. Hundreds of Benin Bronzes have been returned since. The single largest trove remains the 119 Benin Bronzes that the Netherlands restituted last June. The British Museum in London remains the sole hold-out, declining to return its Benin trove—the largest collection in the world—despite calls from Nigeria.

This new Swiss restitution follows years of joint provenance research carried out under the Benin Initiative Switzerland, according to press materials, “which showed that the objects were most likely looted from the Kingdom of Benin during the British attack in 1897.” Eight Swiss museums joined the initiative, spearheaded by Museum Rietberg in 2021, investigating the provenance of Benin artifacts held in various Swiss collections.

Based on those efforts, the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich repatriated 14 items. The Museum Rietberg and the Geneva Ethnography Museum, meanwhile, returned two Benin Bronzes each.

“By contrast, the bracelet and four monoliths had been illegally imported into Switzerland, were confiscated by the authorities, and subsequently restituted,” a spokesperson for the Museum Rietberg told me over email, highlighting that none of the trafficked objects passed through the three museums in question.

Quadrangular altar bell featuring a leopard head in high relief. Photo: by Johnathan Watts, courtesy of Musée d’ethnographie de Genève.

At yesterday’s ceremony, Swiss Federal Councillor Elisabeth Baume-Schneider joined Nigeria’s Minister of Art, Culture, and the Creative Economy Hannatu Musa Musawa in signing an agreement regarding “the import, export, and repatriation of cultural property,” per press materials. This included a legal framework for preventing cultural trafficking and best practices for repatriation.

Some of the newly restituted objects are set go on view at the National Museum in Lagos. Others will enter the Oba Ovonramwen Storage Facility at the National Museum in Benin City, as Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments works to establish a gallery devoted solely to the recently repatriated Benin artifacts pouring in from Switzerland, the U.K., and more.

Nine of the treasures, however, remain on loan at the Museum Rietberg, with another at the Geneva Ethnography Museum, offering Swiss citizens a chance to enjoy them on fresh terms.