In January 2023, a delegation led by the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments and the Place of the Oba of Benin flew into Zurich. Having spent the previous year negotiating the return of Benin objects from museums in Germany and the us, their attention now turned to around one hundred objects held in eight public museums in Switzerland.
For over a year, the museums had been working together, under the banner of the Swiss Benin Initiative (bis), to identify the pieces from Benin City in their collections. What was their provenance? When and how had they been acquired? Most importantly, were they taken during the looting of Benin City in 1897?
These are questions that many museums in Europe have been asking themselves in a context of heightened scrutiny regarding the so-called “Benin Bronzes.” Since 2021, provenance reports have been published on the Benin collections in museums all over Europe. These include the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford (Hicks 2021), the National ...