He has five wives, a $500,000 Rolls Royce – and is trying to get better $30 billion in artwork stolen from his ancestors 135 years ago, including some of the Met Museum’s most prized works.
Oba Ewuare II of the Kingdom of Benin, the Hereditary King of Nigeria, had already received three works often called Benin Bronzes from the Met and others from the Smithsonian as part of his repatriation to “right mistaken.”
But now Oba is facing an unexpected battle from African-American activists in Recent York, who say the bronzes were proceeds from the sale of the royal family’s ancestors into slavery.
The group is heading to sue the Smithsonian to stop Oba’s plans to get much more Benin Bronzes and are in talks with the Met to stop him from shipping a set of 154 artifacts to Nigeria.
Lawyer Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, executive director of the Restitution Study Group, a non-profit organization that’s trying to stop the repatriation of the Bronzes from Benin, told The Post: “These are relics of the slave trade being returned to the heirs of the slave trade. They reward slavery twice.”
The Benin bronzes were openly stolen from Oba’s predecessor, Ovonramwen, in 1897 by British colonial troops in a “punitive raid” in retaliation for the ambush and murder of unarmed British naval officers and their African porters within the Kingdom of Benin.
There are actually 10,000 of them in museums and universities within the UK, Europe and the US. There was just one Benin bronze head sold in 2021 for nearly $13 million in England, meaning your complete collection might be value $30 billion.
The choice to send them to Africa was fueled by demands for “repatriation” and “ethical returns” that flooded the museum world, with the Benin Bronzes being one of probably the most famous examples of the controversy that also called on the British Museum to return the Elgin Marbles, carved in Athens, to Greece Parthenon.
In 2021, the Metropolitan Museum of Art agreed to send three works of art to the Nigerian National Collections: two Sixteenth-century brass plaques made at a court in Benin, and a 14th-century brass head.
In the identical 12 months, the Met and the federal government of the Nigerian National Museums and Monuments Commission also signed a Memorandum of Understanding “formalizing a shared commitment to the longer term exchange of knowledge and art”.
Last October, the Smithsonian also shipped 29 artifacts from its collection to Nigeria. “Today we right mistaken,” said Lonnie Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, on the October “repatriation ceremony.”
But while the Nigerian government was the official recipient of looted works in 2021 and 2022, last month a government journal decided that Oba Ewuare II is “the rightful owner and custodian of the culture, heritage and traditions of the people of the Kingdom of Benin”.
Which means the monarch is now on his way to a $30 billion fortune – however the move has made the thought of sending the bronzes to Nigeria rather more controversial.
The Farmer-Paellmann group sued the Smithsonian Institution in an attempt to stop their repatriation plans last 12 months, and although they lost the case, they plan to return to court, she said.
The group claims to speak for the 32 million “DNA descendants” of people sold into slavery in Nigeria and transported to the US.
Restitution lawyers say Farmer-Paellmann and her group raise several necessary issues.
“I feel American DNA descendants have a superb moral and legal case to share the bronzes, and Nigerian and American museums are ignoring them,” said William Pearlstein, a Recent York lawyer who’s an authority in art and restitution law.
Farmer-Paellmann argues that the Kingdom of Benin—which is distinct from the trendy African country of Benin—helped organize the Atlantic slave trade.
Between the Sixteenth and Nineteenth centuries, its rulers and nobles accepted brass or copper “manillas” or bars from European slave traders in exchange for human beings. The group says many manillas were melted down to create an intricate series of metal plaques and carvings that adorned the royal palace in Benin City until the British seized them.
This makes Oba the mistaken person to get the roles, Farmer-Paellmann told The Post.
Ewuare II, 69, who earned a master’s degree in public administration from Rutgers University in Recent Jersey and worked for the United Nations, has ruled the traditional kingdom since 2016.
He once gave official voodoo curse against human traffickers who tried to enslave anyone in his kingdom.
last 12 months presided over on the return of two bronze heads and a brass rooster repatriated from the colleges of Cambridge and Aberdeen in a ceremony on the royal palace.
According to a decree published within the Nigerian government journal last month, the repatriated artifacts “could also be stored within the Oba Palace or elsewhere in Benin City or every other place that Oba and the federal government of Nigeria deem protected and secure.”
Farmer-Paellmann said it was unclear where Oba in Benin would house the works that were returned because the museum expected to display them had not yet began, she said.
But an Oba spokeswoman told The Post Friday that the treasures “will definitely be made available to the general public.”
The three-story museum, designed by architect David Adjaye and expected to cost over $4 million, was scheduled to be accomplished by 2025. 2020 Recent York Times report
“The King has made it clear that plans are underway to construct the Royal Museum in Benin, which can be funded by the Federal Government of Nigeria, which is able to house these treasures to educate the Nigerian public concerning the values and enduring traditions of the Edo people,” he said. Peju Layiwola, an artist and professor of art history, referring to an ethnic group living within the southern part of Nigeria where the town of Benin is positioned.
Layiwola told The Post that Oba was “magnanimous”, “emphasizing the importance of what these cultural materials represent within the cultural history of the Edo, Nigerians and African diaspora.”
Farmer-Paellmann said she spoke to the Kingdom of Benin who “showed enough respect to talk to us.”
“The Benin Bronze belongs to all of us,” she told The Post. “They were literally made with the currency that enslaved us, and we wish them to stay within the institutions where we’ve access to them.”