in the basement.
What I see of the place gives me no great reason for thinking that a single thing has been improved in the past twenty years. I step out of the first set of galleries into a small courtyard. Along the walls, there are white cardboard plaques about various Nigerian kingship ceremonies, as well as one about a German-led archaeological expedition in Ijebuland in the 1980s. The print quality is poor, faded from exposure to the sun, and the plaques are badly mildewed. The mildew has eaten into the text and photographs in several places. The cardboard is curled up around the edges. Again, there is the inescapable feeling that one is looking at a neglected high school project. The courtyard itself is sometimes rented out for birthday parties or funerals:a friend had mentioned to me that the party for her grandmother’s funeral had been held here. So Nigerians do come to the museum, if only for a weekend party.
I enter the small gallery devoted to the royal art of Benin, and catch sight of a pair of tourists leaving the museum. Their language and bearing make me identify them as foreigners; Brazilians, I think. How sad to travel all the way from Rio or Bahia in pursuit of one’s heritage, only to meet with this. The two Brazilians are the only other visitors I see at the museum during the two hours I am there. In the Benin gallery, an employee strides purposefully toward me and asks, with a look of great concern, if I have a ticket. I show him the stub in my hand. He says: I just wanted to be sure. About five minutes later another man, equally agitated, sidles up to me and asks if I have obtained the proper ticket for the gallery. I show him my stub. I see, he says, I just wanted to make sure. I can’t quite figure out if either man is asking for a bribe. I’m happy to be in the dark over that question.
And that is it; no more galleries. The archaeological collection is pitiful—a few masks, a few beaded baskets, a clutch of figurines. Hardly anything to set the heart racing. Certainly nothing like the magnificent Plexiglas case full of exquisite Ife bronze heads that I had hoped to find. Later on, I read the curious tale of the loss of one particular Benin bronze. In 1973, the then head of state, General Gowon, had telephoned Udoh Udoh to inform him that he was coming over to the museum to select a piece as a gift for thequeen of England. Dr. Udoh, the moment he put the phone down, scrambled to put some of the best pieces away into storage and out of harm’s way. But how does one hide a whole museum? Gowon arrived in due course, picked a fine Benin queen mother head from the seventeenth century, much to Dr. Udoh’s horror, and gave it to Elizabeth II. The queen of England, reasonably enough, assumed it was a replica. She put it on a shelf in the Royal Library. The true status of the piece was not discovered until 2002, when it was brought out for the Jubilee Exhibition. The fact that it was found to be a genuine antique—John Wallace helped detect this—substantially weakened the Nigerian government’s ongoing case for the return of the numerous Benin plaques currently in the British Museum. The strangest thing about that particular Benin queen mother head was that it had originally been plundered by the British in 1897 during the “punitive expedition,” and only returned in the 1950s to help set up the Nigerian National Museum. It had already crossed the ocean twice before the general, in gratitude for Britain’s support of the Federal cause during the Biafran war, gave it away again. And the British, this time around, had no intention of returning the work.
So disoriented am I by the meagerness of the work on offer that I head to the museum’s reception desk and, like Oliver Twist, ask if there is any more. Perhaps there’s an upper floor I have missed or something like that. The woman looks deeply irritated by the question; I suspect she would be irritated by any question. She points me to
What I see of the place gives me no great reason for thinking that a single thing has been improved in the past twenty years. I step out of the first set of galleries into a small courtyard. Along the walls, there are white cardboard plaques about various Nigerian kingship ceremonies, as well as one about a German-led archaeological expedition in Ijebuland in the 1980s. The print quality is poor, faded from exposure to the sun, and the plaques are badly mildewed. The mildew has eaten into the text and photographs in several places. The cardboard is curled up around the edges. Again, there is the inescapable feeling that one is looking at a neglected high school project. The courtyard itself is sometimes rented out for birthday parties or funerals:a friend had mentioned to me that the party for her grandmother’s funeral had been held here. So Nigerians do come to the museum, if only for a weekend party.
I enter the small gallery devoted to the royal art of Benin, and catch sight of a pair of tourists leaving the museum. Their language and bearing make me identify them as foreigners; Brazilians, I think. How sad to travel all the way from Rio or Bahia in pursuit of one’s heritage, only to meet with this. The two Brazilians are the only other visitors I see at the museum during the two hours I am there. In the Benin gallery, an employee strides purposefully toward me and asks, with a look of great concern, if I have a ticket. I show him the stub in my hand. He says: I just wanted to be sure. About five minutes later another man, equally agitated, sidles up to me and asks if I have obtained the proper ticket for the gallery. I show him my stub. I see, he says, I just wanted to make sure. I can’t quite figure out if either man is asking for a bribe. I’m happy to be in the dark over that question.
And that is it; no more galleries. The archaeological collection is pitiful—a few masks, a few beaded baskets, a clutch of figurines. Hardly anything to set the heart racing. Certainly nothing like the magnificent Plexiglas case full of exquisite Ife bronze heads that I had hoped to find. Later on, I read the curious tale of the loss of one particular Benin bronze. In 1973, the then head of state, General Gowon, had telephoned Udoh Udoh to inform him that he was coming over to the museum to select a piece as a gift for thequeen of England. Dr. Udoh, the moment he put the phone down, scrambled to put some of the best pieces away into storage and out of harm’s way. But how does one hide a whole museum? Gowon arrived in due course, picked a fine Benin queen mother head from the seventeenth century, much to Dr. Udoh’s horror, and gave it to Elizabeth II. The queen of England, reasonably enough, assumed it was a replica. She put it on a shelf in the Royal Library. The true status of the piece was not discovered until 2002, when it was brought out for the Jubilee Exhibition. The fact that it was found to be a genuine antique—John Wallace helped detect this—substantially weakened the Nigerian government’s ongoing case for the return of the numerous Benin plaques currently in the British Museum. The strangest thing about that particular Benin queen mother head was that it had originally been plundered by the British in 1897 during the “punitive expedition,” and only returned in the 1950s to help set up the Nigerian National Museum. It had already crossed the ocean twice before the general, in gratitude for Britain’s support of the Federal cause during the Biafran war, gave it away again. And the British, this time around, had no intention of returning the work.
So disoriented am I by the meagerness of the work on offer that I head to the museum’s reception desk and, like Oliver Twist, ask if there is any more. Perhaps there’s an upper floor I have missed or something like that. The woman looks deeply irritated by the question; I suspect she would be irritated by any question. She points me to
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