Review of Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. 345 pp. Pluto Press, 2020.

Abstract

Dan Hicks’s new book, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution, has made a splash. Designated by the New York Times as one of the best art books of 2020, featured on blogs, podcasts, webinars, and in mainstream newspapers, the book and its author, the professor of contemporary archaeology at the University of Oxford and curator at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, are suddenly everywhere. This Zoom-enabled ubiquity can be understood in the context of the larger historical reckonings of 2020 and 2021 – a global pandemic fueled by global capitalism, climate change, and incompetent governance; a breaking point in the long saga of police brutality against racial minorities andwhite indifference to it; a toppling of statues to colonialist and Confederate leaders around the world; and, as I was finishing the book, a final attempt to impeach a hate-mongering US president for fomenting rebellion against the very democratic institutions he swore to serve. In its passionately argued call for the restitution of cultural artifacts looted in one of themost notoriously brutal episodes of colonial violence, The Brutish Museums encapsulates the zeitgeist.1 The objects commonly referred to as the Benin Bronzes (although the metal pieces are actually made of brass, and the corpus includes works in many other materials) once adorned thepillars and shrines of thepalace in the capital of thepowerful EdoEmpire,which controlled a large regionof theNigerRiver andDelta andWestAfrican coast from the fifteenth tonineteenth centuries. The story of how the objects leftWest Africa is the story of this empire’s end, but that is not quite how the European and American museums that now own them tell it. Beside a vitrine at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Hicks’s ownmuseum, a panel states: “In January 1897 a small party of British officials and traders on its way to Benin was ambushed. In retaliation a British military force attacked the city and the Oba was exiled. Members of the expedition brought thousands of objects back to Britain, includingmany of those shownhere.” The emphasis in this account is not on the colonial reordering of African geopolitics but, rather, on the final event that ostensibly triggered it: the killing of a “small party of British officials,” which was led by Acting Consul James Phillips and which is often referred to by the British as the “Phillips massacre.” The Field Museum in Chicago tells the same story but with more background: