Benin bronzes should be entrusted to descendants of the enslaved
Thank you for your editorial on the Benin bronzes (“At the Museum of Fine Arts, a chance for justice,” April 27). However, calling for the repatriation of the plundered artworks to Nigeria erases the descendants of the enslaved Africans whose lives paid for these artifacts. The bronzes were crafted from manilla currency used to purchase our ancestors, including my Edo ancestors. Fifty manillas bought a woman; 57 bought a male.
The Benin Kingdom stole our ancestors and sold them to European slave traders for more than 300 years, producing as many as 8,000 of these brass treasures — laundered slave trade profits. Today they are worth an estimated $30 billion. One bronze head alone sold for more than $12 million.
We applaud collector Robert Owen Lehman’s decision to rescind his donation of pieces he’d pledged to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. No morally conscious person would enrich the heirs of slave traders with profits of human suffering. The Benin bronzes celebrate practices that persist today: Edo state remains a hub of human trafficking in Africa.
Nigeria already holds hundreds of bronzes, according to the Digital Benin project, and many originals were gifted by Nigerian leaders, including to Queen Elizabeth II. Institutions like the MFA have ignored Afrodescendant ownership claims, and most continue to erase the slave trade origin from museum exhibits.
We need the bronzes for cultural education, metallurgy study, and DNA research linking us to trafficked ancestors. Returning them unconditionally to Nigeria would rob the world of opportunities for healing and justice. They must be entrusted to the descendants of the enslaved, not gifted to the heirs of the slave traders.
Rather than retraumatizing Afrodescendants through this harmful double standard, the MFA could help usher in repair from three centuries of transatlantic slavery and a century of colonialism by facilitating joint stewardship. They belong to all of us.
Deadria Farmer-Paellmann
Founder and executive director
Restitution Study Group
New York
Read the whole letter published by the Boston Globe on May 3, 2025 with more letters and links:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/05/03/opinion/letters-to-the-editor-mfa-benin-bronzes-gallery-closed/
Restitution Study Group 