The opening of the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) in Benin City, Nigeria, originally slated for November 11, has been postponed after a group of some twenty protesters disrupted a preview event on November 9.
The demonstrators, some wielding bats, appeared to be asserting the jurisdiction of the Edo people’s ceremonial king, Oba Ewuare II, over the region’s cultural patrimony.
The museum’s director, Phillip Ihenacho, told Agence France-Presse that the demonstrators “entered and began vandalizing part of the reception pavilion, where we receive visitors, then they stormed inside the front section, where the exhibition area is located.” Security personnel shepherded foreign and local guests to safety; damage to the area was reported to be minor.
In 2023, Ewuare clashed with the state’s then governor regarding the country’s famed Benin Bronzes, a trove of thousands of brass, bronze, and ivory objects looted by British troops in 1897 from the Kingdom of Benin, as Nigeria was then known, and dispersed across the Continent and the West.
Roughly 150 of these have been repatriated in recent years, and several were to have gone on view at MOWAA, an independent institution initiated by the previous administration for that purpose, and co-funded by France, Germany, and private donors.
Ewuare argued that the antiquities should be displayed at the Benin palace, from which they were taken, and in 2023 the Nigerian federal government stipulated that the oba could decide where the objects would be housed. MOWAA then shifted focus, and it was to open without any of the bronzes on display.
MOWAA in a statement reaffirmed its status as an independent nonprofit institution with no ties to the state’s former governor, and warned visitors away until further notice.
“The reported disruption at MOWAA not only endangers a treasured cultural asset but also threatens the peaceful environment necessary for cultural exchange and the preservation of our artistic patrimony,” said Nigerian culture minister Hannatu Musawa in an Instagram statement.
Credit: Art Forum
