The Repatriation Movement 2.0: Which European Museums Are Next After Nigeria and Benin

On 9 November 2025, around twenty men armed with wooden bats stormed a preview event at the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) in Benin City, forcing ambassadors and donors to shelter inside the building they had gathered to celebrate, as reported by All Africa in 2025.

MOWAA exists specifically to house the Benin Bronzes that European institutions have spent four years sending home, yet it could not open on schedule. Within days, Edo State’s governor revoked the museum’s right of occupancy over the land on which it sits, citing “overriding public interest.”

The scene exposed something the repatriation movement rarely admits in public: getting looted African art out of European storerooms has turned out to be the more straightforward half of the task. Nigeria’s own capacity to receive, govern, and display what comes back is now the harder question, and it will shape which European museums move next.

A Kingdom Looted, A Debt Deferred

An Al Jazeera report of 2022 confirms that British troops carried the objects out of Benin City in February 1897, during a punitive expedition that burned the royal palace and forced Oba Ovonramwen Nogbaisi into exile. Nigerian authorities put the number of items looted at more than 5,000.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has separately cited an estimate of approximately 4,000 objects taken from the royal treasury. British officers sold much of the haul at auction to offset the cost of the expedition, and the bronzes, ivories, and brass plaques were scattered into museums, universities, and private collections across Britain, Germany, Austria, and eventually the United States.

Nigeria first requested the objects’ return in the 1930s. For most of the twentieth century, European museums answered with silence or with the argument that the works were safer and more visible in London or Berlin than in Lagos. That position held until 2021, when several governments moved in close succession: France passed a restitution law for a separate collection taken from the Kingdom of Dahomey, and Germany’s culture ministry signalled it would return its entire Benin holding within the year. What changed was not the historical record, which had never been seriously disputed, but the political cost of continuing to ignore it.

Germany Sets the Benchmark

The Art Newspaper reported in July 2022 that Germany signed a declaration transferring ownership of 1,130 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria on 1 July 2022, the largest restitution commitment made by any government to date.

The first handover followed that December, when foreign minister Annalena Baerbock presented 20 objects to Nigerian officials in Abuja. “It was wrong to steal these bronzes,” she told the ceremony, “it was wrong to keep them.”

Berlin’s Ethnologisches Museum, the largest single German holder, transferred ownership of 512 works that August, and smaller collections in Stuttgart, Cologne, Leipzig, and Hamburg followed under the same national agreement.

Germany allowed some pieces to remain in the country on long-term loan for continued display, but ownership, the part that had eluded Nigeria for a century, moved unconditionally. That distinction between loan and ownership became the standard by which every subsequent European return would be measured.

The Netherlands Delivers the Largest Single Return

The Netherlands returned 119 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria in 2025, which Dutch and Nigerian officials described as the largest single restitution directly linked to the 1897 expedition.

Dutch culture minister Eppo Bruins signed the transfer agreement in February 2025 at the Wereldmuseum in Leiden, and the objects were formally handed over at the National Museum in Lagos on 21 June.

Four pieces stayed in the museum’s courtyard collection; the rest went to Oba Ewuare II, the traditional ruler of the Benin Kingdom, who described the return as “a divine intervention.”

The Dutch return also mattered for its pace. Nigeria filed a formal request in 2022, and the Netherlands answered within three years, a notably faster turnaround than Germany’s own multi-year process. Switzerland moved next: three museums under the Benin Initiative. Switzerland handed over 18 objects in mid-2026, a ceremony that also produced a new bilateral cultural-property agreement between Bern and Abuja, according to a report by Artforum in July, 2026.

France and Belgium Confront a Wider Reckoning

France’s restitution predates the Benin Bronzes wave and concerns a different kingdom entirely. In November 2021, President Emmanuel Macron and Benin’s President Patrice Talon signed the transfer of 26 royal treasures looted from the Kingdom of Dahomey in 1892, following a law the French National Assembly had adopted unanimously a year earlier.

The objects, thrones, ceremonial statues of Kings Ghezo, Glele, and Behanzin, and carved palace doors, had sat in Paris for 129 years before returning to Cotonou.

Africa Museum reports that Belgium’s reckoning runs broader still. Its parliament passed a law in June 2022 recognising that objects tied to its colonial rule of the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi could legally be transferred back, and the Royal Museum for Central Africa has since catalogued around 129,000 Congolese objects as a first step toward identifying what qualifies for return.

Unlike Germany’s Benin agreement, Belgium’s law names no completion date, and cataloguing alone is expected to take years, a reminder that legal permission to return objects and the administrative capacity actually to do so are two different achievements.

ALSO READ:

American Museums Follow, Object by Object

The United States’ restitution wave has moved in smaller, more fragmented steps than Germany’s or the Netherlands’. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum jointly transferred 31 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria in October 2022, according to a 2022 Art Newspaper report.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston returned two works, a terracotta commemorative head and a bronze relief plaque, directly to Oba Ewuare II in June 2025, shortly after closing its Benin Kingdom Gallery and returning most of its remaining collection to the private donor who had originally loaned it. Its director, Matthew Teitelbaum, called it “deeply gratifying” to see the objects go back “to their rightful owner.”

Britain moved first among these smaller actors. The Horniman Museum in London became the first UK institution to transfer ownership of its 72 Benin Bronzes, in August 2022, well ahead of any government-level agreement.

The gap between individual museum decisions and national policy runs throughout the story: institutions with narrower governance structures can act on their own terms, while those bound by national legislation, such as the British Museum, cannot.

The Holdouts: Where the Repatriation Movement Stalls

The British Museum holds more Benin material than any other institution on earth, 928 works by recent counts, and has returned none of them. It cites the British Museum Act 1963, which bars its trustees from permanently deaccessioning objects except in narrow circumstances, and has offered loans instead of ownership transfers, an arrangement Nigeria has consistently rejected, according to a report by HISTORY in 2025.

A museum spokesperson has argued that “there is arguably greater value we can bring through collaboration” than through restitution itself.

The British Museum is not alone. Museums in Austria, Ireland, Canada, Switzerland, and Belgium continue to hold Benin Bronzes, according to a comprehensive institutional survey.

Digital Benin, the research database that first mapped the scale of the dispersal, recorded 5,246 objects across 131 institutions in 20 countries when it launched in November 2022, a figure that has fallen only modestly since, because many of those institutions hold single-digit numbers of objects too small to justify their own diplomatic process.

These smaller holders are, in practice, where the next stage of the repatriation movement will have to come from, one university museum and one municipal collection at a time, because no single agreement can move them the way Germany’s did in one signature.

The RCA Position

What the Repatriation Movement Still Owes Nigeria

The repatriation movement has spent four years answering a European question: which government will let go. It has spent far less time answering a Nigerian one: where the objects go once they arrive, and who is accountable for them there.

MOWAA, designed by architect David Adjaye and backed by Germany, France, Denmark, the British Museum, and the Getty and Ford Foundations, was meant to answer that question when it opened. Instead, the November 2025 preview collapsed into protest.

Edo State’s governor revoked the museum’s occupancy rights days later, disputing who actually controls the site. Underneath the protest sits a genuine governance question. Nigeria formally recognised Oba Ewuare II as the rightful owner of the Benin Bronzes in 2023, then clarified in 2025 that the National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM) would pursue restitution claims on his behalf.

“There is no more ambiguity,” commission head Olugbile Holloway told Reuters that February. “The oba has given the NCMM the blessing,” as reported by the Boston Globe in 2025.

That clarity on paper has not stopped disputes over land, ownership, and institutional control from surfacing whenever a physical building enters the picture, which is precisely the stage the movement has now reached. Returning an object is a diplomatic event; housing it, protecting it, and governing who speaks for it are decades-long administrative commitments, and Nigeria’s own institutions are still being tested on that second front.

The next major return will not be a British government announcement; Parliament has shown no sign of amending the 1963 Act, but it could be a decision by a university museum in Cambridge, a municipal collection in Vienna, or a Canadian institution too small to attract headlines. Travellers planning a Nigerian itinerary around seeing the bronzes in Benin City should treat MOWAA’s opening date as unconfirmed until Edo State and the Oba’s court resolve who will run the building. They should check the museum’s own status announcements before booking around it.

Because Germany and the Netherlands chose unconditional ownership transfers over loan arrangements, they exposed the British Museum’s continued reliance on the 1963 Act protecting its collection as a political choice rather than a legal inevitability, and until Parliament amends that Act, the single largest Benin collection on earth will keep sitting in London while smaller, faster-moving countries claim the credit for repatriation.

What This Means for Africa’s and Nigeria’s Tourism Sector

Repatriation is a cultural story, but it is also a tourism infrastructure story, and the two are converging on Edo State faster than most operators have priced in.

A functioning MOWAA, once its governance dispute is resolved, gives Nigeria something it has never had: a purpose-built, David Adjaye-designed cultural destination anchoring an inbound heritage itinerary rather than a single-day museum visit. That distinguishes Benin City from most West African heritage sites, which rely on open-air monuments or archaeological ruins with limited capacity for climate-controlled display. A properly governed MOWAA could do for Edo State’s tourism numbers what the Door of Return has done for Ghana’s diaspora travel campaign: convert a historical grievance into a repeat, multi-day draw for visitors rather than a one-off news cycle.

The risk runs the other way too. Every month MOWAA’s ownership dispute remains unresolved is a month tour operators cannot confidently sell Benin City as a heritage circuit, and international loan agreements—several European museums have offered pieces on loan specifically for MOWAA’s opening exhibitions—stay frozen alongside it. For the broader continent, the pattern set by Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium gives other African nations with unresolved colonial-era claims (the Asante gold in the British Museum, Ethiopian Maqdala treasures, and Cameroonian royal regalia in German collections) have a template to follow: name a receiving institution, secure legal ownership rather than a loan, and be ready to govern what comes back before it arrives. Nigeria’s experience shows that both halves of that template must succeed at once, or the second half becomes the story instead of the first.

If Nigeria’s restitution story raised more questions than it answered, RCA’s ongoing coverage of Africa’s aviation and tourism infrastructure tracks the same pattern: ambitious projects colliding with the governance capacity to run them.

Explore our latest Intelligence Briefs on African aviation expansion and destination strategy for the deals and disputes shaping where the continent’s next visitors go.

FAQs

What are the Benin Bronzes, and why are they called that?

The Benin Bronzes are thousands of brass, bronze, and ivory objects made for the royal court of the Kingdom of Benin, in what is now Edo State, Nigeria. The name is a historical catch-all: the collection includes ivory and brass works alongside true bronzes, and it refers to the historic Kingdom of Benin, not the modern-day Republic of Benin, a common point of confusion.

Which countries have returned Benin Bronzes to Nigeria so far?

Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United States, and the United Kingdom have all returned Benin Bronzes since 2021, through a mix of national agreements and individual museum decisions. Germany’s 1,130-object commitment and the Netherlands’ 119-object transfer are the two largest to date.

Why hasn’t the British Museum returned its Benin Bronzes?

The British Museum cites the British Museum Act 1963, UK legislation that bars its trustees from permanently removing objects from the collection except in narrow circumstances. It has offered long-term loans instead of ownership transfers, an approach Nigeria has rejected.

Are the Benin Bronzes returned to the Nigerian government or to the Oba of Benin?

Both, depending on the agreement. Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM) formally receives most returns. Still, the country recognised Oba Ewuare II as the rightful owner of the Benin Bronzes in 2023, and several returns in 2025, including those from the Netherlands and the MFA Boston, went directly to the Oba’s court.

What happened to MOWAA, the museum built to house the returned bronzes?

Protests disrupted MOWAA’s November 2025 preview, and Edo State’s governor subsequently revoked the museum’s occupancy rights over the land, amid disputes about ownership and governance. Its opening date remains unconfirmed.