MOWAA’s Failure to Launch Was Rigged from the Start – THISDAYLIVE

 Ayodeji  Rotinwa

Much has been published about the protests that indefinitely postponed the public opening of the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) in Benin City, Nigeria, in November. But what many outlets have neglected to question about this ‘dispute over ownership of Benin bronzes’, as The Guardian incorrectly summarized the situation, is that this fallout was years in the making, inevitable and, at its heart, really about money.

The idea for MOWAA was first proposed by former Edo state governor Godwin Obaseki in 2020 as part of a plan to establish Benin City as a cultural landmark in Nigeria. Directed by Nigerian financier and businessman Phillip Ihenacho, the museum had to prove to its foreign backers that it would be a world-class institution, by their standards, and a befitting home for the Benin Bronzes that some of those very same donors previously plundered. (No matter, of course, that those standards include those of institutions like the British Museum in London, from which over 2,000 items were stolen in the last 20 years.) 

The MOWAA project was initially successful. Millions of dollars were raised to fund it, from institutions including the Mellon Foundation and the British Museum, as well as the German, French and Edo governments. However, in March 2023, Nigeria’s then president, Muhammadu Buhari, spoiled the party when his government issued a declaration giving the Oba of Benin, Ewuare II, ownership and custody of any repatriated bronzes. This is not what the neocolonial European and US donors wanted (or had paid for). But the declaration was the Nigerian government’s way of calling time on a growing rift between the governor, who wanted the bronzes at MOWAA, and the Oba, who wanted them returned to him. As relations broke down, the Oba would accuse Obaseki of a dupe: of raising money from European donors in his ancestors’ name to found a museum for the bronzes that he had no right to display. This rift forms the backdrop to the protests today, as the former governor – whose legacy seems bound to MOWAA  – and the Oba remain in a standoff. 

It seems to me that the debacle is really about who gets to have control of the donor money, as the Oba’s adherents – who chanted his name as they protested at MOWAA’s preview event –  believe that the funds raised on the premise of building a museum for the bronzes should be turned over to his authority. 

That this has not happened motivated their demonstration. To me, this is an indictment of something else entirely: the catastrophically scant arts patronage both by Nigerian elites, who have the ability to create platforms for visual art, and by the traditional authorities, who should imbue those arts with value so as to reach those platforms.

The conversation around cultural artefacts – what they mean, how we should care for them and whether they belong in a museum – has been subsumed and dominated by the West. Ironically, that MOWAA plans to reverse this, to achieve a level of epistemic repair is a fact unclear to most of the Nigerian public – lost in the clay earth of discourse about whether protesters had a right to disrupt the MOWAA opening (they did); whether a so-called poor country needs a $25 million museum (we do); and whether the Oba is right to want the bronzes for himself (a moot question since Buhari’s declaration in 2023.)

On the morning of the preview, which I was attending as a guest of the museum – and before I had realized that the loud, angry voices that rang out from the direction of the museum entrance were protestors who would later damage or cart away museum property – I noticed a plaque which, rather cringe-worthily, listed the exact sum each patron had donated to MOWAA. The size of donations from Nigerians paled in comparison to those from Western bodies. Yet in members’ clubs across Lagos, there is much gnashing of teeth and wringing of finely jewelled hands as the same wealthy Nigerians complain about the dearth of cultural offerings in the country. If only someone could do something about it. The fact that it took the Tate Modern, an institution in another continent, to stage what could turn out to be a seminal show on Nigerian modernism should be a source of eternal embarrassment for our elites.

Linked to low arts patronage is the fact that traditional rulers across Nigeria have not played the role they ought to in platforming the cosmological, spiritual, political and civic significance of these artefacts and the understanding and continuity of the still-living knowledge systems that created them. There’s little indication they have continued patronage of the crafts and skills that bore items like the bronzes in the same way. How does the larger public – elites included – understand their value if their custodians do not tell us so?

Given the state of local arts patronage in Nigeria, MOWAA’s reliance on foreign donor money was inevitable – pragmatic, even – but its early-day name changes should not have been. First called the Edo Museum of West African Art and now MOWAA, the museum’s rebranding exercise seemed designed to assure its benefactors – and not Nigerians – that even without the bronzes it still had robust offerings. This motivation can be seen in its inaugural exhibition, ‘Nigeria Imaginary: Homecoming’: a remix of Nigeria’s 2024 Venice Biennale pavilion, a group show that was critiqued for featuring only one artist ordinarily based in Nigeria. Curator Aindrea Emelife did some corrective work by adding artists Kelani Abbas (Lagos), Isaac Emokpae (Lagos and Reading, UK) and Ngozi Omeje Ezema (Nsukka) to the bill. It is reflected, too, in the museum’s stated raison d’être: to ‘inspir[e] the next generation of creatives, scholars and cultural practitioners in West Africa’ by breaking from the colonial ethnographic model of museums. To do this, MOWAA would not simply exhibit works but invest in authoring knowledge about them, provide opportunities for local artists to create work and offer education in archaeology and conservation.

As I was writing this piece, a friend who lives in Virginia, US, showed me screenshots of a Facebook Marketplace sale titled ‘African Benin Bronze Head of King Oba 20th-century casting Oba Head Nigeria’. The seller had bought the item in Benin City from a local artisan – an artist working in the same lineage of craftspeople who created the historic bronzes, no doubt. Whether the head is a genuine bronze or a replica being passed off as authentic, the sale underscores how much work needs to be done. Local artisans are preserving the craft, but in a vacuum created by traditional rulers, the patronizing elite, independent museums and the government – who have historically neglected to build systems of value, knowledge, understanding and, ultimately, pride around our tangible and intangible heritage. Material culture is left to the highest bidder. Without real stewardship, even the ‘Benin Bronzes’ risk being reduced to a trinket sold on the internet for $130.