By Mikayla Brown
My journey into the Benin Bronzes began with a deep-seated curiosity about their tumultuous colonial history. I became captivated by the story of the Benin Bronzes – a collection of remarkable artifacts that have journeyed from Benin City to museums across the world. It was this fascination that encouraged me to understand their journey, leading me to embark on this digital humanities endeavor: creating a digital map to identify the institutions in possession of the looted Benin Bronzes.
The Benin Bronzes are exquisite brass sculptures, crafted by the artisans of the Kingdom of Benin, Benin City (located in present-day Nigeria). Eventually, they found their way into the hands of colonial powers during the Benin Punitive Expedition of 1897. From this initial looting, they became dispersed across the globe, becoming the focal point of contentious debates surrounding cultural heritage, restitution, and the legacy of colonialism. To read more about the history of the Benin Bronzes, read my first blog post.
Looking to visualize where the Benin Bronzes are located, I decided to create a digital, annotatable map using Felt. The map I created traces the movement of the looted Benin Bronzes to help us understand a material aspect of colonialism. It provides a view of the art in our museums through a colonial lens. By visualizing the migration journey of the Bronzes from Benin City, to England, and later to the rest of the Western world we can begin to understand how museums are complicit in the continuous looting and holding of precious artifacts. By visualizing where the Benin Bronzes are currently being held, we can also begin to understand how residues of colonialism manifest in the art world.
Developing a Dataset for Mapping
In my previous blog post, I explained how I collected data about the countries and institutions in possession of looted Benin Bronzes. I concluded that blog post with a preliminary explanation about how I began to organize data in a spreadsheet. In this post, I will provide additional details about my data collection and organizing process.
To create a spreadsheet, first I identified the countries in possession of looted Benin Bronzes and the institutions housing them within each country. In total, there are 19 countries and 153 institutions across Europe, North America, and Australia and New Zealand in possession of looted Benin Bronzes. Then, I began identifying the repatriation status (partial, full, loan agreement) for all of the institutions and any information about how many Benin Bronzes, including Benin Plaques are in their possession that I could find. Lastly, in order to map the locations in Felt, I had to add an additional column for latitude and longitude. I have made the data set publically accessible. You can view the entire dataset to see which Western institutions are in possession of looted Benin Bronzes.
Mapping in Felt
I decided to use Felt to create a digital map because it is a user-friendly, customizable map. Felt is “is a multimedia mapping tool that allows you to create everything from some simple directions maps to maps that have historic overlays to maps of animal migrations and much more” (Byrne, 2023). Once the spreadsheet was created and organized by country, institution, repatriation status, and number of Benin Bronzes and Plaques in their possession it was uploaded to Felt. After I checked to ensure all the locations were correct, I changed the colors of the mapped institutions so that they were color coordinated by country.
Telling a Narrative
The next question I was challenged with answering is, how do I tell a story with a simple static map? To do this, I added narrative details about the history of the Benin Bronzes, starting with their place of provenance in Benin City. I identified the Benin River that the British Royal Navy used to access Benin City so that viewers can spatially imagine how the invasion took place.
I also spent hours combing through British Naval Ship docking records with the aim of identifying the ships that the British Royal Navy ship used to transport the looted Benin Bronzes. I was able to narrow the ships down to five possible ships, the HMS Pomone, HMS St. George, HMS Forte, HMS Philomel and the HMS Theseus. They were all used by the British Royal Navy during the time period that the looting occurred and made trips to various countries in Africa, including Nigeria.
When viewing the map, viewers can see archival images of the aforementioned British Royal Navy ships, images of the Benin Bronzes and of the British officers with the looted Bronzes, an archival image of the Benin Bronzes in the Ancestral Shrine located in the Royal Palace in Benin City, and a map depicting how Benin City and the surrounding area looked pre-British colonization.
To make these details feel like a narrative, I used Felt’s annotation features – text, notes, and lines – to draw people in to where the story of the Benin Bronzes began and to help them follow their journey as they were looted, transported via ship up the Atlantic Ocean, sold to the British Museum, and from there, scattered across the ‘rest of the West.’
Next Steps & Conclusion
Now that I have finished creating a map in Felt, I would like to create a StorymapJS about the Benin Bronzes that goes into greater detail about the British invasion of Benin City, the looting that took place, and explain how the Bronzes came to be dispersed all over museums in the Western world. This map is also the foundational set of data I will use in my dissertation, which digs into museum’s discourse concerning the repatriation of the Benin Bronzes.
As more museums repatriate the Bronzes, I will update the repatriation status column in the spreadsheet. Hopefully, as the Benin Bronzes repatriation initiative continues more museums will repatriate their collection of looted Bronzes.
Throughout history, “maps were created by professional cartographers, many of whom played a large role in colonization” (PBS, 2021), shaping the way many of us see the world today. By creating a digital map, I am decolonizing mapping and the colonial origins of maps. Mapping the place of provenance and the dispersal of the Bronzes across Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and North America visualizes how complicit Western countries have been in housing looted artifacts. The map I created visualizes an aspect of colonialism by focusing on a set of cultural artifacts that were looted as a result of British colonialism and British invasion in Nigeria.
I invite you to view the map “Mapping the Looted Benin Bronzes.“
References:
Decolonizing the Map: Creating the Indigenous Mapping… | PBS Education
How to Map Spreadsheet Data – Using Felt.com (youtube.com)
The Brutish Museum by Dan Hicks (2021)