Distorting history in the restitution debate. Dan Hicks’s The Brutish Museums and fact and fiction in Benin historiography

Abstract

The debates on the ownership of contested cultural objects bring forth questions regarding the representation of history. But might these debates also lead to the fabrication of history? Previous research has analyzed how the British Museum’s anti-restitution position contributes to its distortion of British (Museum) history. Instead, this article considers if – and, if so, how – history is distorted to argue for restitution. It examines the eulogized publication The Brutish Museums (2000) by Oxford professor Dan Hicks asking whether his claims regarding British mass atrocities in the conquest of Benin in 1897 can be substantiated by the documentary evidence. The investigation shows that this is not the case. The article also scrutinizes what the source material reveals about the death toll of the events of 1897. The results of the inquiry question oversimplified notions about culprits and victims in the wake of colonial conquest. It is argued that an incomplete understanding of the past impairs efforts to repair past wrongs and that questions about the ownership of colonial collections could productively be linked with questions about the representation of history, such as whose and which histories are told – or not – through contested objects.

Introduction

Debates on the restitution of museum objects from the colonial era bring to the fore a range of interlinked questions about past, present, and future rights and wrongs. Ideas about what happened back then – the deeds and misdeeds of bygone times – are given weight in the discussion on what should come next – whether these objects should remain with their current owners and at current locations or be returned to their places of origin and source/descendant communities. Issues regarding ownership of contested cultural objects thus connect to contests over the representation of history. ¹

Obviously, no representation can capture the past in all its complexity. The work of historical representation involves processes of selection, organization, and interpretation. Thus, there cannot be any absolute right or complete rendition of the past. ² In serious historical work there are always areas of disputation. However, claims about the past can depart from what is substantiated by source material to such an extent that these claims may be labeled misrepresentations or fabrications.

A class of objects that have taken center stage in the restitution debates is the Benin bronzes, looted by British troops in Benin City, present-day Nigeria, in February 1897. It seems relevant to ask what portrayals of the past are created in these debates and whether these portrayals might go beyond what can reasonably be supported by data and into the realms of wishful thinking and fantasy.

Elsewhere I have analyzed how Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum from 2002 to 2015, distorted and whitewashed the museum’s history to justify its retentionist policy. ³ Exhibitions and publications proclaimed that the British Museum, founded in the eighteenth century, was created to foster tolerance, dissent, and respect for difference and that, in this spirit, research by British Museum scholars on the Benin bronzes shattered European derogatory views of Africans.

Was this true? Upon examination, it was found that this glorifying narrative was directly contradicted by the available documentary record. Well into the twentieth century, the British Museum envisioned the world’s inhabitants as placed in cultural and racial hierarchies, where White people occupied the apex (exemplified by the Parthenon sculptures) and Black people the bottom rungs, with the Benin objects evidencing African intellectual inferiority. ⁴ Paradoxically, whereas a claim to objectivity and universality is fundamental to the museum’s retention policy, it appeared that the ownership issue strongly contributed to its heavily biased representation of British (Museum) history.

But then, what about the opposite side in the restitution debate? At present, when there is a steady stream of literature normatively infused in favor of restitution, it seems worth considering if history might be distorted to support the case for restitution. This article examines the much acclaimed and influential pro-restitution book The Brutish Museums. The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (2020) by Dan Hicks, professor of contemporary archaeology at the University of Oxford and curator at the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum. The overarching question guiding the investigation is: does The Brutish Museums’ portrayal of the British conquest of the Benin Kingdom – in particular, the claims regarding massacres of civilians by shelling and bombing that caused tens of thousands of casualties – have any support in the extant documentary record? The main thrust of this article is to lay out the evidence that this is not the case.

The article also investigates a second, related, question: what can be said, based on the extant source material, about what deadly violence there was in connection with the British conquest of the Benin Kingdom – how many were killed, why, and by whom? The purpose of this analysis is to offer clarification on this aspect of the historical events. To my mind, it seems that the debates on the future of the Benin objects and other cases of colonial loot would benefit from being based on a factual foundation rather than on belief and fiction. I also think that the discussion on colonial loot – intrinsically linked to wider concerns about contemporary global and local power disparities and their remedies– should ideally reach further than the (obviously important) question of ownership per se and address questions about the creation of (historical) representations in these debates. It is worth asking how these debates influence, and are influenced by, our understanding of the past and which historical and present-day perspectives and injustices come into focus or not through them. In the Benin case, the body count presents a more complex picture of perpetrators and victims in the wake of colonial conquest than is often assumed. The debates on colonialism and its legacies too often suffer from polarization and essentialization. Apart from fact-checking a particular work, this article tries to make a general point about the importance of careful evaluation of the historical record to overcome such oversimplifications.

Dan Hicks on British colonial brutality and brutish museums

The central argument of The Brutish Museums is that the scale of violence that characterized the British conquest of Benin in 1897, and British imperialism generally, has hitherto been grossly underestimated. This “ultraviolence” was enacted in Benin in an “unholy trinity” of British crimes – democide, destruction of cultural sites, and looting (16, 134, 233) – and it endures to this day in the display cases of Western museums. The looted objects remain “trophies of ultraviolence, until restitution begins” (215). To acknowledge the “horror” of British colonialism (xiii), it is paramount to break “the untruthful framing” or “fabrication” of the narration of the events of 1897 (40–41) created by the “propaganda machines” of the Niger Coast Protectorate and the Royal Niger Company (101). The Brutish Museums assures that “[o]fficial reports on punitive missions always stated it was impossible to estimate casualties, of course” (118, italics added). Further, the reporting on Benin in 1897 framed the British assault as retaliation for a massacre of a peaceful, British diplomatic expedition led by Acting Consul-General James Phillips, conveniently omitting that a military attack on Benin City had been planned for years. ⁵ Right up to the present, museums have uncritically maintained such misrepresentations of historical events (40). British museum professionals’ inability to see the violence of colonial collecting resonates with “a more general failure by the British to come to terms with our colonial past” (37). Hicks, by contrast, does not mince words when it comes to recounting the horrors of the “indiscriminate” attack launched against Benin in 1897:

This was a democidal campaign, involving massacres of civilians through the bombardment of towns and villages from the air (sic) and thus women and children across the whole of the Benin Kingdom, scorching the earth with rockets, fire, and mines. Primary among the war crimes was the scale of the killing and bombings of civilian targets (123).

The British did not only omit to report enemy casualties:

For Benin 1897, perhaps most telling is the sustained silence in both official and informal documentation of any prisoners of war, or any injured African casualties, or of the spread and effect of disease, or of any hospital operations for Africans of any kind, or hunger or starvation after environmental destruction (125, italics added).

In the course of painting its sweeping picture of this “democidal” campaign and the “industrial” scale of the killing, The Brutish Museums provides some noticeable numbers. Hicks declares that “tens of thousands died” (114) as a result of the campaign. The fatalities, it seems, were incurred both among Edo civilians (through bombardment and perhaps also the diseases and starvation, which the sources are tellingly silent about), and among the “tens of thousands” of Edo soldiers (121, 126). ⁶ Further, the British, who had brought 3 to 4 million pistol, rifle, and machine gun bullets (112, 115), looted “more than ten thousand royal and sacred objects” in Benin City (8, 137, 147, 234, 236). These figures will be given special attention as an index of the use of source material in The Brutish Museums.

When The Brutish Museums was published in 2020, there had been no book-length account of the conquest of the Benin Kingdom written for about four decades. ⁷ The Brutish Museums appeared timely in the midst of the heated restitution debates, then further fueled through the Black Lives Matter mass mobilization. The book seemed to fill the need for a long overdue revision of the events of 1897 and colonial expansion in Africa more generally. Written with passion and repeating an easily comprehensible message about colonial violence, The Brutish Museums became a bestseller. It received glowing press reviews and won awards from the National Council on Public History, the Association for Africanist Anthropology, and the New York Times. According to academic reviews, it shook “the epistemic foundations” of colonial discourses, ⁸ and should be “versioned as a primer for the history curriculum in schools.” ⁹

In stark contrast, Nigel Biggar, emeritus professor of moral and pastoral theology, University of Oxford, in a review in The Critic and his book Colonialism. A Moral Reckoning, found a range of faults in The Brutish Museums, including that Hicks’s tens of thousands of Edo deaths were plucked from the “unargued blue.” Biggar called out Hicks for abusing and misrepresenting data that does not suit his own prejudices, thus failing in the scholarly duty to uphold “intellectual honesty.” ¹⁰

Apparently, The Brutish Museums can be read in different ways. None of the reviewers specialize in Benin history. The same applies to Hicks, but given his academic and institutional credentials, reviewers can hardly be blamed for assuming that he has done the historical groundwork properly. The critique voiced by Biggar (who is neither an expert on Benin nor colonial history) regarding Hicks’s (ab)use of evidence is essentially right but made less effective by only relying on second-hand sources. Biggar leaves important issues unanswered (such as whether the British bombarded civilian settlements) and reproduces longstanding misconceptions about the Benin objects; for example, that proceeds from the sale of the loot were used to defray pensions for the wounded and bereaved. ¹¹

Some signposting is required before entering the assessment of The Brutish Museums. First, the book’s overarching aim, to make the British (and one can add, Westerners in general) come to terms with the colonial past and its enduring legacies, is easy to agree with. There is, I believe, a pressing need to challenge prevailing imperial nostalgia. ¹² Yet in my view, counter-narratives should be evidence-based. Distortions should not be replaced with another set of distortions.

Second, while I criticize the ideas about mass violence presented in The Brutish Museums, I am, of course, not arguing that British colonialism did not involve violence. There are far too many examples of how the British caused immense suffering when spreading the blessings of “civilization.” The month-long siege and shelling of Brohimi on the Benin River in 1894 is one such case (referred to in The Brutish Museums, but mainly to build up the case for mass atrocities in the 1897 Benin campaign). With so much evidence of colonial brutality at hand, there is no reason to invent any. ¹³

Third, I am not arguing that The Brutish Museums is entirely without qualities. The author has dug up some new source material (for example, on the British use of expanding bullets), which makes for useful additions to the study of Benin 1897. ¹⁴ The author rightly points out that museum texts to this day often have given a pro-British view of the conquest of Benin, and he is also right in that the looting was carried out in a less organized fashion than it has been portrayed as. ¹⁵ Yet, none of these two claims are novel and both have been better argued by others. ¹⁶

Fourth, while The Brutish Museums makes a case for restitution, my contribution is not intended to weigh in either for or against it. My text is limited to examining the evidential basis for its historical claims, similar to how I earlier examined the basis for the ones made by MacGregor.

Lastly, my contribution is by necessity limited in extent. The Brutish Museums repeatedly erred in both details and generalizations. Many sections contain multiple errors on every page, and I have found it impossible to treat all the errors I have noted. ¹⁷

Sources, biases, and silences

Implied, and sometimes made explicit in The Brutish Museums, is that the British sources from the time cannot be trusted and that they – deliberately – hide the truth. A full discussion of how the documentary record on Benin 1897 may or may not be used for historical inquiry in relation to issues regarding omissions, reliability, and partiality requires a more extensive analysis than can be attempted here, but a few points may nevertheless be made.

As to the documentary evidence, there is one glaring omission in The Brutish Museums. The most voluminous set of source material – arguably the most important one for Benin history – are the administrative records from the Foreign Office and other governmental offices in the National Archives, Kew, in London. The Brutish Museums hardly make any use of these sources.

The archival material in Kew – read closely together with other sources – does offer up opportunities to address some of the problems regarding biases and silences in the creation of a documentary record (what was documented or not, and for which reasons) and how information flows informed public perception of events. ¹⁸ Intelligence received by the Foreign Office could be made public via the press or in The London Gazette, an official journal of records, or suppressed. ¹⁹ Private letters and diaries at times tell of setbacks, miscalculations, errors of judgement, and organizational malfunctioning not found in published reports on military expeditions. ²⁰

The Brutish Museums’ claim that official reports always stated that enemy casualties could not be calculated is quite simply wrong. Figures for enemy casualties are found in reports (including one used in The Brutish Museums, see below). ²¹ Where there are none, this hardly reflects any deliberate suppression of knowledge. That the enemy “must” have suffered large casualties is an almost standard formulation in these reports and speaks strongly against the idea that enemy losses were downplayed. ²² On the contrary, Robert Jackson has cautioned that officers on campaigns might have inflated casualty figures to give credit to themselves. ²³ The same might apply to figures for enemy strength. ²⁴

British reports, including officially published ones, are often to the latter-day reader surprisingly frank about the violence inflicted on civilians. The official published accounts for the Benin City Expedition of 1897 and the Benin Territories Expedition of 1899 duly lay out the burning of villages and towns and the flogging of unwilling guides (and even the shooting of a guide trying to escape). ²⁵ No qualms are expressed, although the latter report relates that a shot that wounded an enemy also “unfortunately killed a boy.” ²⁶ The British were quite upfront with at least some aspects of their brutality. That said, civilian “collateral” suffering and deaths could go unreported, as observed by Paddy Docherty for the British blockade of Opobo in 1889. ²⁷ Or civilian casualties and starvation could be reported, as was the case for the siege of Brohimi, with the report emphasizing the care given to the survivors by the British. ²⁸

In short, the documentary evidence provides a complex picture. What was highlighted, marginalized, suppressed, neutralized, rationalized, or not recorded at all in this wealth of paperwork, from handwritten order notes, letters, diaries, and reports, and which (parts of) these records were publicly disseminated in print or not, do not readily conform to a set of preconceived ideas about “silencing,” “untruthful framing,” and “fabrication” by abstract “propaganda machines.” Some further aspects of the reliability of specific sources will be discussed in this article.

The number of Edo soldiers and battle casualties

The Brutish Museums devotes a chapter named “Democide” to the Edo (military and civilian) death toll (115–127). Various sources on different aspects of the British military tactics, such as the use of expanding bullets and precautionary firing when advancing in bush terrain, are referred to but none of these sources (not always quoted correctly) are of relevance for assessing casualties. ²⁹ The figures “tens of thousands” dead (114) and “tens of thousands” of Edo soldiers (121, 126) appear in the text out of nowhere without any support in references or discussion.

The author notes (correctly) that the official reports did not estimate the total number of enemy casualties in the Benin City Expedition. However, there are a few death tallies in the source material, none of which is discussed by the author. After the engagement at Ologbo, the British discovered corpses, variously reported as numbering from 28 to 44. ³⁰ In Benin City, apart from the sacrificial victims, seven or “quantities” of battle casualties were found. ³¹ At the stockade (zareba), northeast of Sapoba, 10 out of 50 attackers were reportedly killed. ³² (See Figure 1 for the locations of these places.) Clearly, these 60 dead, approximately, did not represent all Edo battle fatalities. The Edo carried away their fallen, and the corpses that the British saw – or noted the smell of – were only the ones that the Edo had been unable to retrieve. ³³ Still, these visually confirmed dead give at least an indication of the scale of Edo losses. Apparently, based on these mentions, Robert Home (the only scholar who has attempted an estimate) suggested that probably “several hundred” Edo were killed in the Benin City Expedition, and many more wounded. ³⁴ However, Home’s estimate is quickly dismissed by Hicks (121), who assures that there were many more deaths when the countryside was ravaged “over weeks” after the fall of Benin City and further military actions over the next two years.

Figure 1. Map of operations 1897. After Home 1982, viii (courtesy of Robert Home).

Whereas The Brutish Museums fails to refer to the abovementioned death tallies, it refers to the “unfiltered evidence” (unfiltered by the propaganda machines, one assumes) provided by a newspaper article in the Portsmouth Evening News, reporting that Haussa soldiers who had penetrated the bush had seen “hundreds of dead [enemy] bodies” (122). ³⁵ As for the number of Edo soldiers, The Brutish Museums does not treat the few mentions there are of Edo troops seen in the open – such as Bacon’s report of “40 to 50” Edo attempting to advance on the British at Benin City – but tells that the Edo had established a war camp of “up to 10,000 soldiers” at Obadan to the north-east of Benin City, as a defense against the British (85), with a reference to Home and Jacob Egharevba’s A Short History of Benin first published in 1936. ³⁶ These figures reported in the Portsmouth Evening News and by Egharevba seemingly lend some support to the idea that the British inflicted massive casualties on a sizable Edo force in the Benin City Expedition. The reliability of these figures will be discussed below. The evidential basis for the claim that there were (additional) large-scale casualties in operations beyond February 1897 will also be treated.

Further, The Brutish Museums provides casualty figures from the Niger Sudan Expedition undertaken by the Royal Niger Company to the north of Benin against Bida and Ilorin in January and February 1897. Noting that the campaigns against Benin City, respectively Bida and Ilorin, took place in different terrains – in thick bush with limited visibility in the Benin City Expedition and in open country in the Niger Sudan Expedition – The Brutish Museums asserts that this led to “very different situations for assessing the casualties” (103), with the implication that the casualty figures for the Niger Sudan Expedition might indicate the number of casualties in the Benin City Expedition. The two expeditions partly overlapped in time, and Hicks (erroneously) asserts that they represented a coordinated effort of colonial conquest. He throws out the rhetorical question of what the combined death toll of these two campaigns could have been: “ten thousand? fifty? seventy thousand?” (100–101). No answer is given, but The Brutish Museums claims at least 20,000 enemy casualties at Bida and Ilorin, while also claiming that official reports from the Niger Sudan Expedition, like other official reports, did not estimate enemy losses (105–106, 118). How these claims agree with the documentary evidence is illustrative of the nature of the use of source material in The Brutish Museums.

According to The Brutish Museums, on the first day of the two-day battle of Ilorin, “[s]ome 800 cavalry and 5,000 infantry were mown down,” (105) with a reference to a newspaper article “The wars of 1897, Number 1”, published in the Glasgow Herald, January 24, 1898. However, the article does not read in this way. According to the article, the British were on this day “fiercely attacked on all sides by 5000 foot and 800 horse.” Nothing is said about how many attackers were “mown down.” For Bida, The Brutish Museums claims there were 15,000 casualties (106), but provides no reference. To my knowledge, no such figure exists in the source material.

As to The Brutish Museums’ idea of non-reporting of enemy casualties, George Goldie, director of the Royal Niger Company, assessed enemy losses at Ilorin as having “exceeded a thousand.” Noteworthily, this is done in a sentence in Goldie’s report which immediately follows a sentence that is quoted in The Brutish Museums (106). ³⁷ One wonders how it is possible to not see Goldie’s estimate of enemy losses when quoting the preceding sentence.

Moreover, Hicks seems unaware of the two official reports for the battles of Bida and Ilorin published in The London Gazette (available online). Under the heading “Enemy casualties” they report that at Ilorin “200 horsemen were killed, and losses of foot soldiers were variously estimated at from 300 to 500” and at Bida “the total loss inflicted upon the enemy is variously estimated from 600 killed and wounded to 1,000.” ³⁸ The Brutish Museums’ figure for Ilorin is about 5 to 10 times higher, and for Bida 15 to 25 times higher than reported here. The Brutish Museums’ combined death toll for the two battles of over 20,000 exceeds the reported casualty figures by about 10 to 20 times.

In its account of the Niger Sudan Expedition, The Brutish Museums does not only exaggerate enemy casualties. The reader is assured (103–104) that the expedition comprised a total of “1,072 Hausa soldiers and 1,878 carriers” and was equipped with “15 Maxims, each with 18,000 rounds,” with references to an article written by Anthony Kirk-Greene and a contemporary account by Seymour Vandeleur. However, these sources do not support these figures. ³⁹

The Niger Sudan Expedition was carried out in three consequent campaigns against Kabba (misspelled Kappa in The Brutish Museums), Bida, and Ilorin, with a gradually reduced force. Kirk-Greene presents the number of men, carriers, Maxims, and artillery pieces in each of them in a table (Table 1). Apparently, The Brutish Museums’ figure of 1,878 carriers derives from adding the number of carriers – 825, 565, and 488 – in each of the three campaigns. That is, the same carriers are counted three times. His figure of 1,072 soldiers must come from adding together the 507 soldiers and 565 carriers in the Bida campaign and his 15 Maxims from adding together the Maxims – 5, 6, and 4 – in the three campaigns. According to Vandeleur, 18,000 Maxim rounds were brought on the Bida Campaign, which in Hicks’s “reading” has become 18,000 rounds for each Maxim (which would then, for his 15 Maxims, give a total of 270,000 rounds).

Table 1. Table of the disposition of personnel (British Special Service Officers, Royal Niger Constabulary Officers, native rank and file, and carriers) and armament (artillery and Maxim machine guns) in the three campaigns comprising the Niger Sudan Expedition.

After Kirk-Greene 1968, 52.

Thus, Hicks has here put together what almost looks like a random compilation of numbers from two sources to arrive at these figures. Yet, the numbers do not appear to have been plucked in an entirely haphazard way, since they all contribute to making the British force appear to be much more formidable than it was. Returning to The Brutish Museums’ picture of British mass atrocities carried out by the Benin City Expedition, there is a similar misalignment between the claims made and actual evidence. The characterization of the Benin campaign is either unsubstantiated or directly contradicted by the records.

Edo civilian casualties through bombardment of towns and villages

The Brutish Museums repeats that there were “massacres of civilians” when “scores” or “dozens” of towns were “razed” by British rockets and shells (2, 100, 116, 123). The author lists five towns destroyed (111), two of which (Egoru and Sapoba) were actually not destroyed, the other ones were burnt. He quotes (correctly) the 1899 Benin Territories Expedition report that five war rockets were fired into Okemue setting the houses on fire (120–121), creating the impression that this was only one of numerous examples of the bombardment of towns throughout the Benin Kingdom. ⁴⁰

However, only on two other occasions were settlements (briefly) attacked with missiles. On February 10, 1897, six shells were fired by a ship gun against Gwato – inspiring, it seems, Hicks to write that “towns” were bombarded by “ships” (111) – and on the 18^th three rockets and two (or four) shells were launched against Benin City. ⁴¹ No casualties are reported from any of these attacks: Gwato was probably deserted when the shells were fired, and Okemue had possibly been abandoned by civilians. The testimony from an Edo eyewitness – an old woman left behind when Benin City was vacated – does not mention any dead or wounded by the projectiles. ⁴² Given the number of projectiles fired on these three occasions – about 20 in total – any undocumented casualties cannot have been many. The sources prove The Brutish Museums’ idea of numerous casualties through the bombardment of settlements wrong.

Other Edo civilian casualties

British accounts do not report on hunger, starvation, or disease among the Edo population in the wake of the Benin City Expedition, but it is unclear what this is “telling” of. Presumably, the many Edo who fled Benin City and other towns and villages suffered considerable hardship. When settlements were burned, any remaining food storage would have been destroyed. Food shortages would have been especially hard for the vulnerable and those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. ⁴³ The number of displaced is hard to assess but must have been in the thousands. Visitors to Benin City in the 1890s variously estimated its population from “not exceed[ing] 10,000” to “about 20,000.” ⁴⁴ Regarding the effects of disease, the main disease affecting the native population was smallpox, and its prevalence was reported in the Protectorate’s annual reports. The Benin area is not listed among those badly affected by the disease, suggesting that smallpox was not noticeably above average levels there. ⁴⁵ This does not rule out the possibility that other diseases affected Edo refugees.

Docherty suggests that the total Edo death toll (military and civilian) “must assuredly have been in the hundreds, and quite possibly in the thousands when displaced persons and disruptions to local food supply chains are taken into account.” ⁴⁶ Given the source situation, we are into guesswork here. My own guess is that any casualties related to any food shortages were much lower – perhaps in the hundreds – considering that the whole Benin City campaign was of relatively short duration, nine days in total if one counts from the first shots exchanged on February 10, 1897, to the last ones on February 18.

Presumably, the Edo in refugee settlements suffered hardship and this would have gone unnoticed by the British. Yet it appears unlikely that British reports written subsequent to the conquest of the Benin territory would not have commented on evidence of starvation among the people returning to Benin City and in outlying towns and villages, if only because it was in the British’s own interest to report on such matters, as they could be a cause for civil unrest.

Egharevba’s Obadan war camp

As noted, the claim regarding an Edo army of tens of thousands of soldiers is not substantiated in The Brutish Museums, but the book relates that up to 10,000 soldiers had been stationed in a war camp at Obadan, with a reference to Egharevba’s A Short History of Benin. The reliability of this work, built on Edo oral and European written sources, has been questioned. ⁴⁷ The discussion has mostly focused on inaccuracies in Egharevba’s treatment of earlier periods, but the short account of the British conquest of Benin also contains numerous errors. ⁴⁸

The figure of the force at the Obadan war camp may be compared to that given in the first version of his work, published in the Edo language in 1933 as Ekhere vbe ebe itan Edo. Here Egharevba gives the figure of 20,000 troops. ⁴⁹ Why this difference? Uyilawa Usuanlele and Toyin Fayola have argued that Egharevba, when writing Short History, made changes to “produce a story that appears real” to an English readership. ⁵⁰ There is a similar halving of numbers in the preceding paragraph. According to Ekhere, in 1896 the Oba demanded 40,000 sheets of corrugated iron to allow trade, whereas in Short History the demand was for 20,000 sheets. In a contemporary British source, Phillips’s (in)famous letter to Salisbury of November 16, 1896, requesting permission to attack Benin City because of the Oba’s trade ban, the figure is instead 1,000 sheets. ⁵¹ The Obadan war camp is not attested in British sources. Even if it existed, Egharevba’s figures for the number of fighting men seem no more reliable than his figures for iron sheets and thus are essentially useless for assessing the size of Edo forces. ⁵²

What is reported in the British sources regarding Edo preparations against the British threat is that, since the British attack on Brohimi in 1894, the Edo had stationed “a few” fighting men on the road from Gwato to Benin City. ⁵³ In 1895, when the vice-consul of the Protectorate, Peter Copland-Crawford, made a (failed) attempt to reach Benin City, he was warned by a messenger from the Oba that there were “some 600” soldiers at Gwato. In his report, Copland-Crawford suggested that the number might have been an exaggeration to intimidate him, but that there may have been “some force” at Gwato, as at other frontier approaches to the Benin Kingdom. ⁵⁴ This paints a different picture of Edo’s military capacity than that indicated by a war camp housing 10,000 (or 20,000) soldiers.

The Portsmouth Evening News’s “hundreds of dead bodies”

What then of the “unfiltered evidence” provided by the “remarkable” newspaper article in the Portsmouth Evening News, which, apart from reporting on the use of expanding bullets, tells us that “the slaughter was enormous” and that “hundreds of dead bodies” had been seen by the Haussa soldiers? The journalist’s reporting, ostensibly based on talks with the officers and men who had just returned from Benin, unfolds a narrative of British heroism and Edo barbarity. Dying British soldiers utter remarkably well-formulated last words, and a victim rescued from a sacrificial pit had had a bar of iron “braced onto his limbs while hot,” but was revived thanks to the doctors (none of whom mentions this victim in their own accounts). The massacre of the Phillips’s party was instigated by a mysterious “Portuguese renegade,” dismissed from the Protectorate force (who is conspicuously absent in any official documents from the Protectorate which only employed British officers). ⁵⁵ The “hundreds” of enemy bodies (only) seen by the Haussa soldiers are equally absent from all other accounts. ⁵⁶ Like the Portuguese renegade and the poor victim with a bar of iron braced onto him, the “hundreds” of dead bodies are perhaps better seen as evidence of mythmaking and creative journalism than “unfiltered evidence” of actual casualties.

This is not to say that everything reported in the article is made up. The use of expanding bullets is confirmed by Admiral Harry Rawson’s notebook. In a long list of preparations for the expedition – with provisions such as “Boots to be repaired” and “Numerous canvas bags for packing sugar, onions, etc. to be made” – we read “Lee Metford bullets to be cut at the end.” ⁵⁷ Apparently, manipulating bullets to fragment on impact and create larger wounds had become standard in colonial warfare – the cutting of bullets being a mundane, routine practice, as natural and self-evident as the making of bags and repairing of boots.

Ammunition figures

As for the Niger Sudan Expedition, The Brutish Museums provides (incorrect) ammunition figures for the Benin City Expedition. Referring to the ammunition lists in Bacon’s City of Blood and George Egerton’s notebook in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Hicks declares that the British brought “more than 3 million” (112), or “3 or 4 million” (115) pistol, rifle, and Maxim machine gun bullets. ⁵⁸ At least implicitly, these numbers lend support to his idea of killings on an “industrial scale.”

The relevant pages in Bacon, which are based on Egerton’s notebook, are found in Appendix 1 for the reader to compare. As is evident from Bacon’s and Egerton’s lists – which provide figures for ammunition brought by the main column that attacked Benin City, not the entire expedition – the British brought a total of 253,932 bullets (198,240 rifle bullets, 13,608 pistol bullets, and 42,084 Maxim bullets). ⁵⁹ From Hicks’s own presentation of a “simple count-up” (112), it appears that his figure builds on a combination of multiple faulty readings (for example, Egerton’s “total belts per [Maxim] gun = 9” is taken to mean that the total number of belts per Maxim gun was 126, and Bacon’s “Each officer and man armed with a pistol is to carry 36 rounds of ammunition” is read as that each officer and man in the expedition was armed with a pistol and faulty calculations (for example, that 1,200 multiplied by 300 is 1.5 million). As elsewhere in The Brutish Museums, the distortions of the documentary record have a direction toward bigger numbers and more British violence.

Operations after February 1897

As mentioned, The Brutish Museums implies that many Edo deaths occurred during the “ravaging of the countryside over weeks” after the taking of Benin City and in “military actions which continued […] for two years and more” (121). How does this idea compare with the sources? Apart from two forays sent out in March 1897 to capture the Oba, which located and burnt the Oba’s abandoned encampment (the “only” shots being fired during this operation were the ones killing an unwilling guide), the British did not undertake any forward military actions in the immediate aftermath of the taking of Benin City. ⁶⁰ Thus, there was no “ravaging” of the countryside “over weeks” after the fall of Benin City. The scattered information there is from the three following military operations does not suggest that the forces commanded by the chiefs that held out against the British were large, perhaps in the range of a few hundred. The force met by the troops of the Royal Niger Company in June 1897 was reported to be “500 strong and armed with rifles” and suffered a “heavy loss.” (The credibility of the reporting, produced by a Reuter’s agent and Company employee, may be doubted: it seems to have downplayed the Company’s own losses and it is unlikely that the Edo possessed more than a few automatic rifles.) ⁶¹

In the Benin Territories Expedition in April and May 1899, the camp of chiefs Ologbose and Ebohun (Ologbosheri and Abohun in the British sources) was reportedly “capable of holding 400 to 500 people.” ⁶² A total of about 100 people, including 20 illegal rubber hunters and many non-combatants, were captured during the operation, which ended Edo resistance. ⁶³ (Thus, contrary to The Brutish Museums’ insinuation there is no “telling” silence about prisoners in the reports.) The year before, in April and May 1898, a small force led by Reginald Granville clashed with Ebohun’s troops. Granville reported that he learned from prisoners that Ologbose had “altogether two or three hundred people […] mostly women and children.” In his diary, he commented that the force of Ologbose and Ebohun had been “greatly overestimated,” which might refer to the alleged 500-strong force encountered by the Royal Niger Company’s troops. The prisoners also said that 14 defenders had been killed and 20 wounded in the first British attack on Okemue. ⁶⁴ Extrapolating from this rare casualty figure, the total number of Edo casualties in the operations from June 1897 to May 1898 might have been about a hundred, perhaps less or more.

What was the size of the Edo force and its casualties?

While preparing for the Benin City Expedition, the British found it “impossible” to estimate the size of the opposing force, and afterward reported that the enemy had to “admit heavy losses in fighting,” but without attempting a figure. ⁶⁵ Still, the source material allows for making some cautious suggestions on the size of the Edo force defending the Benin Kingdom in February 1897 and the losses it suffered. The sources on other regional conflicts offer tentative figures for comparison.

Based on the body count from Ologbo (of up to 44 dead plus any dead the Edo might have retrieved and any wounded who later died, putting the casualty figure at, say, 50 or 60), and assuming that there were roughly equal number of casualties at the other battle scenes: Gwato, the stockade near Sapoba, on the road up to Benin City, and with perhaps twice that number of Edo casualties at Benin City, the total Edo casualties in the Benin City Expedition would have been around 300 to 350, with further (twice as many?) wounded. ⁶⁶

The encampment where the Oba and his following took up residence after the fall of Benin City, was estimated to have held 2,000 to 3,000 people. ⁶⁷ Assuming that, say, two-thirds were combatants, the Oba’s force still in existence would have numbered up to 2,000. ⁶⁸ Presumably, at this stage, Ologbose and the other chiefs who, in contrast to the Oba, were determined to hold out, had departed with their force of perhaps a couple of hundred men (500, if we trust the news reporting through the Royal Niger Company). Adding together the numbers of dead and wounded in February 1897, the Oba’s remaining force in March that year, and that of Ologbose and the other chiefs give a sum of around 3,500.

The figures for neighboring powers are summarized in Table 2. As it shows – except for Bida, which appears to have been an especially formidable regional stronghold – no other power in the area could muster troops beyond several thousand. Unfortunately, the British sources offer little material to compare the strength of the Benin Kingdom to these other powers. Harry Johnston, former consul-general of the Niger Coast Protectorate, recollected that the most formidable opponents hindering the Protectorate’s expansion were Jaja of Opobo, Nana of Brohimi, and Oba Ovonramwen of Benin. ⁶⁹ He does not elaborate on their relative strength, but the British estimates for Jaja’s and Nana’s troops (Jaja: 4,000, Nana: 3,000 to 4,000) fall in the same range as the one proposed here for the Benin Kingdom.

Table 2. Reported strength of enemy force and enemy casualties.

^a Johnston to Salisbury, no. 18, September 28, 1887, FO 84/1828, quoted in Docherty 2021, 59, Johnston 1923, 177, cf. 181, Anene 1966, 89 suggests that the figure may have been an exaggeration to motivate an attack on Jaja.

^b Report 1895, 12, quoted in Hicks 2020, 72.

^c Kirk 1896, 21, cf. Macdonald to Foreign Office, February 4, 1895, no. 9, FO 2/83, 33 (4), Anene 1966, 168: upwards of 1,500 men returning from Akassa raid.

^d Macdonald to Hill, no. 24, May 1, FO 2/83, 244. Macdonald adds that accounts of casualties differ.

^e Kirk 1896, 2.

^f The 30,000 defenders at Bida included 9,000 to 10,000 troops from neighboring Fulah allies. There were also Bida forces which had crossed to Kabba, to the south of the river Niger. After the session of hostilities, 12,148 people crossed back to the North Niger bank (it is unclear if this figure also includes civilians). The London Gazette, June 11, 1897, 3250, 3253.

^g Vandeleur 1898, 212.

^h The London Gazette, June 11, 1897, 3254.

ⁱ The London Gazette, June 11, 1897, 3255.

^j Goldie to Denton, February 18, 1897, no. 76, enclosure, CO 879/45, 56–57. Reproduced in Newbury 1971, 148–150. Denton reported that Goldie’s estimate was far too high: Denton to Chamberlain, March 6, 1897, no. 77, CO 879/45, 57–59.

^k The London Gazette, June 11, 1897, 3255.

^l A Native Soldiers Account of the Bida and Ilorin Campaigns in Nigeria, FO 2/122, 224.

^m Milne to Consul General, January 21, 1898, enclosure 2 to no. 26, FO 2/178, 84.

ⁿ Moor to Foreign Office, January 25, 1898, no. 15, FO 2/178, 49–50.

^o Gallwey letter, December 30, 1900, FO 2/179, 40.

^p Heneker 1907, 9, Jackson 1975, 139.

Of course, all these figures in the source material are fraught with uncertainty (and require a more detailed discussion than can be given here). Hence, the proposed calculations should not be seen as providing precise numbers of Edo combatants and battle fatalities. Rather, they give an indication within which parameters to place the estimates. The suggested numbers could be either too low or too high, perhaps by as much as 50%. Nevertheless, despite the uncertainties and unknowns, it seems reasonably safe to assume that the Edo forces in February 1897 were in the thousands, and their losses in the hundreds (with perhaps additional hundreds in civilian casualties) – and that the number of Edo soldiers and deaths were certainly not in the tens of thousands.

African casualties caused by the Edo

Without relativizing or diminishing the significance of all these African lives cut short as a direct result of the British aggression, one may also consider the African lives lost in the events of January and February 1897 by the hands of the Edo; namely, among the native staff and carriers in Phillips’s expedition and the ones sacrificed in Benin City.

According to a dispatch from Consul-General Ralph Moor to the Foreign Office, out of the 222 natives in Phillips’s expedition, 124 were killed. ⁷⁰ Robert Allman, in charge of disposing of the bodies in Benin City, counted a total of between 600 and 700 bodies and skeletons. ⁷¹ This figure (which included a number of carriers in Phillips’s expedition taken captive and sacrificed in the City) might also include slaves who had died a natural death but had been left uninterred according to Edo custom. ⁷² Thus, perhaps some of the skeletal remains found did not represent human sacrifices. Although there is uncertainty about precise numbers, it seems that several hundred Africans were killed by the Edo. That is, these deaths might have been in the same region, or possibly even greater than the ones caused by the British. ⁷³

Why call attention to these lives taken and lost? One answer is that, whereas decolonial work involves breaking free from dominant Western perspectives and narrations, and bringing into focus the views and standpoints, lives and deaths of the marginalized and silenced, it also involves breaking down the division of humanity into “Westerners” and their “others.” ⁷⁴ Hence, in relation to violence and power, decolonial work cannot be limited to only paying attention to the modes of domination and violence of the “Westerners” and the victims of “Western” violence.

In this vein, Achille Mbembe – critical of attempts to simply reverse the colonial ideas of who are heroes and villains – has pointed to the idealization of the non-Western other, such as the imagining of an “innocent African” not complicit in enslaving and trading in people. ⁷⁵ Of direct relevance for the Benin case, Isidore Okpewho, questioning the hegemony of the Benin Kingdom in Nigerian historiography, suggests that it is about time to look at “the other side of the equation;” that is, to break with the glorification of great Edo kings and emperors and ask: “What about the people they destroyed in pursuit of their greatness: have they no stories of their own to tell?” Okpewho highlights the paradox of hailing the conquests and exploitation of the Benin “Empire,” castigating similar practices among European colonizers, and he reminds us of disturbing resemblances between some of the figures of the past and the “ignoble villains who continue to lead their nations to ruin in the Africa of our own day” – to which one should add: not only in Africa. ⁷⁶ Okpewho’s point is that the history of one ethnic group – in this case, the Edo – should not have precedence over other ethnic groups, who did not build famed “empires,” since this adversely affects the chances of peaceful coexistence between different ethnic groups in Nigeria today. There is also a class dimension: the perspectives of extractive rulers and ruling elites should not have precedence over those from further down the social pyramid, because this naturalizes similar exploitive hierarchies today.

The number of looted objects

The reader of The Brutish Museums is repeatedly assured that the British looted 10,000 (137, 234), or more than 10,0000 objects (8, 147, 236) in Benin City, but no evidential basis is provided for the figure. Quoting Philip Dark’s estimate “of some four thousand [looted objects] or so, or perhaps more,” ⁷⁷ Hicks adds, “we must acknowledge that the total figure of what was looted may quite possibly be 10,000 bronzes, ivories and other objects” (italics added), and that “any hope for a definite and final number is futile, since there is so much hidden in private and family collections” (136–137).

There are objects in private (and also public) collections that have escaped scholarly attention, and now and then previously undocumented objects turn up. However, that twice the number of objects estimated by Dark would still be unaccounted for after a century of research and collecting, is simply not realistic. Since the publication of The Brutish Museums, the database Digital Benin has been released online (in November 2022). The database focuses on objects made before 1897 (and hence likely looted in 1897), and at present lists 5,285 objects in public collections. It also includes some earlier objects (Benin-Portuguese ivories exported to Europe in the 16th century) and some objects postdating 1897. Privately held Benin objects and objects lost or destroyed since 1897 are not in the database. There are also uncertainties regarding the dating of some categories of Benin objects (pre- or post-1897?) and uncertainties regarding whether some pre-1897 Benin objects should be associated with the looting in 1897. ⁷⁸ How to count fragmented objects may also be discussed. Therefore, (unknown) figures should be both added to and subtracted from the database figure to get close(r) to the number of objects looted. Perhaps more objects should be added than subtracted but this must be left for further research. Yet, despite all uncertainties, Digital Benin provides a rough approximation of the extent of objects looted. Hicks’s figure of (more than) 10,000 looted Benin objects – a figure which he reiterates elsewhere as an established fact – does, like Hicks’s other figures, lack support in factual evidence. ⁷⁹

Some additional errors

Above, I have focused on a selection of errors related to The Brutish Museums’ idea about British ultraviolence and mass atrocities in Benin 1897, but careless reading of primary and secondary sources is found throughout the book’s 300 pages. Here are a few examples: The “A to Z” (155–162) of 17 “dead white” looters contains the names of 18 individuals, including two (Ralph Locke and Henry Ling Roth) who, contrary to The Brutish Museums’ claim, did not participate in the British expedition. Nor are the names entirely in alphabetical order. The questioning of the “unarmed status” (93) of Phillips’s expedition relies on ignoring all the relevant source material, which makes clear it was. This includes the proceedings of the trials held after the attack printed in the report for the Benin Territories Expedition, which is referred to in The Brutish Museums as evidence for the mass bombardment of civilian settlements. ⁸⁰ By failing to read a photo caption, a blackface performance by British soldiers is made into two performances (192, XVa). ⁸¹ The Brutish Museums assures that “we know” that the British killed 60,000 in the Matabele Wars, but provides no reference (123). The source appears to be a vastly inflated figure from Wikipedia. ⁸² In addition to these 60,000 casualties, it is suggested that “many more” were killed when King Lobengula Khumalo was attacked in April 1896. In reality, it is presumed that Lobengula died in or about January 1894.

Conclusion

The Brutish Museums has all the outward characteristics of being a well-researched and solid academic work, but a closer look reveals that it is not. The numerous errors and systematic misreading of sources resulting in wholly unsubstantiated claims about British violence and Edo casualties call its status as a scholarly work into question. It is worth further academic inquiry and discussion as emblematic of the post-truth era, where emotion, oversimplified messages, and personal opinion take precedence over evidence, but should be treated with extreme caution in any serious discussion on Benin history and the future of the Benin objects. ⁸³

Given the author’s insistence that Benin history has been fabricated, and his suggestion that this represents a projection in the Freudian sense, in that thinking and behavior one does not accept as one’s own is projected onto others (41–42), it is somewhat ironic that the portrayal of Benin history in The Brutish Museums is out of alignment with available source material. It is also ironic that the basic argumentation of The Brutish Museums (a word play on the British Museum, the archvillain in the pro-restitution camp) has much in common with that of the British Museum’s director, Neil MacGregor. Both Hicks and MacGregor pick events in history, in Macgregor’s case the founding of the museum in 1753, in Hicks’s case the conquest of Benin in 1897, and assume that what they want to believe (or want their readers to believe) characterized these events (tolerance respective mass atrocities), has endured through time in unchanged form, making the museums of today either “tolerant” (MacGregor) or “brutish” (Hicks). Both are wrong not only in their characterizations of these events but also in their simplified and essentializing view of historical causation and durations. ⁸⁴ If the display of Benin objects in Western museums today is essentially an “enduring brutality” (137), how come some diaspora Edo react with joy when visiting these displays and do not favor restitution? ⁸⁵ Do these people fail to apply Hicks’s “African thinking” (209)? Moreover, the Benin objects may be connected to a range of “enduring brutalities,” not readily amended by restitution. The metal used to cast the objects partly came from the trade in enslaved people, and the New York-based Restitution Study Group has protested against the return of these objects to slave trader heirs. ⁸⁶

Colonial history is often discomforting and there is no point in exaggerating this pain. Rachael Minott argues that “We must decolonize […] all narratives when the Black body is simply used to make a point that is equivalent to pain” and warns about “the reductive use of Black bodies as illustrative tools to forward ideological sentiments.” ⁸⁷At a seminar on The Brutish Museums, which I attended, one participant – who, I believe, to a degree self-identified with the alleged tens of thousands massacred by the British – expressed that the book was agonizing reading. This emotional reaction is probably not unique and throws (further) doubt on the “stark moral clarity” of The Brutish Museums. ⁸⁸

Globally, academia is under attack from reactionary and authoritarian quarters, with post-colonial studies being a favorite target. Unfortunately, The Brutish Museums provides an opportunity to smear all that painstaking and thoughtful research conducted on topics such as colonialism and racism. To Nigel Biggar, whose publications have the effect of questioning the academic legitimacy of post-colonial research and of mitigating the consequences of colonialism, The Brutish Museums is “a symptom of something rotten in the heart of academe.” ⁸⁹ The many errors in The Brutish Museums lend credibility to the whitewashing of colonial history and throw doubt on the integrity of the research that explores the multifaced aspects of the colonial encounter – from violence to attraction – and their enduring effects. ⁹⁰

In another sphere, The Brutish Museums is already having an impact. A video in the exhibition Benin. Looted History opened in 2021 at the Museum am Rothenbaum (MARKK), tells that “bombs and rockets contributed to the massacre of countless of civilians” and reproduces the quote from the Portsmouth Evening News reporting “hundreds of dead bodies.” The Hicksian version of events, with countless people massacred, will probably keep spreading for many years to come.

In the preface to the paperback edition, Hicks declares “I have written this book as part of doing my job” as a museum curator (xix). According to the International Council of Museums’ (ICOM) Code of Ethics, information published by a museum should be “well-founded” and “accurate” and museum publications “should not compromise the standards of the institution.” The Brutish Museums is evidently in breach of the ICOM code, and it calls for a spectrum of questions about professional conduct and institutional trustworthiness. In a time when truth itself is under attack, if the “knowledge” marketed under the banner of one of the world’s most prestigious universities and its university museum, cannot be relied on, who can be trusted?

Some further remarks on Benin objects, restitution, and the representation of history might be added. Although the distorted portrayal of historical events provided by The Brutish Museums is exceptional, it may be seen as part of a trend away from pro-British perspectives (or distortions) to pro-Edo ones. Some authors (myself included) have discussed how museum exhibitions have presented – and some still present – versions of the events of 1897, which become apologetic towards the British, by, for example, describing the British punitive expedition against Benin City as being only caused by the attack on the Phillips’s party and not relating the conquest of the Benin Kingdom to a wider context of colonial expansion. Less attention has been paid to the circumstance that some museums now err in the other direction, by referring to Phillips’s expedition as an “invasion force,” and stating that the Royal Palace in Benin City was torched deliberately. ⁹¹ These claims are also repeated in popular culture, media reporting, a parliamentary memorandum, and publications by academics and amateur historians. ⁹² Such errors may be seen as minor, but they contribute to simplified understandings of the past and risk reinforcing perceived divisions of humanity. The old trope of righteous Europeans and brute Africans is simply interchanged. The labels are switched, but the categories Westerner and African persist.

There is no denying that the restitution debates have been of enormous importance for highlighting a range of past wrongs linked to Western colonialism and Western forms of racism and their present-day legacies. But it is worth asking which aspects of the past keep slipping out of focus. In the case of Benin objects – some of which depict human sacrifices and many of which were looted from sacrificial altars – the debate regarding their future rightful ownership and physical location could, I believe, be productively interlinked with discussions regarding representation; that is, questions regarding whose, or which, perspectives are getting precedence and whose, or which, perspectives are deemed to subservience when history – and the present – is envisioned with and through these objects. ⁹³

Lastly, to stress the messiness of history and to try to bring more perspectives into focus than those that readily serve a particular position in the restitution debate is not to engage in whataboutism, or to deflect attention away from restitution (although the argument can certainly be misused in that way). ⁹⁴ It is simply to say that the issue of righting historical wrongs and their ongoing effects – including how to deal with collections brought to the West during the colonial era – is inevitably a complex discussion and process and that there is a need to strive to establish a sound factual basis for this discussion. Hopefully, more nuanced understandings of the past provide a better toolkit for addressing contemporary injustices.