It is appropriate to begin any inquiry into Benin’s history with reverence, and so I gesture toward Osanobua – the Supreme Being in Edo cosmology – whose presence is invoked not as ornament but as a reminder that the spiritual, historical, and political have always intersected here.¹
This invocation is my entry point: not merely as a Nigerian, but as an artist and researcher invested in what I call spiritual provenance, a way of understanding that centres rituals, metaphysical histories, and ancestral charge. While Western provenance prioritises documentation, materiality, and carbon dating, spiritual provenance asks:
- Which ceremonies consecrated these objects?
- To which ancestors or deities were the treasures dedicated? What cosmic role did they serve?
- When such objects are uprooted, the ‘Benin Treasures’, a phrase used by art historian and member of the Benin Royal Family, Professor Peju Layiwola, embracing the famed bronzes, ivory, iron, textile, metal, wood and other materials, their spiritual ecology is disturbed, and that disturbance matters.²
To speak of restitution without acknowledging these spiritual biographies is to sever cultural artefacts from their essence. And to speak of “progress” without asking who defines it is also to ignore how deeply power, history, and tradition remain entangled in these debates.³
Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, Monument to the Restitution of the Mind and Soul
No conflict illustrates this rupture more clearly than the crisis surrounding what was once promised as the Benin Royal Museum, later rebranded as Legacy Restoration Trust/Edo Museum of West African Art/Museum of West African Art (LRT/EMOWAA/MOWAA), and the deep fracture between the Oba of Benin and the Obaseki family—a lineage entangled in the colonial history of 1897.⁴
During the British invasion, Chief Agho Obaseki, a high-ranking palace official, collaborated with the British, who elevated him to the rank of “paramount chief,” granting him administrative authority over Edo governance and palace affairs.⁵ Many Edo people accused him of betraying the Oba.⁶ This legacy is often invoked in debates about Godwin Nogheghase Obaseki, who governed Edo State from November 2016 to November 2024.⁷
