A photo from the 1930s showing the return of Benin royal coral regalia has long been misinterpreted as an act of colonial restitution. In reality, the British officials were low-ranking, the items were likely bought, not looted, and their return was probably a private transaction rather than act of symbolic justice.
Thanks to the account of a Nigerian chief, who died in 1972, we also learn more about how the three items went missing. In his memoirs, Osula names a certain “Miller”.
The Glasgow hat maker Alexander Miller had long-standing business ties in West Africa and was involved in several trading ventures, one of which later became the United Africa Company (UAC). When he died in 1922, he left his family a sizable fortune of £1.2 million.
His son, George Munro Miller, was working at UAC in 1935 — by then part of the Unilever conglomerate — which had amassed a significant collection of West African artefacts, housed at their recently constructed London headquarters.
The company planned to donate the collection to the British Museum, whose German-born curator, Hermann Justus Braunholtz, expressed great interest. Braunholtz was especially keen on the three coral objects, but they did not belong to UAC — they were privately owned by Miller junior. The wealthy heir agreed to lend them to the museum on a long-term basis, where, as Braunholtz noted, they would be safely preserved for posterity.
It is highly unlikely that Ovonramwen’s grandson, Akenzua II, demanded the return of Miller’s coral pieces in the 1930s as an act of “restitution”.
Dr. Audrey Peraldi, curator at the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, wrote in a 2017 scholarly article about Akenzua’s 1935 appeal to Lord Plymouth for help in reacquiring two royal stools.
The Oba was even willing to pay for the pieces. There was no talk at all of a “demand” for restitution. The British tried their best, but the effort failed due to the refusal of the Berlin Ethnological Museum, which then housed the stools, to part with them.
