The Benin Bronzes were made from the manillas used in payment for slaves. They therefore should be part of the reparations by Nigeria for those sold into slavery.
We should give them all to Dianne Abbot.
The Benin Bronzes were made from the manillas used in payment for slaves. They therefore should be part of the reparations by Nigeria for those sold into slavery.
We should give them all to Dianne Abbot.
More self hate twinned with self importance…
Exactly. Virtue-signalling self-hatred trumps the facts for these cretins.
The Oba of Benin slaughtered an unarmed British trade delegation, intended to open up Benin to economic development and wean it off slave-trading. The British responded with a punitive expedition, which the Oba tried to ward off with ritual human sacrifices. The British armed forces deposed the Oba, destroyed the slave trade and proscribed human sacrifice. There was no looting. The bronzes – made from metal obtained from the Portuguese in exchange for slaves – were legally confiscated to defray the costs of the expedition, including paying pensions to wounded servicemen, and were sold at auction in Britain.
The bronzes should remain in the UK, and, as the proceeds of slavery, be displayed with plaques detailing the huge role of many African tribal nations in the slave trade, which Britain, to its everlasting credit, abolished at great cost to itself.
“transferred to Nigeria” is a bit under-specified. Who gets them and to whom will he sell them on the fly? It’s Nigeria, for God’s sake.
…or cut out the middleman and stick them straight into the furnace.
I’m very much against these things being transferred because I saw the corruption at the various sights around Luxor. I went down into one of the tombs with my camera, respectful of what I was seeing, I had set it up to do a long shutter without flash. When a guide approached me, and “flash is OK”. Basically, give him a couple of quid and you can take photos.
I gave him some money but didn’t want to take any flash photos, but he was like “no, is OK” so I took a couple just to end our discussion. (they were bad photos – flash was too harsh anyway).
I have no doubt that these will be “in storage” almost as soon as they arrive, and then sold off by the back door.
On Ebay within months or even weeks?
Most people taking photos aren’t really looking at the results and thinking “How could I have made that better?”
They’re taking photos to show others “Look, I was there!” See the ones with heads cut off and why most people dread having someone show them their vacation photos.
Flash is an expedient, used to get around limitations as we still can’t make cameras that are as good as the human eye in some respects.
He may also have been impatient; the long exposure required might have delayed moving you along. Which meant fewer loads of people through that day and less money for him.
“They’re taking photos to show others “Look, I was there!”
Are you projecting?
They answered an email from a Nigerian prince…
Since they were paid for using the proceeds of selling slaves and depicted the faces of the slavers themselves the correct approach, as established by legal precedence, would be to throw them into Bristol Harbour.
Can a financial incentive scheme be set up to ensure they are looked after e.g. Cambridge MMA will buy an undamaged bronze back for 200k average. Obvs this will deflate over time but in the short term they might be well guarded.
Why didn’t Cambridge send them to BENIN? Were they easily tricked by a Nigerian prince?
Time to audit contents of Cambridge University Museum, and return EVERYTHING to its rightful country.
EMPTY THE MUSEUMS!
Can we also empty the University of everyone that doesn’t belong here and return them to their rightful countries?
And why stop at the universities?
Can we please start with that Olusoga cunt, smartly followed by that hysterical Indian bitch who wants to kill wipipo?
Deliciously…’Olusoga’ is a Yoruba name…and many Yoruba were slavers…
And which “hysterical Indian bitch”? There seem to be so many…
Dr Priyamvada Gopal, a Cambridge academic in English and postcolonial literature who became widely known in 2020 after tweeting “White Lives Don’t Matter. As white lives” and “Abolish whiteness” during the height of Black Lives Matter debates.
But yes, it’s a crowded field.
She’s the one who threw a wobbly and refused to teach because a porter refused to address her as Dr.
https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/15880
As A cambridge alumni I have told my college as long as she is employed by the university any fundraising efforts will fall on deaf ears.
BiND, I hadn’t realised they were the same one. Thank you.
It’s amazing that these bronze artifacts are still the most sophisticated examples of African technology.
Niggtech was always world-leading – until colonialism when…(cont’d p.97)
Overwhelming view of WHOM??? The black janitors? Marxist board members? Nigerian princes?
Bandwagon fallacy snuck thru as justification.
Wut? Benins will be SHOCKED! Nicholas Thomas may be the stupidist man who ever lived!
Have you actually looked at them ?!?!
“Have you actually looked at them ?!?!”
Like all African art, the Benin bronzes belong to the childhood of the human race.
Precisely. We keep an abstract picture our daughter painted at school when she was four. It looks like a Kandinsky.
Aye, these things can be quite funny.
When my boy was about 6, he won a national adults’ art competition. Nothing major, English Heritage or something like that, who can be relied on to be stupidly trendy.
From the judges’ description in the award, they clearly had no idea that it was painted by a child; it was pretty obvious that they thought it was an adult deliberately using a crude technique.
The artwork is crude and demonic, like most pagan art, but the metallurgy is quite sophisticated for a pre-industrial society. Lost-wax casting isn’t easy, requires a high degree of social organisation to even get to the level where men can do that for a living.
Lost wax casting is pretty basic stuff from thousands of years ago. It really is very simple. Make a wax of what you want. Cast something heat resistant & frangible around it leaving a pour hole & hole/s for the air to escape. When it’s set, heat to melt the wax out. Then pour your metal.When set, break it out of the mold.
Metallurgy would be the alloy. Unlikely to be bronze. The manillas weren’t. They’re brass CuZn not bronze CuSn. Don’t think Africa has tin ores.Bronze is the original, pre-industrial, metal.Cottage industry.
Lost wax casting is pretty basic stuff from thousands of years ago. It really is very simple.
Oh aye? How much bronze have you smelted? I bet you haven’t even tanned a hide or killed an auroch.
I generally worked with gold & silver. Since I did restoration work on Byzantine jewellery for the V&A I’ve a fairly good knowledge of the history of metal working. Reverse engineering was required to work out how they did finer filigree than you’d ever see today..
Why I know “bronzes” are never bronze. Bronze is more of an engineering metal than a sculpting metal. Needs much higher temperatures to alloy & melt.
Lost wax casting like Archimedes Principle is something will generated automatically if you start metal casting. Been repeatedly reinvented in various cultures. Many crafts are like that. Do the craft & you will inevitably discover the techniques. The craft itself teaches you them. It’s like bronze, itself. Both copper & tin were once circulating in commerce as decorative metals. Copper alone was used initially for tools but is far too soft to produce durable blades. At some point in history somebody remelted an article containing both metals & got a surprise result.
BiS, Arsenical Copper artefacts are actually pretty hard, and were known. The “Iceman” had a knife made of the stuff. But whether it was because of natural occurring native copper/Arsenic (or mixed ores) or a deliberate blend we simply don’t know.
Most modern ‘art’ is “crude and demonic”, too.
They’ll end up in some local bigwig’s house, assuming they don’t just get scattered and melted down.
We need to introduce genuine punishments for museum curators who disperse the collections they’ve been entrusted with for current and future generations. As in, if you start handing the exhibits away based on fashionable leftism, you are treated in the same way a trustee who dishonestly disposes of minors’ funds.
The entire charity sector also, it’s a far left swamp of bad intentions and misuse of charitable status. Many such cases with our “institutions”
In both cases, it’s about government funding. Once you live off government money, government becomes your master.
It’s like The Daily Mash was gelded once it worked for the BBC. It’s just following the same narrative now.
French museums are generally really good, because they’re supported by local government who see them as a way to get tourists and not much else. You don’t have that sense of a message being pushed on you. No-one is trying to slot in that there was one black bloke at the Battle of Hastings.
Agreed. Criminal charges are in order.
You’re all bigots. I think it’s essential we return these African cultural icons to Africa.
So important, in fact, that we cannot risk transporting them all at once or by air. They should go one at a time by ship; large ships capable of handling rough seas. Each ship carrying a bronze should be accompanied by five similar decoy ships to minimise piracy risk. To further security, each ship (including decoys) should carry ten thousand guards at a minimum. For maximum safety and respect it is clear that the guards should be African. These guardians should escort the artifacts all the way to their new display areas and be barracked with their families for an extended and indefinite period to ensure a long lasting secure arrangment. Ample cash and fruit can be provided. Mostly fruit.
As soon as this process has begun, our museums should be stripped of all examples of horrendous cultural looting, and similar operations setup to safely and securely return them to their place of origin. Special care and urgency should be applied to those stolen from the Indian subcontinent, and it is only correct that items with an Islamic context should have triple guard.
For reparations, we should donate senior museum personel to provide full professional assistance to the new wards.
Ample cash and fruit can be provided. Mostly fruit.
I recall beads seemed to work, before.
Yes…. And they used to be pretty valuable…
If only because they were produced in pretty specific places and could not be got anywhere else because [secret] and [distance of travel].
No doubt there’s a Funny Name for it in Economics. Same for the *need* for Wimminfolk ( and some cultures menfolk) to *have* those rare, “unique” bits of Bling, Because They’re There….
Beads and Mirrors have *always* been a stable staple of barter trade..
In fact… one “incarnation” of my 800-1000 AD historical kit is “Rich Bastard”.
And not because of the fabrics, but because my buttons and toggles and doodads are matching beads..
And the fun bit is… They’re actual historical finds… roughly 1400 years old..
Because the things were produced in batches, probably during the winter, and then Stored… To limit supply and keep their value up…
Of course stuff Happened over time, and some of those Stores have been found recently in central Europe.. Quite a lot of them actually…
Dropping the modern value of actual documented archeological post-Roman glass beads to the point ( 3-4 euro apiece) where I can afford to use them the way they were supposed to be.. Bling on Clothes.
And no doubt there’s an Economic Principle or two behind the Rise and Fall of the value of those beads as well….
But please…don’t diss Beads and Mirrors… They’ve had actual, practical value for a *long* time….
“For reparations, we should donate senior museum personel to provide full professional assistance to the new wards”
Now that sounds like a good plan. Including some of the museum’s Board members / Trustees or whatever, so that they can help set up appropriate governance arrangements.
They should be shipped out for at least a couple of years to make sure everything is suitable for these valuable objects, and we shouldn’t sent the objects back until after that, to ensure the objects’ safety.
Talking of safety, it would of course be utterly inappropriate colonial violence to provide any local security for the seconded staff.
Phillips bigotry of low expectations shines through. Victorian Britain would have seen these artifacts as primitive, just as we do.
And, yes, it was a place of barbarity. That’s the reason for the punitive raid in the first place.
Why are the two outriders holding their cocks?
I’m looking forward to these same people blaming the West when either Boko Haram or ISIWAP loot theses treasures or more likely destroy them as ‘Unislamic’ – as with earlier posts, every person involved in the decision has to be dismissed, with their pension liquidated. Treason (which to be frank is what this is) cannot be rewarded
Treason? Yes.
With the commies, the issue is never the issue. Thomas’ goal is not the restoration of artifacts, it is the destruction of British history.
And there’s a decent chance of Islamic nutters doing exactly that. Remember those Buddhas in Afghanistan.