Leipzig: recast slave money | Sächsische.de

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With Matthias Autobus

Mail from the United States is said to have arrived a few days ago at Léontine Meijer-van Mensch, director of the State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony (SES) and the Free State of Saxony. The sender is Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, a defender of the descendants of American slaves.

The two ethnological museums in Dresden and Leipzig have 263 metal sculptures, dignitaries, and carved ivory works from Benin. The historic kingdom is now part of the West African Federal Republic of Nigeria as the Edo State. The Saxon cabinet decided to return on 12 July. The SES and the Dresden State Art Collections (SKD) are currently working on a technical model for the details of the contract with Nigeria, Ministry of Culture spokesman Jörg Förster said on Monday. He is not aware of the receipt of the letter. The director of the ethnological museums was informed of the receipt of the letter, but he had not yet been able to deal with it due to lack of time.

Stop to contracts at the last minute

Farmer-Paellmann would like to terminate this and other contracts at the last minute. Recipients are also other German ethnological collections with large funds from Benin. The lawyer has a reason for this: metal castings are made of a material that Europeans have mistaken for slaves since the 16th century. There is nothing less than slave money recast in this African courtesan art admired around the world. Generations of heirs to the Benin throne have granted it. In return, they had people captured in the conquered territories and sold them to European traders, who in turn shipped them to the American colonies. The lawyer cites evidence from the specialist literature, which the Benin royal family tries to downplay in his magnificent volume “The Benin Monarchy” published in 2018. Therefore, according to Farmer-Paellmann, the bronzes do not belong at all to the king of Benin, who is a direct descendant of the black slave hunters of the time. “93 percent of African Americans belong to all of us, including the descendants of enslaved people,” the letter reads. Most of the 40 million black Americans are therefore descended from slaves, 12 million of whom landed on the shores of the United States in the 19th century. Contemporary documents and more recent genetic analyzes serve as the basis for these figures.

Those who argue in this way are themselves descendants of West African slaves. Part of their DNA can be located in the territory of Benin. Farmer-Paellmann’s nonprofit New York institution, the Restitution Study Group, founded in 2000, encouraged former slavery recipients to donate several million dollars to black American education and social services through foundations . These include banking houses such as JP Morgan Chase or Bank of America, railway companies and tobacco companies.

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The busy justice fighter was surprised by the signing of a contract in Berlin last week. It is the prelude to further repatriations of the German collections of all 1,100 Benin objects from 20 museums: the president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK), Hermann Parzinger and the Nigerian director general of the National Monuments and Museums Commission (NCMM), Abba Tijani, legally signed the agreement for the transfer of ownership of 514 objects from the Ethnological Museum of Berlin and the Berggruen Museum. The loans limited Nigeria to 40 exhibits for just ten years. This makes it the largest transfer of ownership of non-European collectibles from a single museum to ever take place anywhere in the world.

This was preceded by the signing of a simple declaration of intent on 1 July by Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and Culture Minister Claudia Roth and their Nigerian counterparts at the Federal Foreign Office. Due to federalism, however, the federal government cannot decide on return on its own, although all museums with Benin holdings have found a consensus on this in political talks since 2019. The pioneering role of the SPK can probably be explained by the Roth’s role as chairman of the board of trustees.

At the federal foreign ministry, the culture minister said that Germany was “changing its blindness to the colonial past. As a federal government and as a country, we want to deal with the legacy of our colonial past ”. However, Farmer-Paellmann doesn’t believe in rulers. Therefore, he simultaneously addresses his letter to Roth and Baerbock: “If you have a genuine interest in human rights and justice in relation to these relics, you will agree with us that the Benin bronze transfer agreements must be invalidated and with the descendants of the slaves “. Co-ownership must be established. “But unlike Baerbock, who said it was wrong to take the bronzes and keep them, the Paellmann farmer wishes:” We want most of the Benin bronzes to remain in Western museums, so that the our children have access to them for education, work and business opportunities. “Unlike German politicians, the descendant of slaves sees the year 1897 as less associated with the sacking of the palace by British soldiers and the sale of bronzes to Germany. Rather , for her, the punitive action ended 300 years of slavery and human sacrifice by the Kingdom of Benin, as she had written a few weeks earlier to the Horniman Public Museum in London, also willing to return.

Involved in the slave trade

He sees a special responsibility for Germany in continuing to present the artifacts to the public. Investigations into the materials would have revealed the copper of the resin which dates back to the 16th and 17th centuries, when the Principality of Brandenburg was involved in the slave trade for nearly 35 years through its colony of Groß-Friedrichsburg in present-day Ghana. Further analysis could reveal even more trade routes, Farmer-Paellmann said in his letter to England. But this search would no longer be possible if the bronzes disappeared in the Benin palace. But that’s exactly what it looks like at the moment, as Nigerian museum director Tijani has already announced. He punctuated his words with two individual returns to the king, although he had previously taken them from British universities to the state of Nigeria.

For Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, the disappearance of bronzes from Western museums would also be bitter personally: she, her German husband and their children would no longer be able to see their cultural heritage there in the Museum of World Cultures during their stays in Frankfurt are the principal. She claims: “We have no access to relics in Nigeria. We do not have dual citizenship and traveling there is extremely dangerous and expensive ”.

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