The debate on the return and restitution of cultural properties to their countries of origin has been simmering for over half a century now. Curators, scholars, cultural entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts have picked up the cause of restoring looted African arts to the continent, in ways that resonate beyond former African colonies and Europe.Footnote ¹ When French President Emmanuel Macron called for a return of Africa's heritage back to the continent, he merely contributed to an ongoing restitution movement and opened the way for objects stolen and looted during the colonial era to be returned from many Western countries. The Benin Bronzes represent an exceptional example in the restitution debate when viewed in the light of how the objects were acquired and subsequently circulated throughout Europe. Scholars like Elizar Barkan have long argued that the violence with which the British conquered Benin in 1897 was exceptional and unprecedented even by imperialist standards. After the looting that followed, the treasures seized by the British soldiers became among the most highly prized of all African arts and their value remains undiminished.Footnote ²

Until recently, many people did not question the provenance of these objects, which are held in the world's leading art museums, including the British Museum in London. It was generally acceptable to believe that these objects were legally removed based on evidence provided by British imperial historians, ethnographers, and anthropologists who catered to British interests. Only recently have studies pioneered by African and Africanist scholars emerged to push back against this consensus and to bring the Benin Bronzes into the conversation about cultural restitution and reparation. Dan Hicks considers this debate in his book The Brutish Museums (the title obviously serves as a play on both the British Museum and colonial museums in general). The playful title aside, Hicks's argument is quite serious. In the book, he offers a critical reflection on the British colonial enterprise in Africa and the role played by Eurocentric voices, anthropology, and ‘world culture’ museums like the British Museum and the Oxford University's Pitt Rivers Museum in supporting and building a white collection infrastructure that needs to be questioned and dismantled if any kind of restitution is to begin.

Dan Hicks is a curator of world archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum of Anthropology and World Archaeology. He writes from the standpoint of his experience as a European and as curator. ‘I have sought to … do “research on the job”’, Hicks writes, ‘to dig into what we know, to use our specialist and sometimes esoteric technical knowledge to excavate new pasts and presents, perhaps even to seek to carve out better futures too’ (xii). The book is thus ‘written from Oxford, a self-consciously “Anglocentric” account, written to address how “British Imperial historiography catered to British interests”, especially in the case of Benin, with the conviction that European voice have a service to fulfil in the process of restitution: one of sharing knowledge of the process of cultural dispossession, and of facing up to the colonial ultraviolence, democide, and cultural destruction that characterised the British Empire in Africa’ (xiii).

Admittedly, there is nothing new about the object and subject of Hicks's book, the Benin Bronzes have been extensively researched and written about since debuting in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. What is compelling about this book is Hicks fresh perspective and analysis. He incorporates a perspective that insists on the complicity of anthropology museums as warehouses of pillaged objects (23), arguing these institutions have never been interrogated or addressed in wider debates on colonial violence, cultural dispossession, repatriation of looted objects, and cultural restitution. Hicks's perspective is intensely critical: in his study, he lays bare and deconstructs the contested roles, positions, and voices that different groups — European nations, anthropology museums, Eurocentric scholars, the British colonial administration, and curators — have played and are playing in the ongoing violence of cultural dispossession. It is rare to find such an honest, critical, reflective, and sometimes self-deprecating account of British imperialism. It is more valuable to encounter such an account written by someone who has benefitted from this imperialist legacy in his professional career and who, with this book, seeks to renounce that legacy.

Thanks to Hicks, historians, anthropologists, art historians, artists, ethnographers, and cultural enthusiasts can now trace how anthropology museums have remained complicit, by shying away from thinking about colonial violence or acting on cultural restitution. Over time this might allow us to approach bigger questions beyond return and restitution of cultural properties. Hicks exposes the function of anthropology museums as weapons and devices for the propagation of the ideology of white supremacy, a tool for legitimising, extending, and naturalising new extremes of violence within corporate colonialism (15). This in turn places a huge responsibility on the museums to offer spaces and sites for Britain — and other colonial powers by extension — to come to terms with its colonial-militarist past in a new way, as sites of conscience and restitution, reparation and reconciliation, not as defenders of the legacies of brutal colonialism and racial violence (17). The book is thoroughly researched and well written; it is a timely contribution to the ongoing debate on the cultural restitution of the Benin artefacts. Divided into eighteen chapters and an afterword, five appendixes, notes, references and index, the book is well suited for teaching and research, and should appeal to a wide audience interested in a self-critical Anglocentric perspective on the history and legacy of the British colonial enterprise in Africa.