Benin City’s $26mn Museum of West African Art — and why it was hit by protests

The red rammed-earth walls of the new Museum of West African Art (Mowaa) in Benin City, southern Nigeria, echo Benin Kingdom’s medieval ramparts. Those mammoth earthworks begun in the ninth century — now overgrown ruins — were an engineering feat in a civilisation renowned for its artists. Their direct heirs thrive in the bronze-casting guilds of Igun Street, a Unesco world heritage site entered through an arch, past plantain carts, near the museum.

Mowaa, a more-than-$26mn flagship cultural institution five years in the making, is styled as a campus, with a welcome pavilion and public garden. A low building with scalloped edges and panoramic windows houses the 48,000 sq ft Mowaa Institute, with state-of-the-art conservation labs, storage facilities and exhibition spaces. Designed by Adjaye Associates in the heart of the Edo state capital, great pains have been taken to ensure that it chimes with vernacular architecture.

Yet events in the run-up to the planned opening of Mowaa’s first building on November 11 have highlighted competing pressures in a region sorely lacking art infrastructure. Underlying the friction between its global outlook and some local expectations is the question of what restitution might mean for those recouping what they so brutally lost.

I was inside the museum three weeks ago when an international preview of the Mowaa Institute had to be abandoned. The Institute’s director, Ore Disu, was telling an invited audience: “We don’t want a citadel on the hill, distant and detached, but a tree rooted in local history.” She was interrupted by shouts from up to 30 local protesters, supporters of the Oba (King) of Benin who see Mowaa as a rival to his own planned museum and as disrespecting his traditional authority. Despite armed police, they had entered the compound, some battering on auditorium windows with cudgels. This followed a demonstration at the Edo state legislature four days earlier opposing Mowaa’s opening. About 200 guests (including the EU and German ambassadors) were ushered to safety within the Institute before receiving assurances from the state police commissioner. An hour or two later, we were escorted off campus. The public unveiling was postponed.

The abortive preview made headlines far beyond Nigeria, sparking fears that it could set back restitution and deter foreign investment. “What happened, even by Nigerian standards, was extraordinary,” Phillip Ihenacho, founding director of Mowaa, tells me at the museum, saying staff were manhandled and the gift shop looted. “The whole nation was embarrassed.” Nigeria’s president Bola Ahmed Tinubu appointed a presidential committee to resolve the dispute.

Mowaa’s birth coincided, perhaps awkwardly, with the drive for restitution. From the outset, Ihenacho says, “we were a museum of modern and contemporary art that hoped to showcase some Benin Bronzes and demonstrate that Nigeria was capable of conserving to a western standard.” From late 2021, when the Oba of Benin, Ewuare II, stated that he wanted to establish a Benin Royal Museum, “we made clear we didn’t have claims to restituted objects.” The federal government has recognised the Oba of Benin as the custodian of the so-called Benin Bronzes — thousands of artefacts looted from the Oba’s palace during the British punitive expedition of 1897.

The museum dropped the prefix “Edo” from its name, but “misperceptions” about its laying claim to the Benin Bronzes persisted, fuelled by a change of state governor a year ago and differences with the palace. The pro-palace protesters demanded that Mowaa be named the Benin Royal Museum following allegations about the diversion of funds from that project (which Ihenacho denies). Invoking the spectre of 1897, the Oba lamented that history was repeating itself.

Ihenacho, a Lagos-born financier and Harvard Law School graduate, makes clear, “We’re a charitable trust.” The German, French and Danish governments are donors, along with the Mellon, Getty and Ford foundations, with $2mn from Edo state and $8mn from Nigerian corporates. His philanthropic interest in “creative incubation” chimed with the former Edo governor’s vision of a Benin City cultural district as the “Florence of Africa”.

The impressive opening display in Mowaa’s atrium re-centres west Africa in world history, from a 15th-century bronze archer and a terracotta leopard to the “Catalan Atlas”, a 1375 map on loan from France that centres Malian gold in the medieval global economy. Heritage works (none restituted) are from Nigeria’s National Museums under a blanket loan agreement. There are interactive displays and videos of bronze-casters. According to Disu, these “bridge collections and living memory with artisans”.

Mowaa could also learn from memory museums. The site was part of the burned royal enclosure replaced by British colonial buildings. The British Museum secured $4mn for a pre-construction dig, Ihenacho says. “We found gin bottles and swords, and black soot from the fire — clear evidence of what happened in 1897.” Built on a site of trauma, it is not surprising that the museum can spark mistrust as well as pride.

For Azu Nwagbogu, founding director of LagosPhoto festival, the aim of restitution is a “reversal of epistemicide” — the destruction of entire knowledge systems embodied in pillaged artefacts. Having toured colonial-era museums across west Africa, he argues for the need to “leapfrog” failed obsolete western models. Earlier, the artist Yinka Shonibare, a member of Mowaa’s Artist Council, told me, “There’s an inherited trauma with cultural artefacts being removed from you . . . Many of us have been educated to think of ritual objects as less than western artefacts. So we have to re-educate ourselves to understand them.”

With its work cut out, Mowaa has tremendous backing from Nigerian artists — even if some I spoke to were critical of holding an international preview before local audiences were won over. It was timed for Nigeria’s burgeoning November art season, with LagosPhoto (now biennial) marking 15 years, and the fair ART X Lagos marking 10. “Our public programming is what you’d expect in a museum,” ART X founding director Tokini Peterside-Schwebig told me. This year saw groundbreaking art-fair exhibitions on Nigerian modernist Bruce Onobrakpeya and the late photographer JD ’Okhai Ojeikere. Lagos galleries, too, mount museum-quality shows, such as a stunning survey of the 1960s Osogbo School of Art at kó gallery. Artists step up to fill gaps. Shonibare’s GAS Foundation residency in Lagos — whose library was a key resource for Tate Modern’s Nigerian Modernism show — is proving an intellectual powerhouse.

Boosting such ad hoc infrastructure, the Mowaa Institute that Disu shows me around is a “centre of excellence and training to support collections in Nigeria and museums across west Africa.” With more than 45 staff — mostly Nigerian — it was long at work before moving in seven months ago. Staff conserved paintings for the Tate show, including by Ben Enwonwu, and the National Gallery in Lagos. A collection will grow, starting with boxfuls of Nigerian editions of Drum magazine.

For Aindrea Emelife, Mowaa’s curator of modern and contemporary art, the fracas proved “museums are not just stale repositories; art is emotional memory.” The inaugural exhibition, Nigeria Imaginary: Homecoming (now postponed), expands the Nigerian Pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale, which Mowaa created. Inspired by the Mbari Club, an artistic laboratory founded after independence in 1960, the show is a reminder that contemporary artists, nourished by repatriated heritage, are also key to reinterpreting it. Tunji Adeniyi-Jones’s “Homecoming” (2025), a ceramic-tile mural in the curved library, draws on Yoruba cosmology while its sinuous crimson figures recall Mbari modernism. The exhibition culminates in Shonibare’s “Monument to the Restitution of the Mind and Soul” (2024), an installation of terracotta sculptures representing 152 looted objects from Benin, mostly still in Britain.

At the National Museum Benin City, I found a low-tech yet momentous show of artefacts repatriated from Germany, the Netherlands and the US. Restitution in Motion: An exhibition of Benin Bronzes returned from around the world, was on this month in a circular gallery, with exquisite bronze heads, plaques and a beaded ivory mask of Queen Idia. Opposite, a brand-new concrete storage facility and gallery for restituted objects, built by Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments, is named after Oba Ovonramwen, deposed in 1897. The museum curator, Mark Olaitan, expressed a quiet joy at handling these ancestral works — a reminder that restitution entails a rebalancing sense of justice.

But for some from Benin, the returns have stirred mixed emotions. “The kingdom survived the British onslaught. But have we healed?” the artist and writer Victor Ehikhamenor asks me in the Black Muse Sculpture Park he inaugurated this month just north of Benin City. “The fanfare of the return offended me.” Yet for Ehikhamenor, also on Mowaa’s Artist Council, the month’s fraught events are “teething problems; Benin will take 10 museums because it thrives on art.”

wearemowaa.org; ‘Osogbo’ runs at kó gallery until January 10 2026, ko-artspace.com; ‘Today, Tomorrow, the Moon Will Still Be’ runs at Black Muse Sculpture Park until March 14 2026, angelsandmuse.org

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