In May, 2018, the Nigerian artist Jelili Atiku shouted for help in the lobby of the Musée d’Aquitaine, in Bordeaux. “I want to go home,” he cried. “Benin. Edo . . . Take me back home!” Dressed as a bronze warrior, with limbs bound and a British flag trailing at his heels, he mimed the desperation of an artifact trapped in the museum—which he fled stripped to the waist, revealing metallically painted skin. The performance dramatized Nigeria’s long-frustrated efforts to recover the Benin Bronzes, a collection of several thousand sculptures seized, in 1897, during the British sack of Benin City. Today, they’re dispersed among more than a hundred collections, with the greatest number kept at the British Museum.
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