The platform systematically documents where objects are located and addresses colonial violence. In doing so, it follows the logic of what Sarr and Savoy call the reversal of responsibility: it shifts the focus from the question “Why should Edo objects be returned?” to “Why is a European museum allowed to keep them?” At the same time, a linguistic analysis shows that many object descriptions remain framed within colonial interpretive structures. This reversal of responsibility exposes institutional accountability but does not automatically challenge the epistemic logic of the descriptions. In this tension lies both the provocation and the methodological limitation: political justice versus scholarly precision.
The reversal of responsibility is an effective tool for highlighting colonial power structures and shifting moral responsibility. However, it is not a historically neutral instrument. Using it as a purely empirical analytic tool risks overgeneralizing a majority of social interactions. Seen as a normative instrument, it can function as a radical, decolonial lever—and precisely therein lies its problem.
The platform claims to investigate where Benin bronzes are today. It names their violent seizure during the British invasion of 1897 and integrates Edo designations, oral histories, and African perspectives on a larger scale than before. Yet what is excluded are the objects that remain in private collections. This omission reproduces a colonial logic, which museums have maintained since their establishment as centers of cultural authority.
While colonial ownership is critically addressed with regard to museums, there is little attention paid to the sheer number of objects in private hands or how they are treated outside cultural institutions.
The language of Digital Benin remains deeply embedded in the colonial thinking of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The platform decolonizes access to knowledge regarding museums, but not the way that knowledge is linguistically produced.
Decolonization on the platform appears primarily as a question of ownership and provenance. The disclosure of the routes by which objects reached Europe focuses exclusively on museums. True decolonization means more than transparency about museum holdings. It also requires critical engagement with the categories, terms, and interpretive frameworks used to describe objects. This is another weak point of Digital Benin.
This is especially evident in descriptions of the human body. For figures such as Okhuo or Ibierugha, it is noted that they are young, unmarried women because they are naked or wear only a girdle. This reasoning follows a colonial logic, in which African bodies are considered immediately “readable.” Nudity is interpreted morally and socially, while complex ritual or symbolic meanings are reduced to biological or sexual significance. These interpretations do not derive from Edo knowledge systems but from 19th-century European ethnography.
A similar problem arises with the description of the Eseiku figures. Here, Western medical terms such as dwarfism or genetic conditions become the primary frame of reference. The body is pathologized before its social, ritual, or cosmological significance is seriously considered. Although Digital Benin references oral traditions from Edo, these are often treated as supplementary, while European scholarship retains authority. This reinforces a hierarchy of knowledge that continues colonial structures.
Social roles are also often explained through European analogies. Figures described as court jesters or attendants rely on European social models projected onto the Benin court. The court jester is not a universal category but a specific European figure. Its application is less about understanding local structures and more about translating the unfamiliar into familiar European terms. That such attributions remain, even in a more cautious form, shows the persistence of colonial interpretation.
Additionally, the use of Eurocentric art-historical terms, such as portrait, master, or perspective according to European conventions, sets European art history as the implicit standard. Benin art is then considered particularly remarkable when it aligns with European notions of individuality, naturalism, or spatial representation. This reproduces a hierarchy in which Europe remains the norm, and African art is measured against it.
The central contradiction of Digital Benin is thus clear. The platform critiques colonial expropriation by Western museums but largely retains colonial modes of thought and language. It challenges colonial museum ownership but does not consistently challenge colonial knowledge.
Language is far from incidental. It structures perception, assigns meaning, and determines whose knowledge counts. As long as Benin objects are explained using terms derived from colonial ethnography, European medicine, or Western art history, colonial authority remains effective, even within a project with a decolonial aim focused on a specific area—namely, museum collections.
A more thorough decolonization would mean taking Edo knowledge systems not just as a reference, but as the starting point for descriptions. It would openly acknowledge uncertainties rather than masking them with seemingly objective formulations and would critically examine, rather than uncritically adopt, European categories.
Digital Benin demonstrates how deeply colonial thinking is embedded in language and knowledge structures. Decolonization does not end with databases or provenance records. It begins where we learn to speak differently, explain differently, and think differently—on all levels, both in the public spaces of museums and in private collections, which usually remain invisible to the wider public.
footnote
wj“ After you visited the National Museum in Bamako and its storage, what did you do?”
bs “I sat in the museum park—I didn’t know anyone in Bamako.”
wj “Yes, you should have called me, and we could have gone to the N’Golonina market and experienced another side of culture…”