Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum

This guide to the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne starts with a small bronze plaque behind glass, cast by craftsmen of the Kingdom of Benin and once hung in the royal palace of the Oba in what is now Nigeria. It follows the British soldiers who stormed that palace in February 1897, burned the city, and shipped its treasury of bronzes and ivory back to Europe to be auctioned and scattered, some eventually bought piece by piece into this museum's collection over the following decades. For more than a century the plaques sat catalogued simply as art, until a formal reckoning between Cologne and Nigeria reopened the question of who they truly belonged to. Look closely at the relief work before you move on to the rest of the gallery.