Launched in November 2022, Digital Benin isn’t necessarily a new digital project, but it is an important one that continues to shift how we understand and access African cultural heritage, in this case cultural objects from the Kingdom of Benin (present-day Nigeria).
At first glance, it’s an aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly interface that showcases more than 5,000 artifacts looted from Benin during a notorious 1897 British military campaign, an enduring symbol of colonial violence and theft. While this alone would make the project a valuable resource, a great strength of the project lies in how it highlights connections: between museum-held objects and their places of origin, between Western classifications and indigenous Edo terminology, between archival documents and the Benin objects themselves. It’s not just a database, but a dynamic tool for recontextualizing history.
Digital Benin connects the global locations of Benin artifacts across 130 institutions in 21 countries, most of which were looted during the colonial period and are now located in Western museums. Each object record includes high-resolution images, metadata, provenance information and translations in both English and Edo. Notably, you can trace how looted items moved from British soldiers in 1897, through art dealers and collectors, and into major museum collections.
One of the most powerful aspects of the project is the “Ẹyo Otọ” section that highlights the Edo object classification system. Instead of relying on Western museum categories (like “pottery” or “bronze”), Digital Benin introduces a controlled vocabulary based on Edo knowledge systems. For example, you’ll notice distinct categories like Akhẹ Amẹ (water pot) or Akhẹ Osun (Osun shrine pot). These designations reflect the original, indigenous understanding and use of the object.
The design of the site is equally impressive, with extensive documentation on the project development, data acquisition and management, and the Edo controlled vocabulary. The Italian studio Calibro, known for projects like the open source data visualization tool RAWGraphs and The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive, built custom visual tools and interfaces for the site.
Good design intersects with dynamic function in the “Paper Trails” section of the project, which connects the individual Benin objects to archival documents like letters, catalogues, photographs and newspaper clippings that mention them. You can click through the documents, read transcriptions and follow specific objects as they are referenced over time.
A unique strength of Digital Benin is its overall approach to this work. The project is led by Nigerian and international scholars, deeply grounded in local knowledge, oral traditions and indigenous frameworks. It models a powerful kind of digital restitution by not just returning information to descendant communities, but empowering them to define how that knowledge is structured and shared. This value is embedded into the project as a whole, shaping everything from the site’s design and data organization to its commitment to centering Edo perspectives and reclaiming cultural authority.
See more resources in our library catalog:
Abungu, George Okello, and Webber Ndoro. Cultural Heritage Management in Africa: The Heritage of the Colonized. London: Routledge, 2022.
Coombes, Annie E. Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. Yale University Press, 1994.
Falola, Toyin. Britain and Nigeria: Exploitation or Development? London ; Zed, 1987.
Hicks, Dan. The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. London: Pluto Press, 2020.
Ogbechie, Sylvester Okwunodu. Making History: African Collectors and the Canon of African Art : The Femi Akinsanya African Art Collection. Milan, Italy: 5 Continents Editions, 2011.
Phillipe, Nora. Restitution?: Africa’s Fight for its Art. Paris: Cinétévé, 2021.
Phillips, Barnaby. Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes. London: Oneworld, 2021.
Troelenberg, Eva-Maria, Damiana Oțoiu, and Felicity Bodenstein. Contested Holdings: Museum Collections in Political, Epistemic and Artistic Processes of Return. New York: Berghahn Books, 2022.