4 years after the project was announced, the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) opened its first building – the Institute – in the heart of Benin City (formerly Edo in Nigeria, not to be confused with the Republic of Benin) on November 4. The Institute of approximately 4,000 m2 is part of a museum complex, designed by Adjaye Associates, still under construction.
The MOWAA, organized like a campus, will extend over nearly 6 hectares and include several exhibition spaces linked together by memorial gardens and places for performances. “This plan is inspired by the historic Benin City, where guilds and entrepreneurial communities were integrated into the ancient walled complex” says Ore Disu, director of the MOWAA Institute in The Guardian.
The Institute constitutes the nodal point of the campus. Built of red clay (a symbolic material in the city’s architecture), the building is located inside the ancient moat of the Kingdom of Benin. It includes a 100-seat auditorium, conference rooms, conservation laboratories and a bookstore. Two galleries are adjacent to the Institute. The atrium, scheduled to open in 2025, will serve as an exhibition space for archaeological remains and historical treasures. The second gallery will be used for temporary exhibitions.
Among the other buildings that will see the light of day in the next year or two is the Rainforest Gallery which should have an area of 1,400 m2: a venue for larger presentations of contemporary art within a tropical forest replanted.
The cost of the campus is $100 million, says Mowaa director Phillip Ihenacho. So far, the museum has raised nearly $20 million. These donations come from Edo State (where Benin City is located), the German and Nigerian governments, the Open Society and Ford Foundations, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, the Gerda Henkel Foundation. Most recently, the Mellon Foundation donated $3 million.
The museum will not receive the bronzes that Germany returned to Nigeria in 2022. However, this is what was planned for 2021: “ Nigeria wants to build a new museum to display the precious bronzes. The future building should emerge from the ground at the end of 2024 in Benin City (Edo State) “. This is due to the legal confusion surrounding the ownership of these assets. The former Nigerian president had transferred the ownership rights of the looted items in 1897 from the Edo Kingdom to the Oba (monarch), Ewuare II.
But the Oba’s intentions are unclear. Germany no longer has the certainty that the bronzes will one day be exhibited to the public. Phillip Ihenacho chose to focus on other challenges, such as defining what it means to be an African museum in the 21st century. For its part, the Republic of Benin (a former French colony called Dahomey) is building a museum to exhibit the goods taken during the colonial period and returned by France in 2021.
