Dan Hicks

He set out with eight other white men and with an uncertain number of servants, but perhaps over 200 carriers.

I'm professor of contemporary archaeology at the University of Oxford, curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.

They reportedly took no firearms except for revolvers, we're told, in some of the accounts.

The circumstances of how the killing comes about and the nature of that expedition, was it hostile? Was it seeking to provoke? Was it an inexperienced administrator sent off in order to provoke a response? All of that's unclear.

You know, they didn't hold back, you know, imaginative accounts as they possibly could of the blood and guts.

The idea of the city of blood was associated with Benin City.

Without a doubt, you know, this was a royal court that continued to practice forms of court slavery, almost certainly forms of human sacrifice. But these descriptions often lacked any kind of context.

And they've got barbed wire, and they've got electric lighting, and they've got all these sort of modern forms of weaponry.

I think the sheer scale of the destruction is something that's hard to get a sense of.

The fact that this was a desecration of a religious as well as a royal landscape, and that literally they burned everything to the ground. They absolutely, you know, leveled the place to the ground.

A golf course? Yeah, yeah, there's a golf course there within the first month.

So it's a chaotic three-four. They were taken back to London by soldiers and sailors and administrators. Some kept in families over generations, some sold immediately on the open market. And so within weeks, the artworks, items that were royal, sacred, ancestral art, were being bought up in Berlin, in London, in Oxford, and were being put on display. And the message was very clear.

This is a dead culture.

Who was a Liverpool trader and a banker in Lagos who donated this item to Jesus College Cambridge. The reason supposedly was the form of the cockerel or the rooster is an emblem of the college that sits there in the dining hall of Jesus College for decades.

The process of return is not something that is simply about a decision by the British Museum. or by the British government, or by the Metropolitan Museum in New York or whatever. It's about hundreds of institutions and individuals who at the moment are caring for these items and the decisions that they make. It doesn't mean that you can suddenly decolonise the museum. It doesn't work like that.

It's case by case. It takes time.