De'Adria Farmer-Pellman

In 2022, I saw an article in the New York Times that the Smithsonian would be returning the bronzes. I was quite shocked.

The moral claim is that the bronzes, for us, are the embodiment of our enslaved ancestors. And they are the source of our education about who we are.

I have Isan DNA. And by the way, anyone listening to this program that has Isan DNA from their ancestors who were enslaved are literally coming from the Benin Kingdom.

Their justification was that they were looted, that they were stolen artifacts. They had been taken by colonizers.

These are very expensive relics. The value of the bronzes is something people don't like to talk about. One overhead sold not long ago for about 12 million U.S. dollars.

So, you know, I sent them documentation, not just, you know, from all of the scholars around bronzes, but from their own website and their own publications.

Part of this whole effort is to ensure that we have access to these relics so that we can learn our history. The willingness to sit and work together is about sharing cross-cultural education and just ending what essentially is a war. You know, it hasn't ended yet. It won't end until we sit down together and we work together and heal.

The Benin Kingdom would use the guns to raid villages to steal people and sell them.

I'm executive director of the Restitution Study Group, and we fight for reparations for descendants of enslaved Africans globally.

The Benin Kingdom required that the Portuguese pay for human captives with these manilas. And roughly at the beginning of their trading, you could buy an enslaved captive for seven manilas. Probably towards the end, a male would cost 57 manilas, a female would cost 50.