The Return of the Queen Mother?

Art and Agency in Nigeria

Abstract

Within the vast collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met), there is a displaced woman sequestered away. In being located some five-thousand miles from her homeland of what is now Benin City, her cast brass eyes have glimpsed the outside world through exhibition only twice within the last thirty years.1 She is the brass and iron representation of an Iyoba (Fig 1, Fig 2, Fig 3), a mother to the Oba (King) of the Benin Kingdom and a politically and ritually prominent figure in her own right.2 Yet, before this entombment in an American museum, her still eyes had seen the royal lineage of her court revered. She had seen women of the same high title flex their powers as only second to the king.