Heritage Management and Community Engagement: The Story of the National Museum, Benin City, Nigeria

Heritage management is essential to the preservation of a people’s tangible and intangible culture. The heritage of a people may change over time or become extinct in the absence of conscious preservation, as is evident with many African cultures. Central to the preservation of heritages, is the engagement of communities in a dynamic process of continuity. The Great Benin kingdom engineered this process with the institution of the guild system, which served the royal court of the Oba (king). Although the guild is no longer practised strictly as court art today, the system is preserved as community art centres run by descendants of the ancient guild. Artisans in Benin City, play an important role as custodians of the culture and system, while the National Museum, Benin City houses some of the important relics of the Benin kingdom. This article looks at the history of the National Museum, and the structure in place for heritage preservation. It also examined the role played by Igun bronze casters who are important custodians of the arts and culture of the Benin kingdom. The study is qualitative research that relied on historical content and ethnographic methods, interviews and online publications for its data. Much of the ethnographic data was collected while the researcher was engaged in fieldwork in Benin City. His observation of the Benin guild workers, informal interviews and visits to the National Museum, Benin City are important parts of the data. Data collected were evaluated from observation assessment, text and interview analysis. The findings are presented within the general content of the essay. The study concludes that, although the National Museum, Benin City is an institutionalized heritage management organ of government, the preservation and continuity of important aspects of the tangible and intangible heritages of the Benin kingdom is been done also by the bronze casters who have continued with the ancient culture of bronze casting. This synergy, though informal, is a significant module, which may be adopted by other museums with similar structures.