Few governments have enacted general return policies. Only a handful of objects have actually been restituted, despite thousands of outstanding requests. Yet there are also rumblings of a backlash. Museums rise across Africa to welcome the prodigals, from the cities of Benin to Benin City, Nigeria, where plans have been announced for a sprawling, David Adjaye-designed Edo Museum of West African Art. France has since repatriated dozens of major works to Senegal, Madagascar, and Benin, where President Patrice Talon hailed their arrival as the return of “our soul.” In 2017, during a state visit to Burkina Faso, he declared that “African heritage cannot solely exist in private collections and European museums.” The next year, his government issued a report that shocked many in the museum world, calling for permanent returns of looted art. But it was France’s President, Emmanuel Macron, who tipped the first domino. The wave of returns has many causes, from geopolitical jockeying to the reckonings prompted by social movements like Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter. Belgium, which keeps the world’s largest single collection of African art in a gloomy palace near Brussels, has promised to review all colonial-era acquisitions with the Democratic Republic of Congo. In March, the Smithsonian agreed to transfer most of its thirty-nine Benin Bronzes to Nigeria, following a similar decision by Germany’s national museums. Now, in a very short time, a tectonic shift has occurred. Only twenty years ago, a group of the world’s self-designated “universal” museums declared that many stolen works had, over time, simply become “part of the heritage of the nations which house them.” In 2018, Benin’s minister of culture described meaningful restitution as about as unimaginable as “the reunification of North and South Korea.” More than half a million such objects-by some accounts, more than ninety per cent of all cultural artifacts known to originate in Africa-are held in Europe, where they have long seemed destined to remain. Today, they’re dispersed among more than a hundred collections, with the greatest number kept at the British Museum.įor decades, the bronzes have served as emblems of the African struggle to reclaim art expropriated under colonial rule.
The performance dramatized Nigeria’s long-frustrated efforts to recover the Benin Bronzes, a collection of several thousand sculptures seized, in 1897, during the British sack of Benin City.
Take me back home!” Dressed as a bronze warrior, with limbs bound and a British flag trailing at his heels, he mimed the desperation of an artifact trapped in the museum-which he fled stripped to the waist, revealing metallically painted skin. In May, 2018, the Nigerian artist Jelili Atiku shouted for help in the lobby of the Musée d’Aquitaine, in Bordeaux.
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