Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin: Cultural assets such as the large corpus of Benin bronzes housed in museums are part of the cultural world heritage of mankind. All those whose actions and suffering are embodied in the artefacts have rights to them.
All those connected to them – indeed, all of us – are entitled to know their full history and to acknowledge it.
They should also become co-owners of them in the sense of UNESCO’s World Heritage.
It is time to give up the exclusive concept of private property– or a single nation’s property – for these cultural assets in favor of a concept of multiple stakeholders. “Shared heritage,” in other words.
Moreover, the way in which slave owners and their descendants are treated testifies to a principle deeply rooted in European history and spread around the world in the course of colonization.
History does not repeat itself. Yet the same patterns anchored in the socioeconomic structure of European societies unfold their power again and again: It is not the victims, the slaves, who receive compensation, but the dispossessed slave owners, then as now.
Thus, the plantation owners, not the slaves, were considered victims.
