Many artefacts in UK collections were taken along with a war indemnity of 50,000 ounces of gold following the Third Anglo-Asante War, then auctioned off to collectors of major museums by the Crown jeweller in order to raise funds for injured soldiers.
Ghanaians flocked to the Manhyia Palace Museum in Kumasi, the capital of Asante region, to welcome the 32 items home. "This is a day for Asante. A day for the Black African continent. The spirit we share is back," said Asante King Otumfuo Osei Tutu II.
Semley Auctioneers – based in Dorset – have made 18 skulls available for auction and estimate each skull will be sold for between £200 and £300. The auction is scheduled to take place on 18 May 2024.
At a formal repatriation ceremony at the Okinawa Prefectural Museum and Art Museum in Naha, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Embassy of the United States in Tokyo returned 22 historic artifacts that were looted following the Battle of Okinawa and had been missing for almost 80 years.
Taco Dibbits: “Like many people I used to think of restitution as a solution — politically, certainly. If you just give something back, then that’s done with, finished. But now I think it’s only the beginning.".
The fact that the government and elected representatives are unable to reach a consensus on large restitutions raises questions about the future of a framework bill designed to facilitate such transfers, writes columnist Michel Guerrin.
The looting of Cambodia’s sacred temples, in the dead of night or under the cover of the fog of war by unscrupulous thieves, took place over many decades up until the 2000s. Now, a host of museums are investigating their own collections.
Trinity College and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) agreed in March 2023 to return the spears to descendants of the Gweagal people who crafted the spears more than 250 years ago. One year later, they were handed over.
Sarah van Beurden: What is new is the wave of research on the origins of colonial collections, and several projects – both academic and artistic – reflect on the larger cultural loss the removal of these objects caused in their communities of origin.
With tens of thousands of African artworks in French museums, curators face a huge task in trying to identify which of these were plundered during colonial rule in the 19th and 20th centuries and should be returned.
Earlier in 2024, David Nolan Gallery in New York mounted the exhibition Fort Marion and Beyond: Native American Ledger Drawings, 1865–1900, gathering over 100 works on paper by Native artists from the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Hidatsa, Kiowa, and Lakota tribes.
Kwame Opoku writes: The lull in the restitution of African artefacts after the restitutions of 2021 and 2022has left a vacuum filled with activities that, although not directly anti-restitution, do not directly promote restitution.
32 Gold and silver items have been sent on long-term loan to Ghana by the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) and the British Museum (BM). They were stolen during 19th century conflicts.
Chief Charles Taku has made an impassioned call for the “urgent and unconditional restitution of the Bangwa Queen in Dapper Foundation in France, the Bangwa King in Metropolitan Museum in New York, USA and the cultural heritage artefacts which are in the National Ethnological Museum in Berlin and Municipal Museums in Germany, in the Netherlands and other parts of the world.”
Robert Jenrick, MP Conservative Party since 2014 and Minister of State from 2022 to 2023, writes: Our museums have fallen into the hands of a careless generation. Foreign governments seeking restitution of art calculate that our institutions – the UK itself – lacks the self-confidence to fight back.
The Lebang community in Cameroon has been the recipient of eight (8) significant cultural and spiritual heritages sold in auction and online in The Netherlands and Germany.
A group of 11 sacred Ethiopian altar tablets, which the museum acknowledges were looted by British soldiers after the Battle of Maqdala in 1868, have never been on public display and are considered to be so sacred that even the institution’s own curators and trustees are forbidden from examining them.
A 200-year-old wampum belt has spent much of its existence at the Vatican’s museums, across the ocean and thousands of kilometres away. Last year, the belt, made by Algonquin, Nipissing and Mohawk peoples in 1831, was returned to Canada for 51 days – for a brief appearance at a Montreal museum in the fall – before it was sent back the vaults of the Vatican. In 2023, nothing was returned, a Timeline reveals.
Two great granddaughters of a Sakalava king, who was beheaded in 1897 by colonial troops, publicly addressed the French ambassador, asking him to speed up the repatriation of their ancestor’s skull.
Guyana is seeking the return of various artefacts including a letter written by Quamina, the leader of a 19th century slave rebellion, held by the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (SOAS).
After almost 70 years in the Africa Museum, the rare Kakungu mask is back in Congo. Despite the festive ceremony at the National Museum, the mask remains the property of Belgium, causing unrest among the Congolese people and the Suku community, where the mask originally came from.
Some 17,000 human remains are said to be in the collections of German museums and universities. It's often no longer clear how they ended up in Germany. Colonialists committed horrific crimes.
If you came here for a vicious takedown or a strident defence of Tristram Hunt’s position on “colonialism and collecting”, you might be slightly disappointed.
An exhibition at the Foreign Ministry Museum in Mexico City is displaying more than 100 stolen pieces that have been recovered, thanks to intense work by the country’s diplomats.
Over the past several weeks, museums across the United States have been covering up and removing displays of Native American ancestors and cultural objects.
A commission of French and Algerian historians created to reconcile colonial difficulties has agreed proposals for the exchange of archives, remains and artefacts.
The BM is tackling an influx of social media trolls from Chile, who have flooded the museum’s Instagram posts calling for the return of a moai statue, one of the stone monuments from Easter Island.
In Mati Diop’s film Dahomey, which premiered at the Berlin film festival, the director documents the 2021 journey of 26 treasures that the commander of French forces in Senegal looted from the royal palace of the kingdom of Dahomey, part of modern-day Benin, in 1890.
Spain maintains unwavering ownership of the Quimbaya Treasure, dismissing Colombia’s legal and diplomatic efforts to reclaim the pre-Columbian artifacts donated to Queen María Cristina in 1893. Both nations stand at a crossroads over the fate of 122 golden pieces, symbolizing cultural heritage and historical legacies intertwined with colonial conquests.
Almost nine decades after it was stolen by Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime, the Italian government has officially returned Ethiopia’s first plane, named Tsehay in honour of the princess daughter of Emperor Haile Selassie.
During Mongolia’s Minister of Culture, Nomin Chinbat’s visit to Britain, not only the 2027 exhibition Arts of the Mongol World was discussed but also provenance research and restitution. Mongolia’s treasures ‘provide a window on the country’s history and demonstrate the vibrancy and captivating nature of our nomadic culture’.
Yinka Adegoke of Semafor interviews Oumy Diaw, contemporary art specialist and former communications director for the Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar, Senegal.
British Museum and V&A to lend Ghana looted gold and silver. Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, said the items were the equivalent of “our crown jewels” but added that the three-year was “not restitution by the back door”.
[ in Spanish ] The Spanish Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, has reported to the parliamentarian Commission on Culture about the review of the “colonial framework” carried out in Spanish museums, institutions “anchored in gender or ethnocentric inertia that have often hindered the vision of heritage, the history and artistic legacy”. Conservatives are against.
Germany and France will jointly spend €2.1m (£1.8m) to further research the provenance of African heritage objects in their national museums’ collections, which could prepare the ground for their eventual return.
Peru’s Ministry of Culture triumphantly reclaimed 202 cultural artifacts, spanning various eras and civilizations, from Germany, Spain, the USA, Canada, and Belgium, showcasing successful international collaboration against illicit trafficking.
Princess royals Ncedisa Maqoma and Princess Mamtshawe Zukiswa Kona of the Xhosa nation saw in Dublin, for the first time, their ancestor Chief Maqoma’s sacred warrior’s stick, looted and brought to Ireland 150 years ago.
The Digital Benin project provides a central place to see artifacts that are now scattered around the Global North. Its organizers hope it will be the first step toward repatriation.
Growing pressure on European museums to return artifacts taken from Southeast Asia during colonial times could provide soft-power benefits for the EU amid attempts to improve its image in the region, analysts say.
In 2023, Sri Lanka retrieved six objects from the Netherlands. The hope is that future initiatives will lead to the return of more Sri Lankan artefacts from other countries and even private collectors, fostering a stronger connection between the country and its cultural heritage.
Tony Blair considered a “long-term loan” of the Parthenon Marbles to Greece in the hope of support for a London 2012 Olympic Games bid, bypassing the issue of ownership.
Human remains held in French public collections and less than 500 years old, can now be returned to their countries of origin by a decision of the prime minister.
[ in French ] The auction of an extremely rare African sculpted mask for 4.2 million euros, initially purchased for 150 euros by a second-hand dealer from a French couple, has been validated by the court of Alès (Gard).
British High Commissioner in Nigeria: UK museums operate independently of the government, as decisions relating to the care and management of UK collections are addressed by museum trustees, with claims for restitution addressable to relevant museums.
British Museum chair George Osborne (and Lord Cameron) criticise Sunak over Parthenon marbles. Osborne says the row gave the Labour Party a line of attack. Rishi Sunak opened the door to a ‘devastating line of attack’ from Labour by snubbing his Greek counterpart, PM
Three decades after legislation pushed for the return of Native American remains to Indigenous communities, many of the nation’s top museums and universities still have the remains of thousands of people in their collections.
The Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia voluntarily transfers to the custody of the FBI a 16th-century manuscript for return to the Archivo General de la Nación del Perú, the Peruvian national archives.
‘I’m a strong believer that trustees of museum collections should have autonomy over those collections, and be able to make the case whether they should retain them within the UK or loan them to other museums around the world – or indeed begin a conversation around restitution and repatriation.’
What his piece makes also interesting is what Nelly Kalu writes about her childhood: When I was a child, my father would tell me stories of the deities in our village and their significance to our lives, even in our names
When the southwestern jungles of Colombia were rediscovered by Spanish colonizers in the 18th century, looters arrived looking for gold. Scientists eventually followed to survey, study, and inventory the site.
Among the most intriguing objects in the British Museum is the Asante Ewer, a bronze jug made in England for Richard II in the 1390s, which somehow ended up in West Africa.
The Netherlands will physically hand over six Sri Lankan artefacts to Sri Lanka during a two-day event at the Colombo National Museum. All come from the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, among them is a famous ceremonial cannon of the King of Kandy (captured in 1765).
Nick Merriman, the chief executive of the Horniman Museum in south London, says inclusion of difficult stories of slavery and empire is not wokery, but ‘simply good history’.
Switzerland’s Federal Council will set up a new independent committee to advise on disputes over art that was looted during the Nazi era. The committee will also be consulted over repatriation claims made about cultural objects that came to Switzerland due to colonialism.
[ in French and in Dutch ] Although it is accepted that human remains are out of trade and therefore should not be sold, practice shows that this happens anyway.
The semi-documentary sheds light on the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Taoist abbot Wang Yuanlu, who was the caretaker of the Mogao Caves (UNESCO World Heritage site) in Dunhuang in Northwest China's Gansu Province, discovered the Library Cave at the site, a repository of over 50,000 items dating back to the 4th to the 11th century.
African leaders and diaspora have gathered for a 4-days meeting in Accra, Ghana, to discuss reparations for the slave trade and also for the restitution of lost treasures.
[ in French ] President Tshisekedi of DR Congo, currently chair of the African Union, has made restitution priority. It is interesting to read what the Director General of the Kinshasa Academy of Fine Arts, Henri Kalama Akulez, has to say about it.
Anthropologist Nancy Munn studied the Warlpiri people from 1956 to 1958. Now, with the repatriation of her collection to Australia, a younger generation is reunited with its ancestral heritage.
Isabella Walsh, an Irish woman, has contacted embassies and consulates in Dublin and London to repatriate 10 African and Aboriginal objects that her father wanted to be returned
[ in Dutch ] The owner of the museum, the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, wanted the World Museum to admit visitors until the lease expires on December 31, 2024.
Germany asks forgiveness for 'dark' colonial legacy in Tanzania and discusses repatriation of human remains. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said his country would "open negotiations" with Tanzania to discuss the is colonial past in the East African nation.
Museums from Glasgow to Cambridge are proactively repatriating objects. Glasgow has become the first UK museum to repatriate objects to India (“a very emotional event”, as Glaswegians of Indian heritage said).
The National Museum of Scotland nearly had to call off the high-profile repatriation of a totem pole to the Nisga’a in Canada after the Scottish Government reneged on a promise to cover costs.
A German museum is facing right-wing backlash after creating a designated time for non-white visitors to view an exhibition about colonialism, the Washington Post reported last week. Police remain stationed at the museum. Director Kirsten Baumann: We want to offer victims of racism a safe place.
The Mauritshuis gallery in the Netherlands and the Humboldt Forum in Berlin have joined forces in an exhibition that addresses the looting of art that has sustained European collections for centuries
Egypt has announced plans to convene an international meeting for countries affected by the smuggling of antiquities during the age of imperialism. The move comes in the wake of the revelation that over 2,000 artifacts were stolen from the British Museum, which has raised concerns about the credibility of several Western museums.
This is how the difficulties of the colonial past should be negotiated. First, begin with the object and not the politics. Museums cannot absolve the crimes of colonialism and they should not be mobilised to assist contemporary geopolitical objectives.
Manchester Museum, UK, has handed over 174 items to the Australian Aboriginal Anindilyakwa Community, marking one of the largest restitution projects ever undertaken in the UK.
Since 2017, Berlin's Museum of Prehistory and Early History has been carrying out research on around 1,100 skulls from what was known as German East Africa.
Creative pursuits in Spain face the challenge of purging the country’s colonial vision, critically reviewing its relationship with the Americas and overcoming a gender bias. + Pedro Antonio Cano, a 7-foot man from South America
Benin Digital mentions two objects in Portugal, one of which is in the Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa. Sofia Lovegrove Pereira sends a podcast [ in Portuguese ], Reparacoes historicas - Preterito imperfeito (28 08 2023), which argues that the Sociedade has indeed one on display but another 76 in store.
Emails leaked to BBC News claim the British Museum was alerted by Ittai Gradel, an antiquities dealer, to items being sold on eBay in 2021, but that it ignored the report.
[ in Dutch ] The 2014 forced marriage between the Africa Museum in Berg en Dal, owned by the Fathers of the Holy Spirit, and the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures (nowadays Wereldmuseum) has never been a happy one.
Dresden’s museum of world cultures returned four everyday objects to the Kaurna Aboriginal community of Australia at a ceremony in Sydney: the spear, digging stick, cudgel and net were brought to Germany by two protestant missionaries between 1838 and 1839.
The National Museum of Natural History has at least 30,700 human bones and body parts in storage. Brains and other body parts, mostly from people of colour, were taken without consent.
A project to investigate the origins of human skulls taken from the former colony of German East Africa has concluded that nearly all are the remains of people from the same colonized region
Crania from a Nordic 'golden age' sit in a Harvard museum basement, and now researchers on both sides of the Atlantic want to reunite them with their bodies.
A YouGov poll, commissioned by the Parthenon Project, suggests the majority of Brits would back returning the sculptures to Greece in a "cultural partnership".
[ in English and in Dutch ] The Indonesian Repatriasi Commission and Naturalis will work together to explore how the importance of the Homo erectus fossils from the Dubois collection can best be safeguarded for Indonesia, the Netherlands and the rest of the world.
The most important object a bronze ceremonial cannon of the King of Kandy, partly covered with silver and gold, and set with rubies. During a military campaign in 1765, the Dutch had captured it. + [ in Dutch ] Negative reaction to it
One of the most preserved among the eleven remaining mantles of the Tupinambá native people will definitely return to Brazil. By the end of 2023, the treasure made with red feathers of the scarlet ibis will leave the ethnographic collection of the Nationalmuseet, the National Museum of Denmark, and will join the collection of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro.
With joy and ululation two families from the Loita clan of the Maasai in Narok South received 98 cows from Oxford University for ‘stolen’ cultural artefacts.
[ in Englis, in French ] The piece brought back by British Captain James Cook in 1771 is said to be the first Oceanian sculpture collected by a European.
A research project has been conducted with the participation of the museum department and independent researchers regarding 6 such artifacts in the Netherlands and it has been confirmed that all the artifacts were brought from Sri Lanka during the colonial period.
At a conference organised by the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA), Kodzo Gavua (University of Ghana) has called for partnership among museums in the sub-region and in Europe towards retrieving African artifacts.
The Austrian government aims to propose legislation governing the restitution of objects in national museums acquired in a colonial context by March 2024.
Minister Catherine Martin for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media announces establishment of a new expert committee to advise Government on issues relating to the restitution and repatriation of culturally sensitive objects in Ireland.
When Sylvie Vernyuy Njobati saw the sacred statue of her Nso people for the first time, she was shaking. "I was seeing... our founder... our mother locked up in some glass container. And for 120 years, she's been yelling out. She needs to be back home," she told the BBC's The Comb podcast.
[ in French ] Just before the major exhibition "Dakar-Djibouti, counter-investigations", scheduled for 2025 at the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, in France, Sotheby's is selling part of the collection of the art dealer Hélène The Wolf. A collection built up between the end of the colonial era and the beginning of Mali's independence.
Germany has handed over to Colombia two masks made by the Indigenous Kogi people that had been in a Berlin museum’s collection for more than a century, another step in the country’s restitution of cultural artifacts as European nations reappraise their colonial-era past. They may have health risks.
Known only as A01392 in the records of the Grassi Museum in Saxony, now the life mask of a Ngāti Toa tupuna has returned to his whenua and people as a taonga.
The German government says it wants to confront the legacy of its colonial rule in Africa. But it is still failing to address issues such as its brutal repression of the Maji Maji uprising in Tanzania.
Unlike the British Museum and other UK national museums, the Royal Collection is able to deaccession, provided that this is advised by its trustees and authorised by the monarch. The collection is not owned personally by Charles, but he holds it in trust as sovereign to pass on to his successor.
Germany had hoped that by returning 20 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria last year it was “healing the wounds” of colonialism. But when it emerged that ownership of the repatriated objects will pass to the king of Benin rather than the Nigerian state, Berlin found itself facing a public relations nightmare.
Museums in Leipzig, Göttingen, Stuttgart and three other German cities have transferred the remains of Māori and Moriori people to a New Zealand delegation, headed Te Herekiekie Herewini of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
Jakarta welcomes the Dutch returns. ‘The return is part of a broader agreement between Indonesia and the Netherlands in 1975. That deal, though, faced many obstacles in its implementation, said Sri Margana, a member of Indonesia’s Repatriation Committee and professor of history at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta.
Former President Buhari’s decision that Benin objects go back to the Oba of Benin (and thus not to the National Commission for Museums and Monuments [NCMM] or to the government of Edo Sate in which the Benin Kingdom is located) continues to cause unrest.
Collections in private hands and the trade can contain important objects, while no one has a grip on them. An example is the 18th-century sword stolen by British troops from Seringapatam in India that was featured at the Bonhams auction on May 23rd, 2023.
During a solemn ceremony at the GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig, ancestral remains, which had been in the possession of the Staatliche Ethnographische Sammlungen Sachsen (SES), were returned to representatives of their Māori (New Zealand) und Moriori (Chatham Islands) communities of origin.
Buckingham Palace has declined a request to return the remains of an Ethiopian prince who came to be buried at Windsor Castle in the 19th Century. Prince Alemayehu was taken to the UK aged just seven and arrived an orphan after his mother died on the journey.
In the late 1800s, Andreas Reischek, an Austrian scientist, robbed Māori graves and plundered Māori artefacts for his private collection. More than 140 years later, officials of the Austrian government have been repatriating what Reischek looted.
The focus of the campaign is on the process of retrieval of antiquities through bilateral cooperation and partnership, in a manner consistent with existing international arrangements. Great Britain has the most extensive collections.
Kwame Opoku comments on the report that former director of the Louvre Museum and current Ambassador for International Cooperation, Jean-Luc Martinez, delivered on 25 April 2023 to the French Minister of Culture.
[ in German, in English ] The German government has again defended the return of the Benin bronzes to Nigeria. It was good and right to return them without conditions. Nigeria can decide where they stay, said the parliamentary state secretary in the foreign office, Müntefering, in the Bundestag.
The AfricaMuseum in Tervuren near Brussels conserves two mummified persons. Where they came from and how they reached the museum was long shrouded in mystery.
A team of museum directors, researchers and scholars has been conducting a “census” of the collections in the 498 Italian state museums to get a handle on what exactly they contain.
Art historian Nana Oforiatta Ayim criticises Western voices for still dominating the restitution discourse, ‘whether they are directors, academics or curators. She rarely hears the voices from whom the objects were taken.
Even if many museums are eager to return objects now that they are "done" with them, at a time when preservation and storage costs are skyrocketing, it does not always mean that this is the right time for the other side.
Sonita Alleyne, Master of Jesus College in Cambridge, addressed the 32nd session of the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent in Geneva
The desire of Pope Francis to right a wrong has led to the official return to Greece from the Vatican of three ornately carved fragments that once adorned the Parthenon.
Recent research has explored how collections’ information systems and databases present a number of issues for communities whose cultural heritage and traditional knowledge was acquired and held unethically.
It might seem impossible to hurt the feelings of a 3,000-year-old corpse, but woke museum chiefs have stopped using the word 'mummy' to describe the remains of ancient Egyptians, all in the name of 'respect'.
According to a recent ProPublica investigation of the failure to bring about the expeditious return of human remains by federally funded universities and museums, over 110,000 ancestral remains are held by institutions in the U.S., from Harvard to Berkeley.
A long bloody and painful colonisation of Indochina by the French should lead to more antiques to be identified and repatriated in the future.
It will be difficult to get a true handle on just how much the nation has been plundered.
According to the National Cultural Heritage Administration, more than 1,800 sets of cultural relics have been returned to China over the past decade.
RM* found two links; sometimes it is hard to open them.
A civil rights group in New York, USA, Restitution Study Group, has petitioned the United Kingdom’s Charity Commission to reject the repatriation of looted Benin objects to Nigeria because the West African nation also “profited from slavery.”
Switzerland has returned four mummies to Chile, including two of them among the world’s oldest, after their private owner agreed to their restitution. Other remains, in an “advanced state of degradation”, buried in Geneva.
Many believe new applications—from AI and NFTs to 3D scanning—are game changing in returning objects to source communities. Lawyers say they can make the process harder.
The Koh-i-Noor diamond, a 106-carat gem that is part of Britain's crown jewels, has been back on public display after initially being absent at Charles III's coronation. The diamond was gifted to Queen Victoria after Britain's East India Company formally annexed the Kingdom of Punjab in 1849.
The sector, Research and Collection has approximately 30 employees including curators, provenance researchers and registrars. The library and archives also fall within this sector. The sector represents the scientific backbone of the museum.
Hotel Drouot has auctioned off three Benin objects, without guaranteeing that they are not related to the British invasion of the Kingdom of Benin in 1897. The provenance only goes to the 1950s and 1960s. It also auctioned Nok and Sokoto objects from Nigeria, both of which are on ICOM's Red List for West Africa.
According to Ruby Satele, a PhD candidate from Sāmoa at the University of Vienna, rematriation involves not only the return of ancestors, but also practices of care while they remain in storage. Her research combines strong theoretical thinking with practical action to challenge power imbalances and promote greater justice in museums and universities.
RM* found new evidence that the trade in human remains continues and flourishes: Auction houses in the USA offer ancient 'kapala' from Myanmar and Tibet.
[ in Dutch] Due to the death of Otto van der Mieden on February 1, 2024, the founder and director of the Puppetry Museum, the museum is closed and the collection is being deaccessioned.
