More demands for the restitution of stolen Benin Artefacts

[Soulosophy]

Dr Kwame Opoku, explains how growing public pressure in Nigeria is encouraging public officials to make claims for the stolen African artefacts held in British, American and european museums.

Hardly a day passes by without some call for the return of the stolen cultural objects of Benin. In the whole of Africa people are incensed when they hear about the unjustified invasion of Benin by the British in 1897 and above all, the looting and burning of Benin City. Most Africans cannot believe that the europeans who preached Christian morality could at the same time have been involved in stealing cultural objects of Africans, who according to european propaganda had an inferior culture. Many an African is even more infuriated to realise that the so-called primitive objects are on show in respectable museums in the United States, Britain, Germany and France that refuse to contemplate the return of these objects. One starts wondering about the relations between the museums and the plunderers.

There are growing signs that people in the ruling classes are beginning to feel the pressures of the demands of the masses and will, sooner or later, have to give serious consideration to these frequent demands. Above all, they will have to convince their own people that they are not collaborating with the europeans and Americans in depriving the people of their urgently needed cultural and spiritual objects. The article below, published in the Nigerian Tribune, reports on the demand by the Governor of Edo State, from Benin City where the memories of the British atrocities against that city and the Benin Kingdom are alive. It is significant that the call was made at the launching of a book on Oba Ovonramwen, the valiant king whose resistance to British imperialism led to his exile, the looting of his capital and the destruction of the Benin kingdom that had been in existence since the 13th century.

Ligali | Me2We | More demands for the restitution of stolen Benin Artefacts

[Sourakhata]

[Im The Truth]

Dr Kwame Opoku has always been cool with me. He's a scholar on West African Religion. One of these days Africans (and all other oppressed people) will demand much of their culture items from these displays of imperialism aka museums.