COTONOU (Benin): Twenty-six works of art seized by French colonial soldiers in 1892 were returned to Benin yesterday, a landmark in the long fight by African countries to recover looted artefacts.
The works, which include the doors of the Palace of Abomey, royal thrones, and warrior dance staffs, were formally welcomed back to Benin at a ceremony presided over by president Patrice Talon.
“This return is a testimony to what we have been, a testimony that we existed before, a testimony to what we have known,” Talon said before an audience that included representatives of Benin’s royal families.
The artefacts will initially be housed in a museum in the city of Ouidah before being transferred to a new museum being built in Abomey, site of the royal palaces of the Kingdom of Dahomey.
The restitution is the largest France has made to a former colony, but it represents only a fraction of the 5,000 works whose return Benin is seeking and the tens of thousands of seized African works held in France.
The return of Benin’s artefacts adds pressure on other European nations to hand back artworks looted from former African colonies. Ivory Coast has also requested the return of over 100 works of art from France, as has Senegal.
Britain, Germany and Belgium
In the first such move by a United Kingdom institution, a Cambridge University college last month handed back a bronze cockerel to Nigerian officials that had been looted in the 19th century.
It was taken along with hundreds of sacred sculptures and carvings known as the Benin Bronzes during a British military expedition in the former kingdom of Benin in southern Nigeria in 1897.
A day after the Cambridge move, the University of Aberdeen in Scotland handed another Benin bronze to the same Nigerian delegation.
Thousands of Benin Bronzes are held in museums across the United States and Europe. The British Museum, which has the largest collection, refuses to return any of its bronzes.
It has long argued that its vast trove of foreign artefacts, such as the Elgin Marbles taken from the Parthenon in Athens, are best housed there.
Nigeria, meanwhile, has also pushed for around 1,000 Benin Bronzes to be returned from Germany. In September, Berlin agreed to give back hundreds, starting next July.
And Belgium, which amassed thousands of objects during its brutal colonisation of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, is looking at ways of returning artefacts – a process that could take years.