Looted colonial art: France is returning 26 Benin bronzes for the first time

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Benin bronze in the Linden Museum Stuttgart: According to estimates, Europe has 90 percent of the African cultural heritage

Photo: Thomas Niedermueller / Getty Images

A college at Cambridge University and a Paris museum have returned Benin bronzes for the first time.

The bronzes are cultural assets that were stolen in West Africa during the colonial era.

You are currently at the center of heated debates about the return of looted colonial art.

Germany had also announced the return of various bronzes - but only from 2022.

Jesus College, Cambridge returned a rooster sculpture that had been stolen by British troops in 1897.

The college, whose coat of arms shows a rooster, had already announced in 2019 that it would be returned to Nigeria.

The 26 works of art in the Paris Museum for Non-European Art Quai Branly include statues, jewelry, scepter and a throne.

The French army brought them to France after a bloody fighting in 1892 as part of the conquest of the West African country.

The return will be formalized in two weeks at a reception given by Benin President Patrice Talon, Macron said.

"An extraordinary event"

The Benin bronzes are among the most culturally significant artefacts in Africa. These are works of art from the palace of what was then the Kingdom of Benin, which were looted by colonial powers in the 19th century. Today they can be seen in museums all over Europe. Around 1100 bronzes can be found in German museums alone. They are also to be shown in the Berlin Humboldt Forum.

Benin, which became independent in 1960, has been fighting for the return of the works for years. In 2017, in a keynote address in Burkina Faso, Macron committed itself to the first return of African cultural goods within five years. The art historian Bénédicte Savoy, who teaches in Berlin and has been fighting for years for the return of looted colonial art from France and Germany, spoke of an "extraordinary event". France, which "was deaf to the wishes of Africa for so long," is now the first country in the world to return works of art to an African country. In 2018, Savoy had submitted a comprehensive report on works that were to be returned on behalf of Macron. The return was then made possible by a law passed in 2020.

In Germany, museum experts announced in a joint declaration in April 2021 that they wanted to come to terms with the colonial past.

According to the Minister of State for Culture Monika Grütters (CDU), the aim is to make “substantial returns”.

The most important holdings in Germany can be found in the Ethnological Museum Berlin, the Ethnological Museum Dresden / Leipzig, the Museum am Rothenbaum (Hamburg), the Linden Museum (Stuttgart) and the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum (Cologne).

In the coming year, the property rights of the objects will initially be transferred from these museums to the societies of origin in Nigeria.

It is estimated that Europe holds 90 percent of Africa's cultural heritage.

The collections of the Musée Quai Branly in Paris alone contain around 70,000 works of art from sub-Saharan Africa.

ime / dpa / Reuters