Young Africans add to pressure on museums over looted art, says UN

Addis Ababa – A new generation of young Africans is adding to the pressure on Western museums to return stolen artefacts, Ernesto Ottone, deputy director general of the UN’s cultural agency, told AFP on Monday.

“Over the past five or six years, we have seen pressure in the street,” Ottone, a former culture minister in Chile, said in an interview in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa.

“When we speak to the new generation of people going to museums in Europe, they look at what they see with a critical eye,” he said, highlighting a new “awareness” and “change in attitudes”.

Ottone was in Ethiopia for a UNESCO conference discussing the return of statues, paintings and other works to the continent many years after they were looted in colonial times.

Although several European countries have started handing back art to countries in Africa and Asia, Ottone said it was a “complex matter” that depended on each country’s legislation.

He said he was seeing efforts led by universities or museums as well as officials.

Museums in France alone stored some 90,000 objects from sub Saharan Africa, according to a 2018 report.

President Emmanuel Macron promised in 2017 to return “African heritage to Africa” and a high-profile effort led to 26 looted items being returned to Benin in 2021.

But since then, the effort has stalled.

Several countries have filed restitution requests to France, but a bespoke law is needed each time to allow cultural goods to be removed from current collections.

More recently France has agreed only to loans, such as the Djidji Ayokwe drum, which was confiscated by the French army in 1916 from the Ebrie community in Ivory Coast.

France also loaned the crown of Queen Ranavalona III, the last sovereign of the Kingdom of Madagascar, to its country of origin, more than a century after it was taken.

Britain also holds many works in museums that their countries of origin are pressing to get back, such as the Parthenon Marbles, object of a long-running dispute between the UK and Greece.

The British Museum in London has refused to return any of its famed collection of Benin bronzes, sacred sculptures and carvings removed from the former kingdom of Benin in southern Nigeria in 1897 during the colonial era.

A law passed in 1963 technically prevents the British Museum from giving back the treasures.

Opponents of British restitutions fear a domino effect that would lead to a string of claims, emptying out museums across the country.