Kwame Opoku

Loan of looted Ethiopian treasures to Ethiopia: Must Europeans always win?

From this scene I strolled away to the northern gate, to where the dead body of the late

“There was a dim grandeur about it all, and also these seemed to a fate.

We pointed out in our last article some of the strange ideas of the president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, the body that controls the Humboldt Forum where African artefacts, formerly in the Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin, will be transferred.

“It is indeed unfortunate that so much Nok material has been looted over time to supply the international market. Properly excavated, such pieces might have shed valuable light on the Nok culture,” Ekpo Eyo [1]

‘We, Europeans, who have received and transmitted and continue to transmit these objects, are on the side of the conquerors. To a certain extent, this is also a ‘heritage that weighs us down’. But there is no fatality.

"African art, like any great art, some would say, in any case more than any man transmitted to objects by man and his society.

Gold jewel of two crocodiles, Baule, Ivory Coast, now in Musée du quai Branly, Paris, France.

Tribute to Amilcar Cabral by Poet Espirito Santo

‘If I should die tomorrow, nothing will change in the inevitable evolution of the struggle of our people and our victory’. Amílcar Cabral. [1]

“It is our prayer that the people and the government of Austria will show humaneness and magnanimity and return to us some of these objects which found their way to your country.” -The Oba of Benin, Omo N’Oba Erediauwa. [1]

“The restitution of those cultural objects which our museums and collections, directly or indirectly, possess thanks to the colonial system and are now being demanded, must also not be postponed with cheap arguments and tricks.” -Gert v.