hankyoreh

Neil Curtis, Head of Museums and Special collections, is seen with one of the Benin bronze works depicting the Oba of Benin at the Sir Duncan Rice Library, the University of Aberdeen, in Aberdeen, Scotland, on March 17. (Reuters/Yonhap News)

A Berlin museum’s plan for an exhibition this fall of cultural properties taken from Africa — intended as a gesture of reflection for a history of colonialism — is prompting growing calls for the properties’ return.

The Humboldt Forum, a museum specializing in regions outside of Europe, was quoted by Deutsche Welle on Monday as saying it plans to hold a reopening exhibition this fall, during which it will be showing bronze sculpture work from the Kingdom of Benin, along with other cultural properties that were taken by the British in the 19th century and sold to other countries in Europe.

The bronze artwork is part of a tradition that was maintained for nearly 700 years in the Kingdom of Benin, located in what is now Nigeria. Sculptures continued to be produced under the traditional methods in the region today, the network said.

The transportation of the sculptures to Europe began in earnest with Britain’s invasion of the Kingdom of Benin in 1897. The British seized between 3,500 and 4,000 cultural properties, around 1,100 of which were purchased by Germany, the network said.

Around 500 of the works remain in Berlin today.

While demands for the return of cultural properties date back as far as the time of the Kingdom of Benin’s collapse amid the British invasion, Britain has remained unresponsive. Insistent calls for the properties’ return have been resounding ever since Nigeria achieved independence from Britain in 1960.

The debate has made rapid progress since German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas made the argument last year that such cultural artifacts should be returned as a form of restitution for colonization, Deutsche Welle reported.

After Maas raised the issue, Germany’s State Minister for Culture Monika Grütters asked the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which manages museums in Berlin, to develop a strategy for this. The exhibition of Benin art was prepared as part of those efforts.

In an opinion piece recently published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a German newspaper, Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, said museums with Benin cultural artifacts in their collections are discussing ways to cooperate with the Nigerian government. Parzinger also mentioned a plan to exhibit pieces held by Germany at a West African art museum being built in Benin City and other sites.

Parzinger made clear that, eventually, the cultural artifacts need to be returned.

“An honest approach to our colonial history needs to include the return of cultural artifacts,” Maas said on Twitter.

The German Foreign Office recently dispatched a high-ranking diplomat to Nigeria to discuss issues related to the exhibition.

“Suddenly they’re saying, ‘Yeah sure, we’ll give them back, we’ll organize this, we’ll do a conference,’ and that’s very new,” said Benedicte Savoy, a French historian and professor at the Technical University of Berlin who has been a prominent voice on the issue of looted cultural artifacts.

By Shin Gi-sub, senior staff writer

Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]