The United Kingdom is returning a selection of several Asante royal artifacts to Ghana in a deal with the traditional leader of the Asante people.
The Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) and the British Museum have sent 32 gold and silver items, including several of the Ashanti Empire’s crown jewels, on long-term loan to the West African country. The artifacts were stolen from the court of Ghana’s Asante king, known as the Asantehene
“These objects are of cultural, historical and spiritual significance to the Asante people,” the museums said in a statement back in January when the loan agreement was first finalized. “They are also indelibly linked to British colonial history in West Africa, with many of them looted from Kumasi during the Anglo-Asante wars of the 19th century.”
The UK has returned 32 royal artefacts looted from Ghana's Asante Kingdom in the 19th Century.
— The Instigator (@Am_Blujay) April 12, 2024
The 150-year old artfacts were returned by the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, but on a three-year loan, not on a permanent basis. pic.twitter.com/Zc5APo65e3
While the 32 relics will be returning to Britain, several items were permanently returned to the nation earlier this year.
In February, seven royal artifacts stolen from the ancient Asante Kingdom by British colonial forces and later transported to a U.S. museum were finally returned to Ghana.
Items returned on Feb. 5, 2024, include a necklace, an ornamental chair, an elephant tail whisk, two gold stool ornaments, a gold necklace and two bracelets. The date marked the 150th anniversary of when British colonial forces looted the Asante city in 1874.
“We are here … (because) the white man came into Asanteman to loot and destroy it,” Otumfuo Osei Tutu, the king of the Assante kingdom in Ghana’s largest city of Kumasi, said at a presentation ceremony.
The items have been part of the museum’s collections since 1965.
“We are globally shifting away from the idea of museums as unquestionable repositories of art, as collecting institutions entitled to own and interpret art based primarily on scholarly expertise, to the idea of museums as custodians with ethical responsibility,” said Silvia Forni, director of the Fowler Museum.
Ghana is not the only African nation fighting for the return of their precious, stolen jewels.
In July 2023, the German government announced that precious artifacts looted during the colonial era would be returned to Nigeria in 2022. In 1897, the British army stole bronze, brass, and ivory artworks in a raid on the Kingdom of Benin, now known as Nigeria. The bronzes were sold to exhibitions around the world. Berlin’s Ethnological Museum has one of the world’s largest collections of historical objects from the Kingdom of Benin, holding an estimated 530 items, including 440 bronzes.
In May 2023, South Africa called for Britain’s royal family to return the world’s largest known clear-cut diamond, the 530-carat diamond displayed on King Charles III’s royal scepter.
