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.
Officials from the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles have handed over the first batch of looted artefacts taken by the British 150 years ago during the Sagrenti War.
— CITI FM 97.3 (@Citi973) February 10, 2024
The Kingdom also awaits artefacts from the British Museum, expected to arrive in Ghana by April this year.
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Several African governments have been working overtime to return looted artifacts museums to African countries, but some are hesitant to make a permanent agreement. Recently, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London announced that gold and silver treasure in their collections looted from the Asante kingdom by the British army would be lent to the kingdom in a six-year deal.
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. After the looting, 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.
“The diamond needs to come to South Africa. It needs to be a sign of our pride, our heritage, and our culture,” said Mothusi Kamanga, a lawyer and activist in Johannesburg, via Reuters. “I think generally, the African people are starting to realize that to decolonize is not just to let people have certain freedoms, but it’s also to take back what has been expropriated from us.”
Cullinan I, also known as the “Great Star of Africa,” is the diamond spotted in King Charles III’s scepter during his coronation and was cut from the Cullinan diamond, a 3,100-carat stone mined near Pretoria. The diamond was unearthed in South Africa in 1905 and presented to the British monarchy by the colonial government while still under colonial rule.
The diamond has not been returned.
