The big recovery question: Are Western museums returning looted belongings to their original places?

Imran Abdullah

In early 1897, the British newspaper The Times published what it called a "disaster" in the Nigerian city of Benin. The British entered the city during a religious festival and members of a British delegation were attacked with ostensible reprisals.

In order to cover the cost of the campaign, British soldiers looted royal treasures, fine ivory pieces, sculptures and fine copper alloys known as the "bronze of Benin" made by the people of Ido Starting in the thirteenth century.

About 700 out of 4,000 objects reached the British Museum and attracted millions of visitors for decades. The rest were sold to museums in Germany, Austria and the United States, and contributed to the appreciation of Europeans for African art and culture.

For France, it also had its share of the artifacts of Benin taken by the French during the acquisition of Africa in the 1890s.

The empires departed and their possessions remained
The empire may have collapsed, but the British colonial arrogance towards the former colonies did not die for sure. During its colonization of a quarter of the world, Britain took treasures and artefacts to the British public for admiring them in museums, but now there is no reason to keep them stolen.

As Nigeria has struggled for decades to restore its looted parts, British museums seem to believe it has a divine right to keep the pieces, and the NCAA has become so depressing that it now resorts to the claim to borrow its own property.

The British Museum of Victoria and Albert (V & A) has not offered to borrow Ethiopia's treasures, including an 18th-century gold crown, a royal wedding, and a beautiful and beautiful collection seized by the British in 1868.

During the rapid English campaign on Abyssinia, the priceless manuscripts, paintings and artifacts of the Ethiopian Church, which needed 15 villas and 200 mule to transport them away, were stolen and ended up being distributed among British museums to this day.

As European museums are under increasing pressure to restore irreplaceable artifacts that were looted during the colonial era, moral, historical and legal debate highlights the moral tragedy of how artifacts are transferred to museums, including "theft, looting, frustration, deception, forced consent" and other illegal methods Under which the colonial powers obtained these materials, according to Savoy Sar official French report.

The historian of archeology at the University of Bristol and historical archaeologist Mark Horton said the record of colonial powers in African countries was repulsive; colonial rule was imposed by the barrel of a gun, with military campaigns with vague excuses, citing the 1897 campaign of Benin, The ancient kingdom of Benin, which was not only famous for its great city and its walls, but also for its bronze paintings and statues made of exceptional cast copper.

The city was burned down and the British Admiral sold "archaeological spoils" worth more than 2,000 works of art to fund his activities.

Apart from the military campaigns, many expensive artifacts from Africa and the Middle East were collected by adventurers, colonialists, traders and settlers who did not think about the legality of owning them. Even if they were purchased from their local owners, it was often for a small fee that did not fit the importance of the pieces, especially with the absence of laws and regulations to curb their smuggling.

It is often argued that artifacts preserved in Western museums are safer than those left in Africa. Horton believes that this argument carries many racist attitudes that consider indigenous peoples as unreliable to preserve and organize their cultural heritage. If so, it is also the result of the devastating impact of colonialism .

Promises of Recovery .. Where is North Africa Arab?
In 2017, French President Emmanuel Macaron promised to return African antiquities to the continent. The statement raised great eyebrows in view of the economic and political dimensions of France's long-standing decision to extend Africa's natural and cultural resources.

In this context, Macaron of Benedict Savoy and Senegalese economist Vellin Sar commissioned a report on the possibility of reintroduction, and recommended that part of the 90,000 artifacts and artifacts from sub-Saharan Africa should be returned.

In the wake of the report, the French magazine "John Afrique" published a report criticizing the lack of reference to the countries of North Africa. France, which colonized those countries, acquired many of its artistic works, including Carthage, Roman statues, Byzantine treasures and other stolen items from the Ottomans, .

Egypt has already called for the restoration of the famous Rosetta Stone, which allowed Champillion to decipher the old hieroglyphic code from the British Museum since December 2009, at the request of Archbishop Zahi Hawass, and in 1925 it applied to the New Berlin Museum for the Restoration of Ras Nefertiti No less famous than the Rosetta stone mentioned above.

At the end of 2017, Macron promised to restore the skulls of 37 Algerian fighters held by France since the 19th century at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.

Italy, under the rule of Muammar Gaddafi, returned after a long display at the Hammamet Museum in Rome, when Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi came to Benghazi with an apology for his country's colonization of Libya. Most of the artifacts from North Africa remained in European museums .