Colonial Contexts News Today

Europe would have done better to tolerate the non-European civilizations at its side, leaving them alive, dynamic, and prosperous, whole and not mutilated; that it would have been better to let them develop and fulfil themselves than to present for our admiration, duly labeled, their dead and scattered parts; that anyway, the museum by itself is nothing; that it means nothing, vanity. can say nothing, when smug self-satisfaction rots the eyes, when a secret contempt for others withers the he

Some 17,000 human remains are said to be in the collections of German museums and universities. It's often no longer clear how they ended up in Germany.

The Netherlands announced a major repatriation of nearly 500 looted cultural objects dating to the colonial era.

A Benin Bronze in Berlin’s Ethnological Museum. Photo: Bin im Garten/Wikipedia Commons. June 21, 2021 at 5:04pm Following up on its promise earlier this year to return its trove of Benin bronzes to Nigeria, and to do so transparently, Germany has lifted the veil on a comprehensive digital database offering images and provenances of the looted artworks in its possession, Artnews reports. The website, German Contact Points for Collections from Colonial Contexts, off...

A Benin Bronze held in the collection of Berlin’s Bode Museum.Photo: Richard Mortel/Flickr. April 30, 2021 at 3:41pm Germany has promised to return its trove of looted artworks known as the Benin Bronzes to Nigeria beginning in 2022. Some five hundred of the more than 90,000 brass, bronze, and ivory objects stolen by British soldiers in 1897 from the Republic of Benin (now Nigeria) are held in the collection of Berlin’s Ethnologisches Museum at the Humboldt Forum...

Statement on the handling of the Benin Bronzes in German museums and institutions LISTEN APR 30, 2021 On Thursday, 29 April 2021, at the invitation of the Minister of State for Culture and the Media, Monika Grütters, a digital meeting took place on the further handling of the Benin Bronzes in German museums and institutions. The aim is to arrive at a coordinated position in Germany and to reach a common understanding with the Nigerian side. The participants in the talks were the directors of...

A Benin relief plaque (16th-17th centuries) showing the King with two dignitaries, currently in the collection of the Museum am Rothenbaum (MARKK) in Hamburg Photo: © Paul Schimweg/MARKK The German government and directors of the country’s leading museums have agreed to develop a timetable for the permanent return to Nigeria of Benin artefacts looted in a British military raid in 1897, with the goal of handing over the first of the stolen artefacts in 2022. The federal c...