Will the British Museum Ever Return These Stolen Artifacts?
What happens when a large portion of your country’s archaeological treasures are “owned” by another country that stole them? That’s the position non-western nations around the world find themselves in, with most of their cultural heritage residing in European and U.S. museums—but especially London’s British Museum.
Take Nigeria, for example. In 1897, British troops stole some 4,000 sculptures after invading the Kingdom of Benin (now southwestern Nigeria). Over a century later, surviving bronzes are on display at museums in the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria and the United States, but not in Nigeria, their country of origin. The 2018 film Black Panther nodded to this issue during a heist scene set in the fictional “Museum of Great Britain” where characters reclaimed artifacts stolen from the African country of Wakanda (also fictional).
https://www.history.com/news/british-museum-stolen-artifacts-nigeria
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