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The official transfer of the 26 pieces is expected to be signed in Paris on Nov. The French Development Agency will give some 35 million euros toward the “Museum of the Saga of the Amazons and the Danhome Kings” to be built in Abomey under a pledge signed this year. The restitution process “aims at allowing the African youth to have access to their own heritage in Africa, and not in Europe only,” the French presidency said in a statement.īenin’s Culture Minister Jean-Michel Abimbola called the return of the works a “historic milestone,” and the beginning of further cooperation between the two countries, during a news conference last week. Macron is to visit the exhibit on Wednesday.

“They are part, I believe, of a common history,” she added. In fact, since 1893, they are very much engraved on the French memory as well.” Gaëlle Beaujean, head of the Africa collections at the museum, stressed that “these artefacts have also been seen by artists (in France, and) inspired (architect) Le Corbusier. Since the 2000s, the objects have been housed at the Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac. The colonising troops broke into the Abomey Palace, home of King Behanzin, seizing as they did many royal objects including the 26 artefacts that Dodds donated to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris in the 1890s. In November 1892, Colonel Alfred Dodds led a pilfering French expeditionary force into the Kingdom of Danhomè located in the south of present-day Benin. The story of the “Abomey Treasures” is as dramatic as their sculpted forms. “(It) does not establish any general right to restitution” and “in no way calls into question” the right of French museums to hold on to their heritage. The British Museum said Monday it is working on a collaboration with Nigeria, linked to the construction of a new museum in the West African country, which will allow to “reunite Benin artworks from international collections.”įrench Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot tried to assuage jitters among European museums, emphasising that this initiative “will not create a legal precedent.”Ī French law was passed last year to allow the restitution of the statues to Benin, and of the sword to Senegal.īut she said that the French government’s law was intentionally specific in applying solely to the 27 artefacts.

Many are made up of objects acquired during colonial times. Yet critics of such moves - including London’s British Museum, in a decades-long tug-of-war with the Greek government over restitution of the Elgin, or Parthenon, Marbles - argue that it will open the floodgates to emptying Western museums of their collections. These were looted from the royal palace of the Kingdom of Benin, in what is now southern Nigeria, by a British colonial expedition in 1897. The decision was taken that German museums should work on a restitution plan to return to Nigeria artefacts known as the Benin Bronzes next year. “I think it would be decent that other countries which hold African artefacts take the same path as France,” he added.Įarlier this year, Germany started a similar move. I’d say we are at the beginning of a process,” Biah said. There are others, no? So I wouldn’t say that we are ending a process.

And the 26 works going to Benin represent a tiny handful of the more than 90,000 artefacts from sub-Saharan Africa alone held in French museums. So far, however, France has only turned over one item - a sword handed to the Army Museum in Senegal.