This is Africa: Kenya is creating a database of plundered cultural artefacts and their current locations. “While other African countries have been petitioning for decades and are actively moving towards the repatriation of cultural artefacts that were plundered during the colonial era, Kenya has only recently launched an investigation into which objects were removed from the East African nation, where in the West they are housed and who holds the agency to demand their repatriation.”
repatriation
‘They’re not property’: the people who want their ancestors back from British museums (The Guardian)
The Guardian: ‘They’re not property’: the people who want their ancestors back from British museums. “On 20 March this year, more than 150 years after they were cut from the corpse of the Ethiopian emperor Tewodros II by a British soldier, two locks of hair were returned by the National Army Museum in London after a request from Addis Ababa. A few days later, Norway’s King Harald V and Queen Sonja signed an agreement to repatriate thousands of artefacts, including a number of skulls, to the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island. And in April, German institutions will conduct their largest ever transfer of remains to Australia, involving 53 items from five sites in Munich, Stuttgart and Berlin. This follows a ‘joint declaration on the handling of colonial collections’ by ministers from all 16 German states, which argued that human material ‘does not belong’ behind glass.”
