“May these masks have a good journey back to where they are needed, and where they are still a bridge between people and nature today.”
Governments and museums in Europe and North America have increasingly sought to resolve ownership disputes over objects that were looted during colonial times.
Last year, Germany and Nigeria signed an agreement paving the way for the return of hundreds of artifacts known as the Benin Bronzes that were taken from Africa by a British colonial expedition more than 120 years ago. Nigerian officials hope that accord will prompt other countries that hold the artifacts, which ended up spread far and wide, to follow suit.
Hermann Parzinger, the head of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees the Ethnological Museum and others inThey weren’t “stolen in a violent context” andwas already long since an independent country, he said. Preuss bought them from the heir of a Kogi priest, who “apparently wasn’t entitled to sell these masks” - meaning that their acquisition “wasn’t quite correct.”
“But there is another aspect in this discussion of colonial contexts, and that is the rights of Indigenous people,” Parzinger added, pointing to a 2007 U.N. resolution stating that artifacts of spiritual and cultural significance to Indigenous groups should be returned.
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