A new generation of young Africans is adding to the pressure on Western museums to return stolen artifacts, Ernesto Ottone, deputy director general of the U.N.’s cultural agency, said on Jan. 27.
“Over the past five or six years, we have seen pressure in the street,” Ottone, a former culture minister in Chile, said in an interview in Ethiopia‘s capital Addis Ababa.
“When we speak to the new generation of people going to museums in Europe, they look at what they see with a critical eye,” he said, highlighting a new “awareness” and “change in attitudes.”
Ottone was in Ethiopia for a UNESCO conference discussing the return of statues, paintings and other works to the continent many years after they were looted in colonial times.
Although several European countries have started handing back art to countries in Africa and Asia, Ottone said it was a “complex matter” that depended on each country’s legislation.
He said he was seeing efforts led by universities or museums as well as officials.
Museums in France alone stored some 90,000 objects from sub-Saharan Africa, according to a 2018 report.
Britain also holds many works in museums that their countries of origin are pressing to get back, such as the Parthenon Marbles, object of a long-running dispute between the U.K. and Greece.
The British Museum in London has refused to return any of its famed collection of Benin bronzes, sacred sculptures and carvings removed from the former kingdom of Benin in southern Nigeria in 1897 during the colonial era.
A law passed in 1963 technically prevents the British Museum from giving back the treasures.
