Many Nigerians fantasise about the Western World. While the more affluent Nigerians have been able to turn their fantasies into reality by visiting the Western countries and spending considerable time there, many other Nigerians have had to do with the often lavish and laundered offerings of globalization to count the stars over European and American skies.
There are also many Nigerians who today live permanently in different Western countries. Not for them is any suggestion of returning home.
Historical records and archives suggest that this obsession with the West has a long and sometimes dark history. Indeed, far from the suggestion that Nigerians were the first to shamelessly roll over and pant after the West, there was a time the West was just as shameless. Keen students of history will remember colonialism and the independence struggle and the many episodes that went into it.
This is important, especially in light of the news that the Netherlands has agreed to return about 112 bronze artifacts looted from Benin in present-day Edo State.
Recently, the Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden, or the folk art museum, reached an agreement with Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments to facilitate the repatriation. The repatriation, when it happens, will be the latest installment in a long line of efforts made by the Nigerian government to recover priceless artifacts looted from the country during colonial times.
Already, dozens of artifacts have been recovered by the country. But such was the scale of plunder of a people’s material culture that many more artifacts lying loose in European museums are yet to be recovered.
Nigeria was not the only victim of this theft of epic and historic proportions. Many other countries which were victims of such colonial heists have been vocal in demanding that what they lost be returned to them.
It is noteworthy that other Dutch Museums have also been busy repatriating artifacts looted during colonial times from the Dutch East India Company’s holding in Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
In total, the repatriations include the ‘Lombok treasure’, consisting of 335 objects from Lombok in the Lesser Sunda Islands of Indonesia, four statues from the Javan Hindu kingdom of Singasari, 132 objects of modern art from Bali, and from Sri Lanka—a cache of ceremonial weapons from the city-states of Kandy and others including a royal canon made of gold, silver, and rubies.
While it is almost impossible to describe colonialism in a few words, there is no doubt that colonialism was, by and large, an unprecedented spree of looting and plunder against people who were at the mercy of ruthless occupiers.
These occupiers, as savage as they were, cared little about the welfare of the people they occupied in the short and long run. What was uppermost in their twisted minds was access to the resources that were abundant in their colonies, which meant that even the most vicious forms of exploitation were permissible as a means to an end.
Colonialism was a vicious attack on the culture of the colonized. This culture often found expression in intangible resources like language and material resources like artifacts and artwork.
Their presence in the museums of colonizers around the world remains an ongoing insult to the sensibilities of people who suffered unimaginable injustice under colonialism.
Each of those artifacts must be returned. Nothing will make up for the atrocities of colonialism or measure the loss it occasioned, but returning what is left of the loot will be a tiny but consequential first step.
Kene Obiezu writes via [email protected]
