The United Kingdom has agreed to loan 23 royal artifacts taken from the Asante Empire (modern Ghana) back to a museum in Kumasi, Ghana for a term of three years. The British looted the valuable items from the Asante during the Anglo-Asante wars of 1824 to 1900.
Straight Arrow News contributor Adrienne Lawrence says that the British are keeping colonialism “alive and well” by refusing to return these and other looted items to their native homes.
These developments across the pond should remind us that the audacious nature of the colonizer spirit is alive and well today. And it must be reckoned with if we are going to have peace on a global level. Let’s be real: If the Brits had to return everything in their museums which did not originate with them, those museums would be barren. In fact, in just the Victoria and Albert Museum alone, there are 2.8 million items that belong to countries demanding repatriation. Yet the U.K. won’t do so on account of the British Museum Act of 1963 and the National Heritage Act of 1983 prohibiting the “de-ascensioning” of the items in their collections, or so they say. Yeah, the country built its wealth on the backs of nations that it raped and pillaged for centuries. And now the U.K. claims its hands are tied, and it can’t give those countries back their sacred cultural pieces because of the laws of the U.K. itself created.
The nerve!
2023 was supposed to be the year of the repatriation of artifacts. This time last year, the Houston Museum of National Sciences returned a wooden sarcophagus to Egypt that had been looted. A stolen Christopher Columbus letter was returned to Italy even though we know that dude is King Colonizer. Looted antiquities went back to Nepal. We shut down many indigenous sections of museums and returned items to tribes. The fact is the need for the reckoning is on a global scale, yet the U.K. doesn’t seem to get the message. From the Benin Bronzes to the Parthenon sculptures, the British continue their colonization by refusing to return what they have stolen.
