Stolen Igbo statues
Two life-sized wooden statues stolen from Igboland by whites have been sold for a staggering N85.6m in the UK.
A British auction company, Christie’s has been called out for
selling two life-sized wooden statues stolen from Igboland for N85.6
million ($238,000) in an online auction on Monday, June 29, 2020.
The statues, labelled “A Couple of Igbo Figures Attributed to The
Akwa Master”, were sold to an online bidder on Monday despite
controversy surrounding how the company gained possession of them.
A Professor of African and American Diaspora Art, Chika
Okeke-Agulu, had called out Christie's in a spirited campaign over the
pass few weeks to stop the sale of the statues. But, the campaign
failed.
He had argued that the statues were two out of dozens of local
artifacts stolen from the southeast region where they were made while
the Igbo natives of the region were locked in a deadly civil war with
the Nigerian government between 1967 and 1970.
“These artworks are stained with the blood of Biafra’s children,” Okeke-Agulu wrote in an Instagram post on June 6.
However, Christie’s said it doesn’t believe the statues were
acquired illegally by Jacques Kerchache, the French collector that owned
them.
Nigeria had already passed the Antiquities Ordinance law in 1953 to
prohibit the trade of stolen cultural artifacts, years before the
statues and others like them were believed to have been transported out
of the country.
There have been concerted efforts over the years to have African
artifacts transported abroad via colonial exploitation or illegal
looting returned to the continent, but success has been rare.
No comments:
Post a Comment