LAGOS MAY 14TH (NEWSRANGERS)-As the pressure to “decolonise” has grown throughout Britain’s educational and arts institutions, from showy renaming of buildings, whose benefactors have the slightest link with slavery, to trigger warnings about racial “slurs” in great works of literature, the move to send swathes of objects in British collections back to where they came from…
LAGOS MAY 10TH (NEWSRANGERS)-Nigeria’s outgoing president has issued a declaration over the Benin Bronzes that could have significant consequences in the campaign for the return of these great cultural treasures, as Barnaby Phillips has been finding out. In the dying weeks of his administration, Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari made a decision which has caused a…
LAGOS SEPTEMBER 13TH (NEWSRANGERS)-With European museums on the back foot following Black Lives Matter protests, Nigerian politicians have the opportunity to shape the fate of the famous Benin Bronzes, writes Barnaby Phillips, an expert on the subject. A debate which has been heating up for years has reached boiling point. Many in Africa, and elsewhere,…