Officials from the US-based Fowler Museum at U.C.L.A. recently returned seven artefacts that were taken from the Asante Kingdom in West Africa by British forces during a 19th-century conflict.
Ghana has long been a producer and exporter of gold. Present-day Ghana was one of the sources of gold used during the precolonial trans-Saharan trade routes that led to Europe. The Asante, are the dominant ethnic group of a powerful 19th-century empire and today one of Ghana’s leading ethnic groups, with more than two million members concentrated in south-central Ghana. During the Third Anglo-Asante War, troops under the command of Garnet Joseph Wolseley destroyed the African royal capital, blowing up the palace and obliterating everything in their path. This was approximately 150 years ago.
Now, in one of the first scheduled transfers of Ashanti treasures taken during colonial times, a museum in California sent seven royal artefacts back to Ghana’s traditional Ashanti king on Thursday in honour of his silver jubilee. The event coincided with mounting demand for US and European museums and organizations to return African artefacts that were taken under the colonial powers’ rule—Britain, France, Germany, and Belgium.
The Fowler Museum’s collection of royal treasures from Ghana, which includes an elephant tail whisk, an ornate chair, and a gold necklace, were presented during a chiefs’ ceremony at Kumasi, Ghana’s capital city in the Ashanti region. The museum, which focuses on the cultures of Africa, Asia, the Pacific and the Indigenous Americas, had received the items in 1965 as part of the largest gift in its history, a collection of some 30,000 objects from a trust in the name of the benefactor, Sir Henry Wellcome, a British pharmaceutical entrepreneur and artifact collector.
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This is a surprise actually. Usually, when a museum is found to have acquired stolen art, demands come from the outside. Family, foreign governments, or the media create a disturbance. The Fowler Museum, on the other hand, started the giveback after independently discovering the objects’ illegal past. It rarely operates in the manner in which it should. At the Fowler, on the other hand, provenance research tracking histories of ownership in the collection unearthed glaring problems. Jones and her team, funded by a Mellon Foundation grant, confirmed that theft and extortion were behind the removal from Africa of several Asante pieces — gold ornaments, an elaborate elephant tail whisk and a carved chair studded with intricate brass and iron embellishments. A gold cuff thought to have been decoration on a royal stool is embossed with lavish foliate patterns suggestive of leaves on a kum tree, a type of banyan for which Kumasi is named.
Their return, according to Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, the Ashanti ruler who plays a significant ceremonial role in Ghana, help unite his people.
Manhiya Palace Museum reopens this year in April. Experts say, the exhibition of these objects is going to increase visitor attendance at the museum. It receives about 80,000 visitors a year and they estimate that it could rise to 200,000 a year with the return of these objects. This will generate revenue and allow them to expand and develop our own museums.
Meanwhile, the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles and the British Museum, along with the Victoria & Albert Museum in the UK, are “lending” the artifacts to the Asante people for six years. The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) will lend 17 items, while the British Museum will send 15 pieces – with ornaments, jewelry, and talismans among the treasures. This marks a critical milestone as it aligns with anniversaries related to the Sagrenti War, the return of Asantehene Agyeman Prempeh, and the current Asantehene Osei Tutu II’s ascension.
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