German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and Culture Minister Claudia Roth will sign a rehabilitation agreement with Nigerian counterparts Zubairu Dada and Lai Mohammed in Berlin on Friday afternoon. The political agreement immediately translates into Nigerian ownership of 1,100 works housed in the Linden Museum in Stuttgart, the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne, the Hamburg Museum of World Culture and the State Ethnographic Elections. The museums and the Nigerian government will then negotiate the physical return of the individual items, some of which could remain on display in Germany under custody agreements. “The return is a milestone in the process of reassessing colonial injustice in museum collections,” said Hermann Parzinger, head of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, an authority that oversees many of Berlin’s museums. “With the full transfer of all our assets to Benin, Nigeria, we are taking an important step.” He said a “representative collection” would remain in the German capital with a long-term loan. Two Benin bronzes – the head of an oba, or king, in 18th-century ceremonial attire and an expressive 16th-century relief depicting an oba accompanied by guards or comrades – were to be handed over to the Nigerian government on Friday afternoon and traveled back to west africa with delegation. The bronzes, looted by British soldiers and sailors on a punitive mission to Benin in 1897, were auctioned off in museums in Europe and North America in the early 20th century, with Germany securing the world’s second-largest collection. The two bronzes delivered to Berlin on Friday, selected to represent the typical style of the items, were bought by the British from Edward Schmidt, a German diplomat and employee of the shipping company Woermann Linie, who later sold them to a museum in Berlin. Subscribe to the First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every day at 7 p.m. BST From Britain, two Benin bronzes have been returned to Nigeria so far, at the initiative of the universities that owned them – a rooster sculpture from Jesus College in Cambridge and the head of an oba from the University of Aberdeen. The British Museum, which holds the largest collection of Benin bronze in the world, has refused to hand over its 900 items, saying it is prevented from returning permanent items by the British Museum Act of 1963 and the Heritage Act of 1983.
