The British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) have agreed to a three-year loan of Ghana’s “Crown Jewels,” 150 years after the treasures were pillaged from the collection of the Asante king.
The 32 gold and silver pieces of court regalia—including rings, swords, and ceremonial bangles—belonged to the Asante people of West Africa, who were renowned for their rich economy and military might. The trove was looted from the Asante royal palace during the 19th and 20th century Anglo-Ashanti wars, which pitted the Asante kingdom against coastal African peoples aligned with the British Empire. The Kumasi capital was burned amid the fighting and the royal palace pillaged by British troops, and its treasures subsequently scattered across private and public collections in the UK.
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As many national museums in the UK, including the V&A and the British Museum, are barred by law from permanently returning items in their collections, long-term loan agreements have become a popular means to assuage the bitter politics around contested artifacts. The British Museum and the V&A, for example, struck a three-year loan agreement that has an option to extend.
“It doesn’t seem to me that all of our museums will fall down if we build up these kinds of partnerships and exchanges,” V&A director Tristram Hunt told the BBC, adding the agreement is still, “not restitution by the back door,” or a permanent arrangement.
A senior British Museum source also told The Telegraph he hoped the deal can inspire a similar agreement with Greece over the Parthenon Marbles, a group of sculptures at the center of a centuries-old repatriation debate.
The loan agreement was made not with the Ghanaian government, but with Otumfo Osei Tutu II, the current Asante king, who is called the Asantehene. Though Ghana is a democratic nation, Asante royalty has considerable influence on the country’s cultural affairs. The artifacts will be exhibited at the Manhyia Palace Museum in Kumasi, the capital of the Asante region, to mark the Asantehene’s silver jubilee.
Nana Oforiatta Ayim, special adviser to Ghana’s culture minister, told the BBC that the artifacts’ cultural significance transcends their material value.
“They’re not just objects, they have spiritual importance as well. They are part of the soul of the nation, Ayim said. “It’s pieces of ourselves returning.”
She added that the loan was “a good starting point” and “a sign of some kind of healing and commemoration for the violence that happened.”