![]() ![]() Second, that the exploitation of cultural wealth and natural resources is commensurable, due to the fact of material wealth generated by European institutions from the cultural heritage of former colonies. European museums, by extension, are “unwittingly the public archives of the colonial system” which must restore their looted objects. First, that colonization is a crime, and therefore all acts of looting or object collection under colonization are crimes. In the Sarr-Savoy report, the case for the restitution of art objects is foregrounded by three key ideas. The Rhode Island protests over the Oba’s restitution at the RISD Museum were held a week after the Sarr-Savoy report was released to the public. The report was commissioned by French President Emmanuel Macron to address the state of unlawfully-collected sub-Saharan African art in public French institutions, and to recommend courses of action for the restitution of these art objects. ![]() Toward a New Relational Ethics, colloquially known as the Sarr-Savoy report after its authors Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, was released on November 21. In 2018, the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Each new oba who rules Edo State must install an ancestral altar for his predecessor-here, the king head casting plays a critical role in representing the wisdom of the deceased and channeling the collective wisdom of all past obas. ![]() Yet in its local context, the Oba is a sacred object. The Oba has been shown in various exhibits and configurations in relation to the rest of the Museum’s collections, such as in European galleries with 17th and 18th-century work which address imperialism. In 1939, Aldrich donated the Oba to the RISD Museum. The Oba that is held at the RISD Museum was auctioned to a private individual named Lucy Truman Aldrich at the Knoedler Gallery in New York in 1935, labeled as a French import. This expedition resulted in the confiscation of over a thousand bronze castings, which were brought back to Britain, and auctioned off to the British Museum and individual members of the military as spoils of war. The Oba is one of an estimated thousand bronze castings, colloquially called ‘Benin Bronzes,’ which filled the royal palace of the former Kingdom until the British Punitive Expedition of 1897, where 1,200 British soldiers looted the Kingdom and massacred its citizens. Their lands are known today as Southern Nigeria, more specifically Edo State. The Head of the King (Oba) is a bronze casting of the head of an Oba or supreme king of the Edo people organized under the Kingdom of Benin. Unknown artist, Beninese, Head of a king (Oba) (probably 1700s). ![]()
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