Monday marks the 150th anniversary of the theft by British forces of countless gold, silver and other decorative items from the king’s palace in Kumasi, a former imperial city in the rainforests of Ghana’s Asante region. Troops led by Grenadier Joseph Wolseley razed the African royal city during the Third Anglo-Assad War, blowing up the palace and extinguishing everything.
Monday is also the day seven of those stolen items are officially returned to Kumasi, now a city of more than 3 million people, in an unprecedented ceremony with Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, the 16th Asante king. The UCLA Fowler Museum, in a highly unusual but very welcome move, has begun the repatriation of Asante artifacts that have been in the Westwood collection since 1965. Fowler Museum Director Silvia Forni, Senior Curator Erica P. Jones, and Secretary and collections manager Rachel Raynor will be on hand for the event.
Why unusual? Most often, claims arise from outside a museum when it is discovered to have acquired stolen art. Families, foreign governments or the media cause a stir. Instead, the Fowler Museum uncovered the artifacts’ illicit history on its own and initiated the return. That’s the way it should work, but rarely does.
External pressure led the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to announce an agreement late last month that temporarily returns 32 gold and silver items to the Asante people. The two museums cannot complete a full repatriation from antiquated British laws, one passed more than 60 years ago and the other in 1984 β both designed, at least in part, to stop growing claims against cultural property that were largely concentrated during colonial expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries. Instead, Kumasi’s is granted a three-year loan of 15 objects from the British Museum and 17 from the Victoria and Albert. Manhyia Palace Museumwhich was founded in 1925.
The British buy some time, but the loans represent progress.
In Fowler, on the other hand, provenance research tracing the collection’s ownership histories revealed glaring problems. Jones and her team, funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, confirmed that theft and extortion were behind the removal from Africa of several Asante pieces – gold ornaments, an elaborate elephant-tailed knocker and an intricately carved chair brass and iron ornaments. A gold cuff believed to have been an ornament on a royal stool is embossed with rich foliate designs suggestive of leaves on a kum tree, a type of banyan for which Kumasi is named.
Wolseley, a highly decorated soldier who was an adviser to Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest during the American Civil War, led the African offensive in 1874. called the Sagrenti War, it was the third of five central Gold Coast wars planned for to secure the mineral rich area for Queen Victoria. According to Fowler’s research, even the specific identity of who looted individual objects is now known.
The elephant tail wire, for example, which belonged to the king, was struck by Captain JE Audley Harvey of the famous Scottish Black Watch. London shop and auction records proved useful in determining provenance details.
A treaty at the end of the Sagrenti War required the Asante king to pay 50,000 ounces of gold to Queen Victoria, adding insult to injury by defraying Britain’s costs of attacking him. (At $2,000 an ounce today, that’s $100 million.) Gold reparations were sent to London and sold through a Mayfair jeweller. half a century later, some were found at auction. Henry Wellcome, the voracious American-born British pharmaceutical entrepreneur who amassed a collection of more than a million scientific and archaeological objects during his lifetime, bought many at a public sale in 1928.
The Asante objects were included in a 1965 gift to UCLA of about 30,000 Wellcome Trust objects. Three years ago, the Fowler Museum announced that it had determined that at least six Wellcome Trust sculptures had been stolen during an 1897 genocide in Benin City in present-day Nigeria.
Fowler, unlike its legally burdened counterparts in London, did not place conditions on Asante’s returns. Working with Tufts University scholar Kwasi Ampene, UCLA also commissioned copies from Ghanaian artists. The originals, destined for the palace museum, belong to the Asante, who are free to do with them as they please.
“In the case of pieces that were forcibly or forcibly removed from their original owners or communities, it is our moral responsibility to do everything we can to return these objects,” Jones said in a statement.
For museums, provenance research is a fundamental curatorial responsibility that too often falls by the wayside. At the Fowler Museum, significant cultural dividends are reaped.