Living Traditions

African art traditions have not frozen in museum cases. Contemporary African artists like El Anatsui transform traditional materials — bottle caps, cassava graters — into monumental tapestries that sell for millions at international auctions. Yinka Shonibare uses Dutch wax fabrics to interrogate colonial identity.

The restitution movement is accelerating. In 2022, Germany agreed to return all 1,130 Benin objects identified in its public collections, and transferred ownership of the first 512 — from Berlin's Ethnologisches Museum — to Nigeria, about a third of which remain on loan at the Humboldt Forum. France returned 26 objects to Benin Republic. But thousands remain in Western collections, and the debate over ownership, context, and cultural heritage is far from resolved.