₦airaland Forum

PRESIDENT BUHARI DEMANDS RETURN OF MORE NIGERIA’S ARTEFACTS FROM ABROAD

In the aftermath of the return of two important Nigerian artefacts from Britain, President Muhammadu Buhari has appealed to nations, institutions and bodies, both private and public, to return Nigeria’s artefacts in their possession.

The President welcomed the official handover, on Saturday, of the Okwukor and the Head of an Oba of Benin bronzes, to the Oba of Benin, His Royal Highness, Oba Ewuare II.

They were repatriated from the University of Cambridge and University of Aberdeen, respectively, in the United Kingdom, after 125 years of their leaving the territory of present day Nigeria.

Urging other countries to take a cue from the institutions, the President vowed that the Federal Government will pursue the repatriation of Nigerian artefacts vigorously.

He pledged that government would ensure that they are put to good and proper use on their return in museums and other facilities in conjunction with the royal families and kingdoms that lost these artefacts.

The President noted that in line with international law and practice, export, import and control over antiquities are matters within the purview of national governments to be exercised on behalf of sub-national authorities, institutions and bodies.

He thanked the Government of the United Kingdom that facilitated the return of these artefacts by issuing the prerequisite Export Permits to Nigeria at no cost, as well as the University of Cambridge and the University of Aberdeen who agreed to return these artefacts to Nigeria.

''These are unprecedented moves worth emulating by others,'' he said, adding that the Federal Government hopes to work hand in hand in the future to encourage the return of more Nigerian artefacts from the United Kingdom.

''I also want to appreciate the Federal Republic of Germany which is planning the process of repatriating 1,130 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria from many of Germany’s public museums. These returns are scheduled for this year.''

The President also commended the High Commissioner of Nigeria to the United Kingdom, Sarafa Ishola, and the National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM) for their

collaborative works that led to the repatriation of these artefacts.

The President said it is noteworthy that several others are currently in the process of being returned while discussions are ongoing to repatriate many more.

President Buhari recounted that the artefacts now returned to the Oba of Benin were taken away by British soldiers in 1897 when they attacked the ancient Benin Kingdom and took thousands of artefacts away.

''These artefacts are part of the records of the history of the Benin people.

''My directive to return these artefacts to the Oba of Benin marks the beginning of another aspect in the highly valued relationship between the Federal Government of Nigeria and our traditional institutions who are indeed the true custodians of our history, customs and traditions.

''This directive is also significant because it will introduce a working relationship between the Federal Government as represented by the NCMM and the traditional institutions whereby this Commission negotiates the release of antiquities from foreign museums and institutions on behalf of Nigeria and the traditional institutions that lost the antiquities and jointly they all take steps to ensure the valourisation of Nigerian and Nigerian people through these great arts and cultural emblems,'' the President explained.

Garba Shehu
Senior Special Assistant to the President
(Media & Publicity)
February 21, 2022

Lalasticla
Mynd44
dominique Seun

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1523191341397297&id=100011193364134&sfnsn=scwspwa

Create better reforms for ur citizenry...... artifacts won't feed us

[s]

saintkel:
Create better reforms for ur citizenry...... artifacts won't feed us

[/s]

You are talking out of point �

LordviccoDaGuru:
[s][/s]

You are talking out of point �

he's on point

longetivity:
he's on point

Wen have u become a judge??

As if he knows what artefacts are. Anything he hears garuba shehu say, he will re-echo it .

saintkel:
Create better reforms for ur citizenry...... artifacts won't feed us

You are asking a lizard to give you chairs as if it was sitting on any himself.

saintkel:
Create better reforms for ur citizenry...... artifacts won't feed us

Perhaps you can do your politicking without getting my ancestral heritage involved. In other words, Benin bronzes are none of your business. So you best comment on something else while we Edo rejoice to see our Bronzes come back home.

Sign electoral bill Mr enemy of progress, what does he know about Artefacts ?

[s]

BeardedmeatR:
As if he knows what artefacts are. Anything he hears garuba shehu say, he will re-echo it .

[/s]

[s]

Maxymilliano:
Sign electoral bill Mr enemy of progress, what does he know about Artefacts ?

[/s]

Maxymilliano:
Sign electoral bill Mr enemy of progress, what does he know about Artefacts ?

This is not relevant to this topic ok

The 25th March was, as usual, commemorated as the day Britain officially abolished its Slave Trade in 1807. But how many recall that Arab slavers were the first, and last, in modern times to ship millions of Africans out of the continent as slaves? And that Arab slavers preferred more African women to men? We revisit our archives for this insightful reminder by George Pavlu.


Thus, “for the Islamic world,” Clarke continues, “Slavs provided the major source of slaves in the 250 or so years between the defeat at the battle of Poitiers in AD 732 that forced the consolidation of their dramatic conquests across North Africa and the Iberian peninsula, cutting back the flow of war captives, and the expansion of the im port of black Africans across the Sahara from around AD 1000.”

The trade in slaves ended when the Ottoman Turk s conquered the region in 1463. “The effective closure of the last major source of slaves on the European continent,” says Clarke, “thus co-incidentally took place at the same time as the Portuguese explorations of the West African coast which were to open up the second and most devastating route for the exploitation of Africans as slaves.”

Figures on the Arab slave trade in Africa are hard to come by, but the historian Paul Lovejoy estimates that some 9.85 million Africans were shipped out as slaves to Arabia and, in small numbers, to the Indian subcontinent. Lovejoy breaks his figures down as follows:

Between AD 650 and 1600, an average of 5,000 Africans were shipped out by the Arabs. This makes a rough total of 7.25 million.

Then, between 1600 and 1800, another 1.4 million Africans were shipped out by the Arabs. The 19th century represented the highest point of the Arabian trade where 12,000 Africans were shipped out every year. The total figure for the 19th century alone was 1.2 million slaves to Arabia.

The numbers game

Thus, in terms of numbers, Arabia’s 9.85 million is not far behind the conservative estimate of nearly 12 million African victims of the Atlantic slave trade. Some African historians, though, reject these figures on the grounds that they are too low. They suggest over 50 million Africans were shipped out during the Atlantic trade alone.

According to Lovejoy, another 4.1 million Africans were shipped across the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf and India. “This trade also, with the notable exception of some Portuguese involvement in the area of Mozambique, and of 18th and 19th century French exports to islands under their control in the Indian Ocean, was largely conducted by Muslims,” adds Duncan Clarke.

Through out the 19th century, the Omani Arab rulers of Zanzibar shipped hundreds of thousands of African slaves to work on clove plantations on the island. It was this trade that gave Europe and America so much satisfaction, after abolishing their own trade in African slaves, to highlight the wickedness of the Arab slavers who continued to enslave Africans well into the first decades of the 20th century. Even to this day, Arab slavers are still at work in Sudan and Mauritania, buying and selling black Africans.

David Livingstone, the British missionary/traveller/explorer was so upset by the way the Arabs treated their African slaves that he wrote back home in 1870:

“In less than I take to talk about it, these unfortunate creatures — 84 of them, wended their way into the village where we were. Some of them, the eldest, were women from 20 to 22 years of age, and there were youths from 18 to 19, but the large majority was made up of boys and girls from 7 years to 14 or 15 years of age.

“A more terrible scene than these men, women and children, I do not think I ever came across. To say that they were emaciated would not give you an idea of what human beings can undergo under certain circumstances. “Each of them had his neck in a large forked stick, weigh ing from 30 to 40 pounds, and five or six feet long, cut with a fork at the end of it where the branches of a tree spread out. “T he women were tethered with bark thongs, which are, of all things, the most cruel to be tied with. Of course they are soft and supple when first striped off the trees, but a few hours in the sun make them about as hard as the iron round packing-cases. The little children were fastened by thongs to their mothers. “As we passed along the path which these slaves had travelled, I was shown a spot in the bushes where a poor woman the day before, unable to keep on the march, and likely to hinder it, was cut down by the axe of one of these slave drivers. “We went on further and were shown a p lace where a child lay. It had been been recently born, and its mother was unable to carry it from debility and exhaustion; so the slave trader had taken this little infant by its feet and dashed its brains out against one of the trees and thrown it in there.”

Such was the brutality meted out to the Africans by the Arabs. Like the Atlantic trade, the Arabian trade’s “middle passage” was equally as horrible and terrifying. The “middle passage” describes the harrowing journey lasting several months from Africa’s west coast to the Americas during which millions of Africans, packed like sardines in the slave ships, died of thirst, hunger, rough seas, and sometimes from the sheer brutality inflicted by the European slavers.

In the Arabian trade, the trudge across the Sahara, in leg and neck chains, and as Livingstone describes above, necks in large forked sticks and hands tied with bark thongs, was particularly harsh on the African slaves.

Says Duncan Clarke: “The hardships of these long marches across the desert were considerable, and much later travellers reported that the routes were lined with the parched skeletons of those who succumbed to exhaustion and thirst along the way.”

The Arab slavers did not only march their African captives to Arabia, they also sometimes sold them to European slavers.

In modern times, the popular image of African slavery springs from the vision of a tormented male suffering under the lash of unceasing labour on some “New World” sugar plantation. Yet the real face of servitude finds its focus in the forced migration of millions of girls and young women across the Sahara and the Horn of Africa in to the institutions of Islamic concubinage.

Why they preferred women

While in the European “New W o r ld ”, the measure of a man’s stature was mapped out and calibrated on the physical dimensions of empire built upon the sinews of forced masculine labour, in the Islamic Orient wealth was a reflection of prestige, young girls the vessel of male h u b r is , th e mats of male pleasure ground, the malleable material to be shaped to the master’s will.

Thus, women slaves in the Arab world were often turned into concubines living in harems, and rarely as wives, their children becoming free. A large number of male slaves and young boys were castrated and turned into eunuchs who kept watch over the harems. Castration was a particularly brutal operation with a survival rate of only 10%.

“The combined effect of all these factors,” says Duncan Clarke, “was a steady demand for slaves throughout the Islamic world, which had cover story to be met from wars, raids or purchases along the borders with non-Islamic regions. Although some of these slaves came from Russia, the Balkans and central Asia, the continuing expansion of Islamic regimes in sub-Saharan Africa made black Africans, the major source.”

So invasive was the practice of slavery into the economic, political, demographic, cultural, social and religious life of Africa and persisted for so many centuries, that while