Sweden Set to Return 40 Sacred Objects to Nigeria and 77 Items to Bolivia

Sweden is set to send 40 sacred objects back to Nigeria, and 77 objects belonging to the Kallawaya people of Bolivia, including human remains, to a museum in La Paz, the capital.

The Nigerian objects come from the Kingdom of Benin, a historic kingdom whose lands now form part of Nigeria. It is not the modern country of Benin, which sits to Nigeria's west. In 1897, British forces on a punitive expedition, a military raid meant to punish a local power, took roughly 5,000 royal and religious objects from the kingdom. ArtNews reported the figure.

The Bolivian case is more recent, and more personal. The Kallawaya are an Indigenous people of the Andes. Their remains and related objects were taken out of Bolivia illegally, according to the same report. For years they were held in the World Culture Museum in Gothenburg, Sweden. In 2023, the Swedish government announced that it would transfer ownership of the collection.

The return is not yet complete. The objects are set to go to the Archaeological Museum in La Paz, which will receive them once the transfer is carried out.

Restitution, the formal return of cultural property to the place or people it came from, has become a regular part of how European museums deal with their collections. Each handover involves paperwork, transport, careful packing and a new home for objects that have often been out of their country for more than a century.

For the Nigerian and Bolivian communities involved, the transfers mean the objects, and in the Bolivian case human remains, will return to the lands they were taken from.