Sweden Returns 39 Benin Objects to Nigeria as Bolivian Remains Move Toward Home
Sweden has begun the final phases of returning looted objects to Nigeria and Bolivia, The Art Newspaper reported on 9 November 2026.
The Nigerian part is already complete. On 5 November, 39 Nigerian cultural artefacts, including Benin Bronzes, were formally returned from Sweden to Nigeria, according to a post from the Embassy of Sweden in Nigeria. The Benin Bronzes are brass and bronze sculptures and plaques made in the Kingdom of Benin, in what is now Nigeria. At a ceremony in Lagos, the group was handed over as a whole, and the objects are known as the Emwin Arre.
British troops took the objects in 1897 from the Edo people, whose kingdom they were part of. The pieces later passed to what was then the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm. Six of the Benin objects will stay in Sweden under a ten-year loan, so they remain on view there while ownership returns to Nigeria.
Bolivia's share is still on its way. Seventy-seven objects from the Niño Korin village were taken from storage in Gothenburg, on Sweden's west coast, to be transported to the National Museum of Archaeology in La Paz. The collection includes the skull of a Kallawaya healer, a traditional practitioner from the Bolivian Andes.
The Bolivian objects date to roughly 600 to 1000 AD, during what archaeologists call the Tiwanaku period. Tiwanaku was an ancient culture centred near Lake Titicaca. According to The Art Newspaper, the objects were looted in grave robberies in the 1970s and were later sold to the Swedish museum.
Restitution, the formal return of objects to the people or country they were taken from, has been slow and piecemeal across Europe. Germany handed over 20 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria in December 2022, Reuters reported at the time. In September 2021, a newly formed guild of artists from Benin City also offered to donate artworks to the British Museum in London, as part of a wider debate over the bronzes held in Europe.
The Swedish returns follow a similar path. Each object has to be packed, transported and documented before it reaches its new home. For the Kallawaya remains, that work is now the next step, and for the Benin objects, the handover in Lagos is complete.
