THE United States has returned 11 cultural artifacts to Nigeria.
Authorities said French customs officials tipped off the U.S. in April 2010 about a shipment headed to New York’s Kennedy Airport.
The 10 Nok statues and a carved tusk were seized from a Manhattan gallery owner, and an investigation determined they were bona fide antiquities. The artifacts are to be displayed in Nigeria’s national museum.
Nok statues are about 2,000 to 2,500 years old, among the oldest sculptures in West Africa. They were first unearthed in 1943 at a tin mine near the village of Nok in Plateau State.
Homeland Security investigators say two Nok statues and a carved ivory tusk were previously seized at Chicago O’Hare International Airport.
At a repatriation ceremony held at Homeland Security Investigationoffices on the west side of Manhattan on Thursday, Nigeria’s Consul General Habib Baba Habu, took legal possession of the terracotta sculptures, which he said had been stolen from the National Museum.
“It is the day that America has extended a gift of friendship that we will never forget,” he said.
On display for the ceremony were seven pieces of figurines, which resembled bits of cylindrical gingerbread men thanks to the orange hue of the terracotta. The two best preserved pieces, a head and torso, and a pair of legs standing on a pedestal, appeared to have once belonged to a single figure.
All are the work of the Nok culture, which existed within what would become Nigeria from more than 2,000 years ago, before disappearing in the early centuries of the first millennium.
Each of the six terracotta heads bore a distinctive face, which is typical of Nok sculpture, Habu said, explaining that the ancient artisans drew from individual people in normal life, depicting them riding horsesor donkeys, for example, or with farm tools.
Nok artisans were prolific, many similar figurines have left Nigeria, Habu said: “Many of them are at museums all over the world, some were taken out legally.”
Nigeria has laws that control the export of Nok pieces; however, the sculptures have flooded out of the country. In the 1990s, so many reached the European art market that the prices dropped sharply, according to a New York Times article in 2000.
- The Nation
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Thieves and scoundrels!
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