Sacred Nigerian statues were scheduled to be auctioned off in Paris, but a Nigerian commission has demanded that the event be called off on the grounds that the artifacts were stolen.
The artworks were lawfully acquired, according to Christie’s auction house, and the sale will take place on Monday.
In recent years, French courts have supported auction houses whose sales of sacred items, like Hopi tribal masks, were contested by rights organizations and representatives of the tribes.
The male and female wooden objects that were stolen are representations of Igbo gods.
Professor Chika Okeke-Agulu, a Princeton scholar, and Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments raised the red flag earlier this month that the items had been looted in the late 1960s Biafran war.
The Nigerian commission received a letter from Christie’s earlier this month stating that the sale would proceed.
The items were taken from Okeke-Agulu’s native state of Anambra through “an act of violence,” according to the Igbo tribal member, and they shouldn’t be sold.
More than 2,000 people have signed an online petition asking that the auction be put on hold.
Prof. Agulu Okeke.
In the petition, it was stated that “as the world awakens to the reality of systemic racial injustice and inequality, thanks to the BlackLivesMatter movement, we must not forget that it is not just the Black body but also Black culture, identity, and especially art that is being misappropriated.”.
It asserts that between 1967 and 1970, as the Biafran civil war in Nigeria raged and more than three million civilians died, a renowned European treasure hunter visited Biafra “on a hunting spree for our cultural heritage.”.
According to a statement from Christie’s to the Associated Press, “these objects are being sold lawfully having been publicly exhibited and previously sold over the last decades prior to Christie’s involvement.”.
The auction house acknowledged the “nuanced and complex debates around cultural property,” but asserted that in order to prevent the emergence of the black market, public sales should take precedence over private sales for items of this nature.
Tribal artifacts have a long history in Paris, dating back to both the city’s colonial history in Africa and the 1960s movements of the “Indianist” movement and other groups based there that favored Indigenous tribal cultures.
Due to media attention, such contentious sales have in the past increased the final selling price of the items up for bid, but there have also been instances where buyers were put off from bidding on artifacts due to concerns about a backlash.