That headline has me confused enough ... what’s it mean ?
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Well, I felt the same way..... then I read the article and got even more confused.
Basically, some decent art pieces from this one African culture came to exist, and one day (1897)...some Brits came into the region and ‘acquired’ them (probably hundreds of pieces).
I won’t argue about the art appeal here.
Berlin (German gov’t) over the years came to acquire 20-odd pieces which were in a museum.
This eventually resulted in Nigeria putting a guilt trip on the Germans. Couple of years ago....Germans finally said that they’d fund a big art museum to be built in Nigeria...several million Euro of cost, and then when done, they’d return the art (those 20 pieces).
Well...the museum did get built. But what the Germans did was rig this to return the pieces to the ‘kingdom’ that was originally the owner (not really the government).
The ‘king’ of Benin (Oba) decreed the property was his alone....not of the gov’t or the German museum.
German politicians sat there in shock the past week....weeping openly about how they were mislead on this deal. My prospective....some of the pieces will be sold off eventually, and end up in private collections back in Europe or Asia.
Side note: There are various screw-ups like this going on with German-African relations, and you will see more German weeping as they find out they were misled (over and over).