Africa's Artistic Diaspora

How dealers and collectors navigate complex colonial histories

- James Tarmy

On the opening VIP day of the European Fine Art Fair (Tefaf ), an annual gathering in Maastricht, the Netherlands, there’s no such thing as a “packed” booth. The crowd is too genteel, the list too restricted. But at the back of the convention hall, six booths representing what the fair’s map has dubbed “Tribal Art” are humming with visitors.

The Paris-based dealer Bernard Dulon has brought an intricately carved Bena Lulua figure with a dull red patina that originated in central Africa in the 18th century. (Asking price: €400,000, or about $432,000.) Nearby, the Brussels dealer Bernard de Grunne has displayed a group of Mumuye statues from northeastern Nigeria. Tall, slender and lively, the figures carry prices ranging from €50,000 to €300,000. By the end of the fair’s second VIP day, all nine on offer have sold.

The buzz at the booths feels a world apart from the ongoing fracas over the restitution of the so-called Benin Bronzes, a collection of thousands of artifacts taken from Benin City (in what’s now Nigeria) during a British military raid in 1897. For a century the objects were bought and sold publicly and showcased in the world’s top museums. And for decades, people have called for their restitution, arguing that they were stolen. In the past few years, institutions around the world have finally begun to listen and reexamine African art collections more broadly. The German government signed an agreement in 2022 to transfer ownership of more than 1,000 artifacts to Nigerian officials; the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art transferred ownership of 29 objects last year; and France, which possessed pieces taken in an earlier raid from the West African kingdom of Dahomey, returned 26 objects to Benin in 2021.