On February 8, 2024, the Fowler Museum at UCLA's director, Dr. Silvia Forni; its director of Registration and Collections Management, Dr. Rachel Raynor; and I stood in front of two museum crates on the Dwabrem festival ground at the Manhyia Palace in Kumasi, Ghana. We opened the crates before Asantehene Otumfuo Osei Tutu II and a crowd of thousands and presented seven objects to the assembled people, officially and fully returning them to the kingdom they were taken from over 150 years prior. I think it is fair to say that no-one at the Fowler foresaw this event in 2018, when we started on the project that led to this restitution.
In 2018, the Mellon Foundation approached the Fowler Museum with a tantalizing question: If they were to invite the Fowler to apply for a grant to support the study of historical African arts, what would we want to do...