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Oba of Benin receives looted ‘Bronze cockerel’, ‘Oba head’ returned from UK

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The looted artefacts belonging to Benin City named ‘the Bronze cockerel’ known as ‘Okpa’ and the ‘Oba head bronze’ known as ‘Ilahor’ have been returned to the palace of the Oba in Benin City, Edo State capital during a ceremony on Saturday

The Nigerian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Sarafa Tunji Ishola, and other officials from the UK carried the Bronze to return to the Oba’s palace.

The presence of the officials were received at Benin Airport on Saturday at 11:00 am.

The delegates as they arrived later approached the palace and presented the artefacts which were neatly packaged in a red-colour parcel.

Recall that, earlier in October, last year, Jesus College, University of Cambridge returned a Benin Bronze, Okukor, making history as the first institution in the world to do so.

The Okukor statue was looted directly from the Court of Benin, as part of the punitive British expedition of 1897 and was given to the College in 1905 by the father of a student.

Over hundred years later, the institution finally gave the elaborately carved cockerel known as ‘Okukor’ to a Nigerian delegation at a ceremony in 2021.

However in October 2021, the University of Aberdeen returned a Benin Bronze to Nigeria after over 100 years since it was looted by British forces.

The sculpture, which looks like the head of an Oba (king), is one of the thousands of religious and cultural artefacts looted by British forces in 1897 during the destruction of Benin City in current Nigeria by a British military expedition.

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