This is open to debate. I'm John Donvan. Hi, everybody. You know when you go to a museum,

and next to every work of art, every artifact you look at, there's a little placard that gives you

the details of what it is you're looking at, where it came from, when it was created, maybe who the

artist was. In some cases, though, there is also a raging controversy that the little placard does not

spell out for you. I am talking about artifacts that a conquering power took from their places

of origin. The most obvious example, the one that gets most talked about is the vast collection of

bronzes that the British army seized in 1897 from the kingdom of Benin in Western Africa.

The controversy, the claim that this art belongs back in Africa.

The same argument is being made about a set of nearly 2,500-year-old sculptures that were taken

from Athens and have been on display in the British Museum in London since the 1800s,

though that is not as the outcome of war in that particular case.

But still, Greece wants them back, and Britain is saying no.

There are many other such examples, and in this we see the makings of a worthwhile debate.

So we're doing it, with four debaters, two against two, taking opposite sides on this question, should museums repatriate cultural artifacts? So let's meet our debaters. First, arguing if the answer to that question is yes. And again, the question is, should museums repatriate cultural artifacts? I want to welcome Chica Okeko Kulhu.

Chica is an artist and a curator, as well as a professor of art, archaeology, and African-American

studies at Princeton, and the director of Princeton's Africa World Initiative. Chica,

welcome to the program. Thank you so much. You studied art at the University of Nigeria,

and I'm just curious, what did studying there teach you that

an art school in, say, London or New York could not have? We were taught that there's a deep

connection between aesthetics and ethics, and this is based on the principles of Igbo art

of southeastern Nigeria.

Now, if I studied in Europe or in the United States, I would have missed that connection.

...