Hey everybody it is it is me Dylan so a couple of years ago we put out an

episode about an issue that comes up pretty often.

It's about how art and cultural artifacts end up in Western museums

pretty far from where they originally came from, and often without necessarily permission of the folks that originally made them.

Specifically, we looked at one really notable case of this these thousands of masks from the former kingdom of Benin

These are now spread out through museums all across the world and our our producer Boda Laire actually went to visit some of these masks

in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

And his reporting brought up a lot of questions about

where these pieces of art should actually be.

And recently, this story has come into the news again in kind of a big way. So we're going to play the original story for you now and then

we will have a special update at the end with Botelaire. So stay tuned for that.

Okay, here is the original shell.

A lot of people don't know this, but many Haitians descend from the people of the Benin

Kingdom, which was located in what is now southern Nigeria.

My personal ancestry test came back 28% Nigerian, and I found out that the Benin

bronzes, the precious artwork from this kingdom, would be on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The kingdom of Benin existed from about 1100 AD to 1897 when it fell.

What happened in 1897?

What happened in 1897?

Well, British forces invaded the kingdom.

And during that raid, which killed thousands of people,

the British stole thousands of these bronzes and never returned them.

Here I am. My name is Baudelaire and this is Atlas Obscura. A celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and

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