Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Transfers Eight Illicitly Trafficked Antiquities to Nigeria

ARTDAILY

Head, Nok peoples. African, Nok peoples, Nigeria, About 500 BC–200 AD. Ceramic; terracotta.

MASSACHUSETTS---The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has reached an agreement with the National Commission of Museums and Monuments, Nigeria (NCMM), transferring to the Commission eight antiquities of Nigerian origin that are believed to have been the subject of illicit trafficking. The antiquities include two Nok terracotta figures and a terracotta Ife head, archaeological materials that are known to be at high risk for theft and looting. The group also includes an ekpu, or ancestral figure dating to the 18th or 19th century, which was part of the collection of the Oron Museum, near Calabar, Nigeria, as late as the 1970s; and a bronze altar figure of about 1914, which was likely stolen from the Royal Palace in Benin City in 1976. [link]

Read More

Museum of Fine Arts in Boston Returns Art Works to Nigeria

ARTBEAT | NYTIMES
By Tom Mashberg

MASSACHUSETTS---The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has returned eight works of art to Nigeria after determining that the documentation accompanying some of the items, six of which were bequeathed in early 2013 by a prominent donor and collector, was suspect or fraudulent. The repatriated antiquities include two Nok terracotta figures and a terracotta head, items known to be at high risk for theft; a wooden ancestral figure from the 18th or 19th century known as an ekpu, which disappeared from a Nigerian museum in the 1970s; an elaborate bronze altar figure of a warrior from the 1910s, which was likely stolen from the Royal Palace in Benin City in 1976; two terracotta heads from the Kingdom of Benin, and a group of three figures made of wood and fiber known as Kalabari. [link]

Read More

Zimbabwe: Family Values in Christian Movies

THE HERALD | ALL AFRICA 
By Stanley Mushava

ZIMBABWE---The secular assault is threatening the family institution on every front. Rotten fibre is closing in on family values through the arts and other keynote social engines. The solution is plain. Christians must toughen up, upgrade their strategies, buckle down and fight the secular agenda, argument for argument, text for text, medium for medium. Fortunately, a growing section of Christian artists are waking up to this reality and responding in kind, lately through overtly Bible-oriented movies. "Monumental," "Courageous," "Time Changer," "Genius," "Gone Back Home," "Woman Thou Art Loosed" and "Fireproof" are among the swelling inventory of movies for the family cabinet. Hopefully, Zimbabwe will also develop a viable Christian film industry, especially with new gospel channels coming aboard. [link]

Read More

Show on African Homosexuality Shut Down After Fundamentalist Attack

THE ART NEWSPAPER
By Anny Shaw

The Nigerian photographer's ongoing series "Who We Are" portrays gay men from Lagos

SENEGAL---The Senegalese government has shut down one of the first exhibitions in Africa to focus on homosexuality on the continent. The move comes several weeks after an attack on the Dakar gallery by Muslim fundamentalists, says the French-Algerian artist Kader Attia. “Precarious Imaging: Visibility and Media Surrounding African Queerness” opened at Raw Material Company on 11 May, but a day later, the non-profit art centre was vandalised and the building damaged, according to Attia, whose video about the lives of transsexuals in Algiers and Mumbai was included in the show. No one was hurt in the attack. [link]

Read More

Ugandan Extremist Named to Head U.N. Assembly

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
By Carol Williams

Masked Kenyan supporters of the LGBT community stage a protest against Uganda's anti-gay bill in Nairobi. 

UGANDA---Ugandan Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa, who is set to take over the presidency of the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, has a decades-long legacy of corruption, military aggression and human-rights abuses, according to opponents of his selection as ceremonial head of the world body.  Kutesa also defended Museveni's introduction of an anti-gay law last year that imposes life sentences to those convicted of "aggravated homosexuality," a charge applied to same-sex couples openly living together. Milton Allimadi, a Ugandan journalist based in New York and editor of the Black Star News website, has been circulating an online petition appealing to the U.S. State Department to revoke Kutesa's visa so he cannot attend Wednesday's administrative session, where he is to assume his presidential duties. [link]

Read More

Uganda Martyrs Raise Questions on Homosexuality, Religion and Gay Rights

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS NEWS
By TAHLIB

Uganda Martyrs (with Saint Charles Lwanga in the center) by Albert Wider (Wikimedia Commons)

In yesterday's In Jesus In Love Blog, Kittredge Cherry introduces the disturbing execution of 45 Ugandan male pages who were burned to death on June 3, 1886 for refusing to have sex with their gay King Mwanga II. She wrote: "These boys and young men were canonized by the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, leaving some truths hidden by their halos." I knew nothing about this story, "but they are famous in much of Africa" wrote Cherry and June 3 is a national holiday in Uganda. The King was a bisexual teenager with wives, children, who had sex with other male teens without their consent. male sex partners. It's a shocking tale, and one used to harm gay Africans today.

Some of the future Uganda Martyrs were photographed in 1885, less than a year before they were killed, at Bukumbi Mission in Mwanza (northern Tanganyika). They went there to welcome the new Catholic bishop, Leon Livinhac.

Read More