According to reports reaching OYOGist.com, Christie’s, a particular British auction company, reportedly sold two life-sized wooden statues with Nigerian roots for $238,000(N85.6 million) in an online auction just yesterday, June 29, 2020.
Despite the serious controversy encycling how this company gained possession of the several statues labelled “A Couple of Igbo Figures Attributed to The Akwa Master”, were sold to a particular online bidder on Monday. Below is an Image of the two statues.
Chika Okeke-Agulu, a Professor of African and American Diaspora Art, had already launched a campaign over the past few weeks to stop the sales of these statues; Igbo Alusi figures. On an Instagram post he made on June 6, Okeke-Agulu wrote, “These artworks are stained with the blood of Biafra’s children.”
He had argued that this two particular statues were out of dozens of local artifacts stolen from the southeast region where they were made while the Igbo natives of the region were locked between 1967 and 1970 in a deadly civil war with the Nigerian government. However, Christie’s said it doesn’t believe that Jacques Kerchache acquired these statues illegally. Jacques Kerchache was the French collector that owned them.
