Looting and illicit traffic in antiquities in Africa

Abstract

The looting of art and antiquities is an ancient practice. It is perhaps right to claim that in the twentieth century it grew exponentially. It may be claimed also that apart from countries like Italy, Greece, and Turkey, African countries suffered the most from unauthorised excavation of archaeological sites and trade in stolen antiquities in recent decades. In the 1960s and 1970s, the plundering of African cultural pro-perty assumed gigantic proportions. Michel Brent, who had devoted several years to cover the pillaging of terracotta statuettes from Mali, regretted that it was precisely at the moment when the African peoples have begun to acquire their independence, during the 1960s and 1970s, and thus begun to hold their heads high, to hope for the future, that this clandestine traffic of antique objects developed and took on such huge proportions. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.