National Crisis: How ignorance contribute to the looting of Nigeria's cultural artifacts.

In the 1970s, some cultural artifacts were still housed in shrines in many Nigerian villages. Those shrines were places where villagers worshiped various gods represented by the sculptures in the shrines. Example of some of the shrines are Ishundichie and Aniugala in Issele-uku dialect of Igbo Language. the early christian missionaries respected the rights of those villagers to worship their ancestor gods. Hence those shrines and their contents remained intact for some time.
In the late 1980s, a new breed of christian missionaries swoop into Nigeria. They were called "Pentecostal Christians" These are groups of misguided Nigerians who read the bible down side up, and failed to understand that the bible was a book that tells the history of a particular people (the Hebrews). not related to Nigerians , and that Nigerians deserves to have their histories represented in tangible forms too. As some of us watched in horrors, they smashed into those shrines and destroyed some of the artifacts that were kept by our ancestors to protect us from evil. Some of the artifacts were even stolen and sold to foreign art collectors by some unscrupulous members of these pentecostal churches. To them, they were bringing salvation to the villagers by destroying their "heathen gods".
I personally do not think that the bible god is superior to the gods of my ancestors for the fact that my ancestors represented their gods in tangible sculptures and other visible images. but the Christian god did not have such representations. To me, the bible god is a figment of abstraction while my ancestor made their gods real in tangible images. The unfortunate irony is that those who introduced the bible to us have flipped. They are now stealing the very artifacts they condemned as works of the devil.
With the aid of their Nigerian collaborators, they have succeeded in filling their museums and universities with stolen artifacts from various archeological sites and shrines that are being looted on daily bases. Time Pacific magazine of August 6, 2001, in an article titled Looting Africa noted that theft, Illicit sales, poverty, and war are threatening to rob the African continent of its history, traditions and qualities that its various societies have had for millennia.
The magazine reported that in early 1995, a farmer discovered a terracotta head while he was tilling his farmland in a village of Kawu, 50 kilometers from Nigerian capital, abuja. Time pacific noted that within weeks, art thieves, and international dealers flocked the village for a piece of the art rush. Dealers who specialized in smuggling cultural items across Nigerian porous borders were buying art works of the Nok people who lived in northern Nigeria at about 500 B.C.E.
Because of what transpired in Kawu, ancient Nok people who live in that village were denied the chance for their stories to be accurately told because archeologists were not on hand to properly document the circumstance surrounding the burial those artifacts. Art thieves may have robbed the Nok people a chance to have their stories properly documented, but one thing is certain: Nok figurines inspired many cultural art forms in ancient sub-Saharan Africa According to google's wikipedia on Nok people. Heilbrunn Timeline of Art history described Nok sculptures as "hollow and coil-built like potery. Finely worked to resilient consistency from local clays and gravel." Heilbrunn also observed that "Nok sculptures are so varied that it is likely they were modeled individually rather than cast from a mold." Heilbrunn also noted that "although terracotta are usually formed using additive technique, many Nok terracotta were sculpted subtractively in a manner similar to carving."
while Time pacific magazine believe that one of the major reasons why Africans sell off their artifacts is poverty, I think that ignorance is the greatest problem. Many Local people have converted to Christianity and Islam and abandoned their ancestral religions, not knowing the historical and cultural values of these artifacts, they sell them off to unscrupulous dealers at a pittance.
with these cultural items stolen and stored in museums and universities across Europe and America, it is incumbent on the government of these countries to reject and repatriate those stolen items to Nigeria.