Chimamanda Adichie makes the case that colonialism has led to a whitewashing of an exploitative history that depleted parts of Africa from many of its treasures.  What I would talk about with my students: 

Chimamanda Adichie asks us to think about what should happen when an important object was taken from a person or community without permission. What do you think would be fair to do? Can you think of 3 reasons why an important object should be returned? What reasons can you imagine someone might use to justify keeping the objects? Adichie explains that while some institutions and nations have agreed to return looted items, others have argued that Africans will not take good care of the items and the items therefore shouldn’t be returned. Until very recently, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston had a large collection of items from the Benin Kingdom that were loaned to it by a private collector. According to the museum’s website, careful research revealed that many of these items were acquired through the British looting of Benin City in the late 1800s. Given this, the MFA decided to give almost the entire collection back to the person who loaned the items to the museum (the museum couldn’t return it directly to Nigeria since they didn’t own the items). https://www.mfa.org/collections/provenance/colonial-era-provenance Do you think this was the right thing for the museum to do? Why or why not? Once he received the items back, the donor chose to keep them in his private collection instead of returning them to Nigeria. What would you have done if you were him?