The Rooster
Okeydoke
March 16, 2016
By Elisabeth Perlman
Calls for the removal and repatriation of bronze cockerel statue have been heard.
Jesus College, (click here) Cambridge removed a bronze cockerel statue from its main hall on Tuesday, and will consider repatriating it to west Africa in the aftermath of widespread student protests. In 1930, Captain George William Neville, a former British Army officer bequeathed the Benin bronze, known as an "Okukor", to the College. After a punitive British naval expedition in 1897, the cockerel was among thousands of artworks stolen from the Benin empire, located in what is now southern Nigeria.
Last month, Jesus College students submitted an 11-page document entitled “Proposal to Repatriate Benin Bronze’ during a meeting on the status of the sculpture. Ore Ogunbiyi told the meeting : “We spoke to a bronze repatriation expert who said that grown men cried after the return of pieces in 2014.”
The Jesus College Students’ Union voted in favor of the motion to send back the statue, known as Okukor, “to its place of origin, ” a royal palace in Nigeria, arguing that the looted sculpture represented Britain’s colonial past. However, the Okukor has symbolic significance; the College coat of arms features three black cockerels....
