The danger of returning the Ghanaian ‘Crown Jewels’

I put the case in last week’s Spectator that museums in this country have been gripped by a sort of infectious madness. Since I wrote that article the number of cases of museumitis has piled up further, and there are worrying signs that the infection is spreading into Europe. It has been announced that 32 of the Ghanaian ‘Crown Jewels’ are to be sent from the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum to Asantehene Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, the current king of the Asante, to be exhibited in the Manhyia Palace Museum in Kumasi. The idea is to put them on exhibition there for three years, after which they will be returned (as things stand). But the V&A has indicated that the loan may be renewable, with no end date. These are beautiful objects made, mainly in the nineteenth century, out of the famous gold of Ghana which first attracted Portuguese explorers to that part of West Africa in the late fifteenth century.