Lhe collector Sindika Dokolo announced in 2015 his wish to repatriate classical art objects stolen in Angola. It is now partly done. On February 4, two masks and a Chokwe statue from the Dundo Museum in Lunda Norte, a region in northern Angola close to the Democratic Republic of Congo, returned to the country during an official ceremony orchestrated in Luanda in the presence of the Chokwe King Mwene Muatxissengue Wa-Tembo. The works had disappeared during the civil war between 1975 and 2002.
The three pieces exhibited until April at the Sindika-Dokolo Foundation will later return to their original museum. "I discovered three years ago that the building had been rehabilitated and brought up to standard," says Sindika Dokolo. It's a small, well-made museum, with a didactic course that has only one flaw: it was very ethnographic, which made us lose sight of the artistic dimension. When I asked where the large objects were, I was told that it had been stolen since the 1970s. "
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