The Minister of Tourism Edem Duke, said it was a “big achievement” in the country’s campaign to recover its lost treasures from around the world.
“I feel extremely delighted,” said Edem Duke, who attended the ceremony to receive the sculptures from French embassy officials in the capital, Abuja.Over the last 85 years, Nok art has been discovered in a large area of north-central Nigeria from Jos to Kaduna.
Experts say Nok art, which often represents human heads, is the earliest attempt at portraiture yet discovered in Nigeria.
The National Commission for Museums and Monuments believes that items of Nok culture show it was the first society to have used iron in sub-Saharan Africa. Terracotta sculptures are believed to have been smuggled out of Nigeria to neighbouring Togo, from where the French buyer flew to Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport.It is a route thought to be used by smugglers to avoid customs checks at Nigerian airports, he says.
