The artifact that represented goddess of
fruitfulness reluctantly released by Nupe people to Niger State Museum and
stolen some decades ago, has been found in Italy.
The
Executive Director, Niger State Council for Arts and Culture, Mr Emmanuel
Zhiri, made this known to the Naijaroyaltyculture.blogspot.com in Minna on
Thursday.
This
artifact was found in Italy recently by the Commissioner for Information, Mr
Jonathan Vatsa’’, Zhiri said.
Zhiri
added that it would cost the state a “huge fortune,” to retrieve it.
Zhiri
spoke on the sidelines of the 2017 Commemoration of the World Museum Day with
the theme: Museum and Contested Histories: Saying the Unspeakable in Museums.”
Zhiri said
Niger state museum was one of the well-organised premier museums with
experienced professional personnel.
Zhiri said
government was working seriously to expand the museum by bringing in more
artifact to enrich the state’s museum.
We are
working strategically to bringing in more artifacts to uphold our cultural
heritage.
We have
identified artifacts we are going to bring in, like the musical strings of the
late Walo Shatan Gwari and late Nupe musicians’ musical strings used in the
course of their musical career.
We are
going to pay the custodians of these musical strings and bring them to the
Niger state museum.
It is
going to cost us about N2 million to bring them from the Niger Zone A, Zone B
and Zone C”, he said.
Zhiri
added that the essence of bringing such artifacts to Niger
museum was to preserve the history and make it public to those who did not know
such history.
People
come in here to learn the history of different artifacts; we keep them safe for
posterity.
Managers
of museum strive a lot to bring in inherited artifacts from the people they
were bequeathed to because they do not know the use as much as we do.
They do
not know the significance of these artifacts. As far as they know, they are
keeping them because they inherited them. That is how much most of
them know”, he said.
He said
they do a lot of research on artifacts in the museums.
We do
compilation of oral and written tradition of the artifacts so that the people
will get to know more about the artifacts, community, people and their
culture”, he said.
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