Drum and trumpet with human skulls attached complicate plan for restitution from Los Angeles to Ghana

The Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles is seeking to restitute an Asante drum and an ivory trumpet looted by British troops in late-19th-century Kumasi, Ghana, but both instruments have human skulls attached, complicating their return. The trumpet was sold at a London auction in 1919 described as an “old Ashanti ivory horn with fetish skull attached,” and the drum was sold in 1930; both were later acquired by collector Henry Wellcome and donated to the Fowler in 1965. Returning the instruments to the Asante king may be appropriate, but returning the skulls—possibly from decapitated enemies—would be widely viewed as unethical, while removing them would split ensembles likely kept together for around two centuries. The instruments’ continued limbo, despite the Fowler’s high-profile 2024 restitution of seven other Asante items now displayed at Kumasi’s Manhyia Palace Museum, is revealed in Barnaby Phillips’s book The African Kingdom of Gold: Britain and the Asante Gold.

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