Posselt sold the bird to Cecil Rhodes, a powerful imperialist who headed the British South Africa Company and spearheaded the colonisation of modern-day Zimbabwe and Zambia. <\/p>\n
Rhodes used the bird as d\u00e9cor for his grand Cape Town estate and two years later, the British South Africa Company commissioned archaeologist Theodore Bent to return to Great Zimbabwe.<\/p>\n
Bent found the sculptures that Posselt had stored away and transported four of the prized birds to a museum in South Africa.<\/p>\n
A fragment of one other bird ended up further afield – its pedestal was taken by a German missionary and sold to Berlin’s Ethnological Museum in 1907. <\/p>\n
But after Zimbabwe became independent in 1980, its authorities launched a campaign to recoup the missing birds, with only two remaining in the country.<\/p>\n
Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s independence leader and long-time president, described their loss as a “ruthless cultural plunder”.<\/p>\n
In a peculiar trade, South Africa’s apartheid government agreed in 1981 to release the four birds it held in a museum in exchange for a huge collection of bees, wasps and ants. The trove, belonging to Zimbabwe’s Natural History Museum, comprised around 1,000 kinds of insects.<\/p>\n
Then, in 2003, another win. Germany returned the soapstone pedestal that, in Mugabe’s words, had “spent almost 100 years in exile”. <\/p>\n
Getting the last bird back was more of a challenge. When Rhodes died in 1902, his Cape Town home and all its contents were vested to South Africa’s governor-general – a role which was later transformed into the national president.<\/p>\n
In 1910, a law named the Rhodes Will Act stated that these possessions should not be sold, let or transferred.<\/p>\n
“Every time Zimbabwe asked, the 1910 Act was cited,” McKenzie explained in his speech.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Posselt sold the bird to Cecil Rhodes, a powerful imperialist who headed the British South Africa Company and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":614187,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-614186","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=614186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/614187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=614186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=614186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=614186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}