John Oliver tore into western museums and their collections of stolen artifacts, as well as the present antiquities market, on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight. Antiquities from the global south – particularly Latin America, the Middle East and Africa – have been stolen and enshrined in European and American museums “on a much larger scale than you may realize”, he explained. A 2018 report commissioned by the French president, for example, found that over 90% of all Africa’s cultural heritage was held outside Africa by major museums, which have sprawling collections of “essentially stolen goods”.
