Art theft is and will be a part of the art world as long as value and power I placed on works of art. Over the years there have been many art theft cases with many major cases being resolved from the Mona Lisa to the vanishing Vermeer. People steal art for various reasons, for personal satisfaction, for their own private collections, to sell to other buyers and make money of it, and to others , just for the fun of it. I am going to take a slightly different root, and talk about stolen African Artifacts. Many years ago, thousands of priceless craft were looted and shipped overseas from Africa during colonial rules and war times. One important artifact with quite a controversial relation to the Sotheby is the Benin art corpus from Nigeria. The artifact is believed to have been stolen from Benin in 1897. It is a 16th century mask, once thought to have belonged to an ancient Benin king His Highness, Oba Erediauwa, great grandson of Oba Ovonramwen and the reigning kind of Benin. In the 1897’s there was a punitive expedition in southern Nigeria carried out by British forces in retaliation for a massacre of a previous British-led invasion force. Troops deposed the king and looted the city. Lt-Col Sir Henry Lionel Galway is known to have stolen or acquired the Benin Art corpus. In 2010, the Sotheby announced that there were going to auction the stolen Benin artifact which was going to be sold for between 3.5 to 4.5million and the money was going to go to the descendants of the known British thief and vandal Lt-Col Sir Henry Lionel Galway. The international community came in to protest against the idea of selling the stolen goods. The Internet was flooded with protest too as well as the social media. In December 2010, after a flurry of protests, Sotheby’s announced that the mask had been withdrawn from the auction. 
The idea of stealing, looting and selling the cultural artifacts of others seems to have been a European invention, which was brought to Africa. The commodification of cultural objects seems to have developed with European capitalism for it was only when there was a market for the cultural object of others that stealing, looting, selling and purchase made sense. Despite United Nations and UNESCO resolutions as well as international conference conclusions and ICOM Code of Ethics, many Westerners, continue to write and argue as if nothing had changed in the world since 1879. The current Prince of Benin testified before the British House of Commons’ committee on Illegally Acquired Artifacts. He said “I told the committee that what the British looted was not just works of art but objects of worship and the instruments or medium for recording our history. Hence, taking them away was like tearing off chapters from our history book.”
Sotheby's cannot facilitate the sale of stolen goods or someone making a quick buck out of a sacred object. By what right did Sotheby’s have to sell this stolen artwork? and why are they not reprimanded in anyway for attempting that they very well knew was stolen? Will they have incurred any civil or criminal liability for auctioning the stolen artifacts? Also Can anyone ever hold legal claim to artworks that are known to have been stolen-and in this case the Galaways’.