New Museum to Lure Back Africa's Looted Artefacts: Juha Vakkuri, a Finnish Author, and His Group, African Art Returns, Are Setting Up a Museum in Grand-Popo, Benin, to House Returned African Art Looted in Colonial Times. David Williams Reports

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More than 100 years after a British force torched the capital of the old kingdom of Benin and carted off the exquisite Benin Bronzes, an international campaign is being launched for a museum to lure back some of sub-Saharan Africa's lost artistic heritage. Based in Benin Republic, once the gateway of the slave trade, the future "Museum of Returned African Art" would exhibit a small share of the countless artistic jewels that have disappeared from Africa over the past 150-200 years.

"We are not accusing anyone of anything and we are not using words like 'looting' or anything like that," said Juha Vakkuri, a Finnish author of several works on Africa who chairs African Art Returns, a group he set up to establish the museum.

Through acquisitions of new works and by cooperating with the world's great museums, missionary societies, and private collectors, he hopes to amass a sufficient quantity of works of African art to fill the museum by its completion in 2009 in Grand-Popo, Benin. The campaign, waged through the …