and in teaching for school groups." In November 2021, the Metropolitan Museum of Art transferred two sixteenth-century Bronze plaques, a Warrior Chief and Junior Court Official to the National Commission for Museums and Monuments. This transfer is not to be confused as a response to repatriation requests, as the Institution owns a collection of about 160 Benin Bronzes. Instead, the museum describes this transfer as a return of plaques that were stolen from the National Museum in Lagos in the 1950s. In January 2022, the Great North Museum: Hancock in Newcastle, England, agreed to return a Benin Bronze stave to Nigeria. In March 2022, the Smithsonian Institution announced that 39 bronzes in its National Museum of African Art would be repatriated. The bronzes are meant to be on display at the future National Museum of Benin City. On 1 July 2022, Germany announced the immediate ownership transfer of 1,100 artefacts held by the Linden Museum in Stuttgart, Berlin's Humboldt Forum, the Cologne Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, Hamburg's Museum am Rothenbaum and the State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony to Nigeria. The physical return of each item will be negotiated between the German museums and the Nigerian government and some of the objects could remain in display in Germany under custody agreements. Hermann Parzinger, the head of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, an authority that oversees many of Berlin's museums, said a “representative collection of objects” would remain in the German capital on a long-term loan. On 28 November 2022, the Horniman Museum in London held an official ceremony, unconditionally transferring ownership of its Benin Bronzes back to Nigeria. Opposition In August 2022, an African-American slavery reparations activist group in the US, called the Restitution Study Group, petitioned against the United Kingdom's Charity Commission repatriating the Benin Bronzes to Nigeria. The group argued that in the country's history, African people had been complicit in selling captives into the Atlantic slave trade. Instead, the group suggested that descendants of enslaved Africans should have co-ownership over the Benin Bronzes in Western museums. Digital Benin online platform In November 2022, ARTnews magazine and other media reported that the Digital Benin online database had been created by a number of museums, including both experts from Nigeria (National Museum Lagos and Benin City National Museum) as well as from other African and Western institutions. Digital Benin lists 131 institutions from 20 countries with Benin cultural heritage in their collections.