Twenty-one precious artefacts that were looted by British soldiers from the former west African kingdom of Benin 125 years ago have been handed over by Germany to Nigeria amid laughter, tears, and some audible frustration with the ongoing silence of the country that first stole them.

The objects from the haul of treasures known as the Benin bronzes, including a brass head of an oba (king), a ceremonial ada and a throne depicting a coiled-up python, were taken from the sacked city during a British punitive expedition in 1897 and later sold to German museums in Berlin, Hamburg, Stuttgart and Cologne.

Shortly after lunchtime on Tuesday, Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, passed perhaps the most spectacular of the returned objects into the gloved hands of Nigeria’s culture minister, Lai Mohammed.

“She comes back to where she belongs,” Baerbock said as she handed over a miniature mask of the Iyoba (queen Mother), made of ivory and decorated with yellow glass pearls, red coral and a crown of stylised electric catfish, which was looted from the bedchamber of the last independent oba.

A sample of more than 1,000 Benin bronzes whose ownership Germany legally transferred to Nigeria on 1 July, the artworks were picked up by lorry from the museums, loaded into the cargo hold of a German air force plane at Cologne airport and then flown to Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, via Berlin on Sunday.

On Tuesday, the artworks were unwrapped and put on display on the back of a stage inside the wood-panelled conference hall at Nigeria’s foreign ministry.

But as a nation celebrated the return of its long-lost cultural heritage, frustration was expressed with Britain, which holds the single largest collection of Benin bronzes at the British Museum but whose governments have stonewalled restitution debates for more than a century.

“Britain has most of the works, and we thought they would provide leadership”, said Godwin Obaseki, the governor of Edo state, whose modern borders in Nigeria’s south encompass many of the regions that used to belong to the Benin empire. “They were the ones who came here and destroyed the empire, they were the ones who looted pieces from here, and they should be leading in restitution.”

At the handover ceremony, Mohammed said he had hoped Germany’s move would nudge the UK into opening talks about the bronzes held at the British Museum. “But I met a brick wall”, he said. “The British Museum must understand that repatriation is a turn whose time has come.”

Other individual bronzes have already been returned to their country of origin: London’s Horniman Museum and Gardens last month handed over six objects from its collection to a Nigerian delegation, one of a handful of British institutions to take unilateral steps.