Time as Alibi

According to the Musée du Quai Branly director, “objects often float in an unprecise geography and historicity” (Kasarhérou Reference Kasarhérou2020). To the AfricaMuseum curator, the temptation to read history backwards naturally leads to anachronisms (Volper Reference Volper2020a). From there, the classic retentionist argument runs that too much time has elapsed for patrimonial translocations to have an impact on dispossessed countries, communities, and individuals today. Retentionists use time as an alibi and contend that the era we live in now is too different from past ones, which en passant clears them of any wrongdoing. Dan Hicks (Reference Hicks2021:113) labels this strategy “chronopolitics” and traces its origins to as early as the nineteenth century, when European curators turned ethnographic museums into “fabrics of time.” They exhibited objects that were still in use in source communities next to others that were centuries older, thus creating “a timeless past in the present as a weapon that generates alterity” (Hicks Reference Hicks2021:12–13).

When Europeans seized “witness objects”—items credited with a cognitive capital that conveys meaning (Robert Reference Robert and Bouttiaux2007:17),—“museum objects” (Smith Livingstone Reference Smith Livingstone2018:20), and repositories of historical (Kiwara-Wilson Reference Kiwara-Wilson2013:378) and administrative archives (Pankhurst Reference Pankhurst1999:232), they simultaneously erased cultural records and broke the chain of transmission. In 1897, British troops mounted a punitive expedition after the Oba of Benin City (Nigeria) failed to comply with a trade treaty he had been coerced into signing five years earlier (Bodenstein et al. Reference Bodenstein, Otoiu, Troelenberg and Bodenstein2022:222). During this raid, which fell within expansionary colonial wars from Egypt to West Africa (Docherty Reference Docherty2021:200), British troops not only took the Benin bronzes, whose earliest castings date back to the thirteenth century, but with them “the canon of Benin’s art, the encyclopedia of its civilization” (Barnaby Reference Barnaby2021:10). Therefore, descendants who claim a “transhistorical identity” with their dispossessed ancestors are not, as Kwame Appiah (Reference Appiah2006:128–30) contends, separate contingencies. Instead, the disappearance of culturally-loaded artefacts is a direct cause for the dilution of the link between them.

Sarah Van Beurden corroborates this trend after independence in the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA, now AfricaMuseum), where “the replacement of colonial history with a historical vacuum in which Congolese cultures exist as timeless entities implied the absence of a culturally relevant Congolese present” (Reference Van Beurden2015a:215). By suppressing the yardsticks of congruence with contemporary standards, the more recent Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums (DIVUM 2002), co-signed by the British Museum, perpetuated the same temporal void: “The objects and monumental works that were installed decades and even centuries ago in museums throughout Europe and America were acquired under conditions that are not comparable with current ones.” Appiah (Reference Appiah2004:30) endorses this view of (dis)connected histories to rebut restituting as an “apparently reasonable idea [which] is less reasonable than it seems when the period that separates the theft from the restitution spans several generations.” Inasmuch as it is built as a buffer and not a continuum between the past and now, the historiographic compartmentalization of time is used as an alibi for retention.

In the run-up to the Humboldt Forum’s opening in 2020, long-time restitutionist countries as well as newly converted restitutionists from civil society accused Berlin’s new encyclopedic museum of neglecting to address its colonial past. Soon after, the German Museums Association rectified this memory lapse by providing an insightful warning against chronological compartmentalization: “The term ‘colonial’ refers to the actual exercise of rule, as well as to the ideologies, discourses (also racial discourses), knowledge systems, aesthetics, and perspectives which preceded formal or actual rule and which supported and safeguarded it for colonization and can have an impact beyond it” (2021:24). This impact materializes where the colonial era ebbs and intersects with its spatial remnants—in ethnographic museums. By parading or storing artefacts obtained under dubious conditions, museums prolong and project cultural inequalities into the present.

This point is important because it complexifies what we have so far understood by restitution. If we accept that in addition to a material deprivation, Europeans also abducted immaterial assets contained in these objects, then in order to be complete, restitutions must also be “re-institutions” (Sarr & Savoy Reference Sarr and Savoy2018:25), whereby material returns are accompanied by transfers of know-how and knowledge which the retaining institutions might still have on these objects. Thus interpreted, “the ‘re’ in restitution is a capsule of temporality” (Savoy Reference Savoy2022:140) which reconnects communities with their past. But these considerations have often been preempted by more fundamental objections based on the security and accessibility standards of African museums.

Reinterpreting Security and Accessibility

In chronological order, European powers perpetrated the first breaches of security on heritage. As in Maqdala (Ethiopia, 1868) and Kumasi (Ghana, 1874), during the abovementioned 1897 military raid in Benin City, British troops burned down entire villages and their palaces. Glenn Penny (Reference Penny2021:90) stresses that “soldiers used their bayonets to pry them [the Benin bronzes] off walls. Not all of those pieces could be puzzled back together.” On their way back, soldiers inadvertently scattered or destroyed part of the loot that was supposed to defray the costs of the expedition (Hicks Reference Hicks2021:127; Docherty Reference Docherty2021:208). Oblivious to the fact that collecting and preserving were not European prerogatives (Oberhofer Reference Oberhofer and Laely2018:195), ethnographic museums progressively shifted “away from the older ‘civilizing mission’ and toward […] cultural guardianship” to justify retention after independence (Van Beurden Reference Van Beurden2015b:253). Yet, items were not necessarily safer once they reached Europe, where Phillips Barnaby (Reference Barnaby2021:245) enumerates fires and burglaries throughout the twentieth century, and Allen Roberts (Reference Roberts2019:1) cites procrastination in adopting bilateral agreements that prohibit illicit trafficking. In all fairness, African museums also suffered major security infringements. The National Museum of Mali’s collections, for instance, dwindled from 15,000 objects in 1964 to less than 1,500 in a 1975 inventory (Arnoldi et al. Reference Arnoldi, Kéita, Sidibé and Silverman2022:140). Pointing to similar failures in Nigeria, Paul Wood (Reference Wood2012:134) delivers the gist of the retentionist reservations: “There is a real danger that if works were returned […] in the present political and economic situation, they would be lost: either through physical decay or through various forms of theft, looting, etc.” On the grounds that public museums might lend objects to source communities for ceremonial uses, Wood (Reference Wood2012:126) also fears that their accessibility could be lost.

Accessibility to artefacts, however, depends on where one stands. It has already been pointed out that none of the self-proclaimed universal or encyclopedic museums is located in Africa (Shyllon Reference Shyllon2019:402). But all geographic and demographic parameters being equal, a neglected aspect of accessibility is the ratio of exhibited to stored objects. Out of “at least 8 million objects,” the British Museum (2019) displays “roughly 80,000 objects,” that is, 1 percent of them. In Belgium, the AfricaMuseum (2021a:42) boast “that less than 1% of the collections can be seen in the new permanent exhibition gives an idea of its vast size.” In Paris, the Musée du Quai Branly exhibits 3,500 artefacts out of a total of 370,000 stored objects—a ratio again under 1 percent. As for the Humboldt Forum, around 20,000 of its 500,000 items are currently exhibited, that is, a record 4 percent. Without consulting each other, note that these four major institutions have all published approximative, rounded-up figures, which does not exactly convey the aura of transparency usually preconditioning accessibility. They also fail to comply with the rules set by themselves through the International Council of Museums (ICOM 2017:3): “The governing body should ensure that the museum and its collections are available to all during reasonable hours and for regular periods.” Collections are not accessible to all, neither is access to all the collections granted. By the lowest common denominator, the share of collections accessible to museumgoers in Europe is the same with the proportions of cultural artefacts left in Africa—less than 10 percent. If one were gifted with ubiquity and visited all museums on both sides of the Mediterranean at this very moment in time, one would not even catch sight of one out of ten objects in public collections, the other nine remaining invisible because they are shelved in storage. Circulation of artefacts through temporary traveling exhibitions might come as a quick fix for poor levels of accessibility. But this experience can also prove traumatic for dispossessed communities who have to witness a second departure (Sarr & Savoy Reference Sarr and Savoy2018:19–22, 66). As for long-term loans or even carefully selected “gifts,” they tend to circumvent rather than solve the legal and moral challenges raised by restitutions.

The Law vs. Ethics Case Revisited

Endorsing Saint Augustine’s condemnation of looting as a sin (Shyllon Reference Shyllon2019:274), Frederick I’s edicts (1158), the Treaties of Westphalia (1648), and the Treaty of Vienna (1815) progressively disapproved of the practice of looting. But it was not until the Hague Convention (Reference Convention1899) that looting—hereby defined as “all seizure of and destruction, or intentional damage done to […] historical monuments, works of art or science”—became illegal. Until then theoretically, but well after independence in practice, retaining institutions and their countries applied a mix of morality and law à la carte, seeking credit for their remorseless magnanimity. Herman (Reference Herman2018) specifies that “legal rules can arise not just out of treaties, but also out of custom, meaning a generalized state practice. […] If enough states operate in a certain way (such as in protecting works of art in times of war), then a custom may indeed arise, one that can have legal consequences.” In Europe, the Vatican returned in 1816 the Heidelberg manuscripts looted in 1623 during the Thirty Years’ War. Transposed to current restitution attempts foiled by non-retroactivity, this 193-year interval between the times of seizure and return would take us back to 1829. At the Congress of Vienna (1815), the victors agreed that all the artworks taken during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) in continental Europe were to be returned. However, this reasoning did not apply to the campaigns Napoleon undertook in Egypt (1798–1801). When Britain returned the Kebra Nagast (1872), a silver gilt crown (1924), and Tewodros’s cap and imperial seal (1965) to Ethiopia, these did not exactly equate to customs of returns, for they were made at the victor’s discretion, in what it considered “gracious and friendly,” but unapologetic, acts (Pankhurst Reference Pankhurst1999:233–34).

The victors of the First World War prolonged this double-standard restitution regime: Germany’s otherwise legal acquisition of the Van Eyck panels was reversed, and the panels were restituted to Belgium on the grounds that “the painting in its complete form constituted part of Belgium’s cultural heritage and should not be separated” (Kiwara-Wilson Reference Kiwara-Wilson2013:390). No European museum has since then envisaged extrapolating this argument to the reconstitution of complete collections in Africa. After the Second World War, Article 37 of the Treaty of Peace with Italy (1947) gave the vanquished eighteen months to “restore all works of art, religious objects, archives and objects of historical value belonging to Ethiopia,” which it partly did, whereas Germany concentrated its repentance on Nazi-looted art. However, the victors—England, France, and Belgium—exempted themselves from any token of repentance or restitution in the aftermath of the Second World War and their colonies’ independence in the 1960s.

This non-exhaustive list of juridical liberties and moral bouts shows that some restitutions preceded, and therefore circumvented, the laws that would later formalize them. Today, in order to proceed with restitutions, claimant and defendant states should both be parties to the 1970 UNESCO Convention for requests on public collections. In practice, non-retroactivity starts to apply from the moment countries ratified this Convention, that is, in 1997, 2002, 2007, and 2009 for France, the UK, Germany, and Belgium respectively. The ambivalent results of this legal machinery suggest that while past mistakes cannot be repeated, past injustices cannot be redressed either. Legal limitations take us back to where it all started: a plurality of moralities reflecting individual interests and conscience. When retentionists such as Tiffany Jenkins (Reference Jenkins, Pellew and Goldman2018:82) and Julien Volper (Reference Volper2020b) condemn some restitutionists’ self-righteous tone, they easily forget that the colonial powers did not frame the translocations of cultural items as amoral—out of the scope of morality—but firmly entrenched them within moralizing depictions of civilization vs. barbarity. This moral duality lives on to this day. In 2016, the then-director of the Musée du Quai Branly did not object when a private collector restituted to his museum a Tsogho statue which had disappeared from Musée de l’Homme in the 1950s. Yet, Stéphane Martin (Reference Martin2018) strongly objected to restitutions to Africa because they might “empty” European museums. Likewise, the AfricaMuseum curator Volper (Reference Volper2020b) wonders why Macron does not meet Belgium’s requests for the restitution of around two hundred paintings taken by the French armies at the end of the eighteenth century. But he simultaneously considers any restitution to Africa as an “ideological victory for openly communitarian and racialist groups.”

At the other end of the spectrum, the University of Aberdeen (2021), which acquired a looted Benin bronze in 1957, became a reformed revisionist by retrospectively deeming its retention “extremely immoral” and facilitating its repatriation. Pending the final decision of the UK Charity Commission, the Horniman Museum, Oxford University, and Cambridge University also agreed in 2022 to restitute 72, 97, and 116 Benin bronzes, respectively. “New ethical relationships” (Sarr & Savoy Reference Sarr and Savoy2018) are not simply an exercise in epistemic activism (Etieyibo et al. Reference Etieyibo, Katsaura and Musemwa2021:4). They are also recognized by the International Council of Museums (ICOM), to which all the museums mentioned in this article belong. The ICOM (2019:2) recommends deaccessioning—permanently removing an item from a museum—provided “the museum’s possession of the object is inconsistent with applicable law or ethical principles, e.g., the object was, or may have been, stolen or illegally exported or imported.” In making this pronouncement, the ICOM actually places ethics and law on an equal footing. Considered in this light, the arguments about non-retroactivity and laws being set in stone encapsulated in the formula dura lex sed lex (Pierrat Reference Pierrat2019:57) are hard to dissociate from a hint of complacency with the current status quo. And it is legitimate to wonder what is missing, other than political will, for this plethora of precedents to ripen and crystallize into a “wider erga omnes rule of customary international law” (Robertson Reference Robertson2019:144).

Instrumentalizing Heritage

In Ouagadougou, Macron (Reference Macron2017) sought an opportunity to decolonize France’s image and rub off some of the Françafrique stigma his predecessors were entangled in—military connections, monetary systems, cooperation mechanisms, and soft power, all pursued under asymmetrical partnerships (Borrel Reference Borrel2021:20). Instead of praising the positive role of colonialism as the French Parliament had done in 2005, he denounced it as a crime against humanity. He also expressed the will to rebuild Franco-African partnerships on three pillars—culture, sport, and the French language. As regards culture, he insisted he could not accept that a large part of the African cultural heritage should be located in France. The restitutions advocated by the Sarr-Savoy report (Reference Sarr and Savoy2018) would thus become symbols of equal relationships.

Revisionists from all strands welcomed the offer with enthusiasm. On August 8, 2019, Senegal—a reformed revisionist which inherited the IFAN collections but did not itself always implement intra-African restitutions of artefacts to other former AOF colonies—requested that all the works identified as coming from Senegal (2,281 objects) be returned. On February 20 and May 17, 2019, long-time revisionist Ethiopia—known as the first African country to have lodged a restitution demand in 1872—and Chad equally asked the Musée du Quai Branly to restitute all their respective artefacts—numbering 3,081 and 9,296 (Assemblée nationale 2020). The Republic of Benin, Mali, Madagascar, and the Ivory Coast followed suit.

The more expectations the Ouagadougou speech and subsequent restitutionist initiatives in and out of the francophone sphere would produce, the better Macron could conceal what he coveted in return for his vague, non-binding offer—disguising Françafrique policies under a new adornment. On November 17, 2019, on the margins of the restitution ceremony of the El Hadj Omar Tall sword, Senegal bought three OPV58 patrollers from the French company Kership and missiles from the France-based group MBDA for a few hundred million euros. That Senegal was the first country to which France restituted artefacts was perhaps no coincidence. It is the only African country with which France holds annual meetings. And France is the first creditor and investor in a country that plays a key role in containing terrorism in the region (Eyssette Reference Eyssette2021:336). Germany’s returns of a Bible, a whip, and the Stone Cross to Namibia in 2019, and its recognition in 2021 of the genocide committed against the Herero-Nama between 1904 and 1908—with a EUR1.1bn “compensation” in everything but name, to avoid setting a legal precedent—were also concomitant with its growing economic presence in a country where more than 50 percent of its imports consist of copper (OEC 2021). Under Angela Merkel’s leadership, Germany’s approach to Africa indeed shifted from a developmental to an economic perspective, strengthening partnerships through the G-20 Compact with Africa and the Africa Investment Forum. Although Africa still represents “1% of the country’s global investments,” these rose by roughly USD1.84 billion from 2017 to 2019 (Adesina Reference Adesina2021). These new partnerships no longer perpetuate the former colony’s victimhood and its dependency toward the former colonizer deplored by Bogumil Jewsiewicki (Reference Jewsiewicki2004:12) and Jenkins (Reference Jenkins, Pellew and Goldman2018:87–89). The fact that European powers are willing to trade “the objects of repression” (Savoy Reference Savoy2022:3) and their moral ballast for raw economic objectives, which sub-Saharan African countries in turn facilitate (Bodenstein et al. Reference Bodenstein, Otoiu, Troelenberg and Bodenstein2022:274), indicates at the minimum a mutual recognition of interdependence.

But while Germany proves its reformed revisionism by setting in place the German Contact Point for Collections from Colonial Context (2021) to adjust federal and local government policies to all national museums and to fund provenance research, Macron’s Ouagadougou speech and the Sarr-Savoy report have not delivered any lasting structural reform on the way French public collections could be inventoried, provenanced, and potentially restituted (see Figures 1 and 2). Apart from State-orchestrated restitutions—a sword to Senegal in 2019 and twenty-six statues to the Republic of Benin in 2021, objects that France unilaterally picked from the Musée de l’Armée and the Musée du Quai Branly without conducting any “cooperative provenance research” (Bodenstein Reference Bodenstein, Otoiu, Troelenberg and Bodenstein2022:267)—it has been left to each institution’s own discretion to take action. And to this day, none of France’s fifty public museums is willing to restitute any of the 17,636 African artefacts held by them. By predetermining a minimalist number of potential restitutions (between 200 and 250), the retentionist director of Musée du Quai Branly Emmanuel Kasarhérou (Reference Kasarhérou2020) validates Doris Duhennois’ (Reference Duhennois2020:130) interpretation, according to which “returning colonial artefacts without looking critically at their history is a political gesture that helps conceal the reality of French colonial mentalities.” Macron’s apparently reformed revisionism was in fact a neo-retentionist scheme.

Figure 1.

A Benin bronze (III C 8377) dating from the 16th century described by the Humboldt Forum as “looted in connection with the British conquest of Benin City, 1897”. Photo courtesy of Berlin State Museums.

Figure 2.

A Benin bronze (71.1931.49.19) dating from the 16th-17th century exhibited at the Musée du Quai Branly whose online and on-site notices, avoiding any mention of the sack of Benin City in 1897, read: “Don [gift] George Henri Rivière.” Photo by the author, August 2022.

In echoing Felwin Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy’s (Reference Sarr and Savoy2018:105) injunction that all the objects collected in Africa prior to 1960 “by way of military personnel or active administrators (or) through scientific expeditions” should be restituted “without any supplementary research,” maximalist demands from revisionists can equally prove problematic. By drawing teleological timelines and putting, without prior transparent provenance research, military, scientific, and civil activities on an equal footing, they tend to contradict the very concept the report is built on, restitution, which should only be implemented when illegitimate seizure can be proven. Whereas the well-documented sacking of Benin City offers a straightforward case justifying restitution, more nuanced provenance studies should cast light on a series of fault lines between precolonial and colonial history, acquisitions and requisitions, donations and trade, and extra- and intra-African restitutions, to name but a few apparently non-coercive contexts. From a precolonial perspective, the saber of El Hadj Omar Tall restituted to Senegal could equally be counterclaimed by Mali, where the Toucouleur empire stretched (Arnoldi Reference Arnoldi, Kéita, Sidibé and Silverman2022:154). The AfricaMuseum’s archives also abound with ambiguous information: although collectors received cash in advance from the Musée du Congo Belge (now AfricaMuseum) to buy or exchange objects, sometimes chiefs would refuse to sell their regalia (Wastiau Reference Wastiau2006:10), which administrators would then forcibly obtain at undervalued prices or directly requisition (Mumbembele Reference Mumbembele and Bodenstein2022:145). In the Kingdom of Dahomey, European travelers sometimes preceded militaries in seizing objects which had themselves been produced by prisoner-artists from other local kingdoms (Beaujean Reference Beaujean2019). Finally, the case of the Sacristan Father Trilles, who was dispatched to the French Congo (1892–1907), completes this brief glimpse into the ambivalent origins of collections. There, spirituality was merchandized: while he received some of his “souvenirs” as penance by newly converted Fang, he was subsequently selling these to the Neuchâtel museum’s subcurator Charles Knapp (Perrois & Kaehr Reference Perrois and Kaehr2007:46–47). If it could be proven that these items were seized against their original owners’ will, should they be restituted to Gabon, the Central African Republic, or the Republic of Congo, which then formed the French Congo? As ongoing studies untangle complex provenance threads, multilateral or competing claimants are likely to increase in the foreseeable future.

Restitution Mainstreamed

As has been made explicit in previous sections, museum inequalities reveal as much about retentionist inertia as about restitutionist inconsistencies. Once ethnographic artefacts for the connoisseurs turned icons of primitive art from the 1920s on, objects were swept from these niches by the tides of decolonization and globalization, “wherein it is not aesthetic autonomy that is held to be the governing virtue, but cultural diversity and the relations of art to ways of life” (Wood Reference Wood2012:117–18). As a result, African artefacts now reach out to audiences beyond source communities or whistle-blowers. These broader audiences in turn gaze beyond museums for narratives on the shared history of translocations and the rationale behind permanent exiles. Shifts in the values we attach to these artefacts, in exhibition paradigms but also in the nature of power—now as much based on the way narratives are framed as on material assets—mean that the old adage whereby “he who controls the objects controls the story” (Kiwara-Wilson Reference Kiwara-Wilson2013:399) does not hold anymore. Those who controlled the objects have, if not lost control of narratives, at least lost their monopoly on them. In addition to ethnographic and aesthetic inputs, they have been compelled to include a plurality of standpoints reflecting the violence of cultural estrangement. In some cases, the ICOM Code’s (2017:12) stipulation whereby “deaccessioning from museum collections […] must only be undertaken with a full understanding of […] any loss of public trust that might result from such action” has been turned upside down: not deaccessioning well-provenanced artefacts from imbalanced contexts has led to growing public mistrust and disapproval. To formerly retentionist museums, retaining contested artefacts might be riskier than acknowledging their potential restitution—a rhetorical repositioning that must be distinguished from the actual fact of restituting. Not envisaging restitutions could not only lead to public alienation but could also threaten future cooperation with African museums. If African museums were to envisage lex talionis measures—denial of excavation permits or rejection of collaborative activities such as loans and exhibitions where looted materials are displayed (Gundu Reference Gundu2020:60–61)—European institutions could lose the credibility emanating from knowledge on and cooperation with Africa.

The hypothesis according to which encyclopedic museums reluctantly hopped on the restitution bandwagon deserves attention. The AfricaMuseum director Guido Gryseels (Reference Gryseels2004:8), who once prided himself on collaborating with the French police to denounce illegal objects in private collections, went to DR Congo in 2021 to strengthen collaborations on potential restitutions and returned a Suku mask on a long-term loan in 2022. The British Museum, which is still clinging to its 1963 statutory restrictions to allege that deaccession is impossible, is now taking part in the funding and construction of the EMOWAA, which will host the 1,130 Benin bronzes to be returned by five German museums in 2022. Among them, the Humboldt Forum, which long hid behind the smokescreen of the official ownership of its collections by the Ethnological Museum, is confronting head-on its colonial collections in multi-perspective conferences. Contrary to the British Museum, the Humboldt Forum, the AfricaMuseum and, to some extent, the Musée du Quai Branly now dedicate substantial sections of their website and PR initiatives to clarifying the origins of their goods and the institution’s stance on colonialism and restitution. To smooth out this rhetorical foray, ethnographic museums and their curators have learned how to use new words. “New notions and terms are being offered up, like shared heritage or, even better than this buzzword, shared history or linked history and shared knowledge. Other often-invoked keywords are decolonization, inclusion, diversity, plurivocality, entanglements, among others” (Laely et al. Reference Laely, Meyer and Schwere2020:22). The extent of this semantical sea change is a measure by which to gauge the failure of all past retentionist initiatives. Whereas the former retentionist strategy ended up isolating universality-leaning museums, the new one consists of blending in the decolonized mainstream by sporting uniformity rather than alterity and speaking the politically correct language of restitution. But does that make them truly reformed revisionists or just rhetorical ones?

Some digital initiatives illustrate the duplicity inherent in the rhetoric of restitution. Inventorying goods and archives through digitization is commonly understood as a first step in the process of potential restitutions. But the AfricaMuseum and the German Museums Association (2021:87) soon coined self-contradictory terms such as “digital restitution” (AfricaMuseum 2021b) and “virtual restitutions.” To make matters worse, the AfricaMuseum (2021c) and the Musée du Quai Branly (2021) presented the transfer of digitized sound recordings to the Rwanda Cultural Heritage Academy and the digitization of photographic collections as tantamount to material restitutions, suggesting that they could substitute them. Not allaying these ambiguities produces a doubled-edged restitution discourse, whereby museums deliberately mistake steps toward restitutions for permanent alternatives to them as a procrastinating strategy to comfort their position of power under the present culturally imbalanced status quo. Here, the abovementioned institutions typically use a rhetorically restitutionist tone as a neo-retentionist strategy.

Rethinking the Rules of the Restitution Game

The aim of this section is to take stock of the limitations in the restitution vs. retention arguments and to think afresh a potentially fairer (re)distribution of African artefacts between Europe and Africa. As suggested by practitioners and scholars, “the return of collection items should not be an end in itself” (German Museums Association 2021:80) “but rather the beginning of a process” (Laely Reference Laely, Meyer and Schwere2020:19). Restitutions can only be meaningful if they derive from a process of provenance (determining whether objects were acquired under unfair conditions), repair (apologies and plurivocal narratives), and reappropriation (transmission of knowledge on the objects and re-institutionalization in African museums). In the late 1970s, by branding 114 low-quality items—often replicas—as unapologetic “gifts” to Zaïre and delinking them from the Belgian-Congolese litigation, the former director of the RMCA (now AfricaMuseum) Lucien Cahen was not carrying out restitutions, but reproducing a paternalistic pattern (Van Beurden Reference Van Beurden2015b:160–62). Restitution as a process instead requires dismantling a multilevel pyramidal structure whereby the dominion of the colonizers over the colonized was also reflected in the hierarchy between the elites in the metropole and in the colonies (Mumbembele Reference Mumbembele and Bodenstein2022:143), with the best ethnographic items repatriated from African to European museums (Gaugue Reference Gaugue1997:163). Post-independence elites in Africa in turn absorbed Western epistemes (Van Beurden Reference Van Beurden2015a:253–54) without devolving cultural clout to provincial museums or extra-ethnic groups. Rethinking the role of museums and repurposing their collections therefore come to the broader horizon of decolonized policies breaking away from inherited frameworks (Ripert Reference Ripert2021:293–94).

So far, Germany seems to offer the most comprehensive approach to revisionism. The first European State to be deprived of its colonies under the Versailles Treaty (1919), it is now the most active country in unraveling the networks of African collections. In a reversal of the way ethnologist Luschan cooperated with German museums and private art dealers to fuel their collections (Penny Reference Penny2021:88), it is now exhuming these networks of expropriations to disseminate knowledge about them. Its policy framework allows for provenance research on a bilateral basis “even if there has been no request for return” (German Federal Foreign Office 2019:6). By establishing a Contact point (2021) between all national museums and potential transnational collections, its multilateral platform could trigger a chain reaction in other countries and institutions which are more reluctant to cooperate with claimant states. The Benin bronzes offer a case in point. After the German and Nigerian foreign ministers signed, on June 24, 2022, a memorandum of agreement that clears the way for the transfer of ownership rights of 1,130 Benin bronzes due to be restituted by the end of 2022 (Deutsche Welle 2022), the other museums holding Benin bronzes in Germany and abroad will doubtless feel more exposed. Admittedly, this domino effect is not a straight backwash but rather a ramified maze involving heterogeneous actors and temporalities. But mapping the diaspora of over 10,000 objects spread across 161 museums in 23 countries (Hicks Reference Hicks2021:236–52) through the Digital Benin project could set the most edifying model for multilateral restitutions.

Belgium long shunned the issue of restitution (Roberts Reference Roberts2019:5), including after the opening of the AfricaMuseum when Gryseels (Reference Gryseels2019) asserted that he would only consider returning one or two objects on a symbolic basis. The AfricaMuseum now estimates that 1 percent of its 120,000 ethnographic objects were looted and only 58 percent correctly appropriated, thus requiring EUR2.5 million for further provenance research (RTBF 2021) on the vast grey area that constitutes 41 percent (50,020 objects) of its collections. But elements of duplicity still taint what we deem as a rhetorically restitutionist stance. For instance, it keeps on conflating digital donations to Rwanda and digital restitution to North-East DR Congo with unconditional, material restitutions. As of June 2022, Belgium and the AfricaMuseum have not restituted but rather “symbolically returned” on a long-term loan what they consider a “legally acquired” Suku mask to the MNRDC, thus reproducing former director Lucien Cahen’s patronizing tactics (see Figure 3). Meanwhile in Brussels, the House of Representatives promulgated a law which recognizes the alienability of goods linked to Belgium’s colonial past and determines a framework for their restitution. If the AfricaMuseum is seriously considering the restitution of 50,020 objects, it should not single-handedly pick its own provenance scientists, as was the case until recently, but welcome bilateral scientific committees—as specified and provided by the new law. Otherwise, it leaves itself wide open to suspicions of using the origins of collections as a pretext to bail out its otherwise decreasing resources.

Figure 3.

The King of Belgium “symbolically” returns a “legally acquired” Suku mask from the AfricaMuseum to the Musée National de la République Démocratique du Congo (MNRDC) on a long-term loan on June 8 2022. Photo courtesy of MNRDC.

Further down the retentionist road, the Musée du Quai Branly unilaterally underrated France’s colonial abuses to between 200 and 250 objects. In fact, reliable accounts from the Central Africa military expedition in 1899 (Pierre Reference Pierre1984:67–71) to the Dakar-Djibouti ethnographic mission in 1936–1938 (Leiris Reference Leiris2018) demonstrate that these figures are blatant underestimations. And President Macron maintained Jean-Luc Martinez as head of a mission to design a legal framework for restitutions, despite the fact that the former Louvre Museum director has been indicted for illegal trafficking of Egyptian antiquities. As for the British Museum, it has yet to feign the restitutionist tone, as it keeps associating provenance studies exclusively with Nazi-confiscated art, without applying them to colonization (British Museum 2021). Only last year did it quietly recaption the explanatory notices of some looted artefacts. But curatorial questioning of colonial collections and restitutions from the Universities of Aberdeen, Oxford, Cambridge, and the Horniman Museum, together with the British Museum’s participation in a multilateral forum such as the Benin Dialogue Group where German museums have a more cooperative stance, may eventually turn its retentionism into isolationism.

Where principles of inalienability, imprescriptibility, and unseizability still prove formidable obstacles to deaccessioning items at the domestic level, in international conventions the Roman principle of intertemporal law forestalls “retroactive application of new regulations [that] would lead to barely manageable shifts in legal rights” (German Museums Association 2021:158). Moreover, “international law has no legislators, no policy and few enforcement procedures” (Robertson Reference Robertson2019:137), which leaves, for instance, Article 11 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in abeyance. Restitutions thus appear as impossible (Effiboley Reference Effiboley2020:74) as the fleeting ideal of “re-establishing the state of things such as it should have happened in the absence of the factors justifying the reparation or development aid” (Jewsiewicki Reference Jewsiewicki2004:7). They evoke a funneling process whereby the more time passes, the more actors are involved, the more conditional ramifications spring, the less likely are the objects to be returned. But this rigid apparatus is also prone to cracks. Parties can resort to the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), not just as an alternative, but also as a preparatory step for litigation. The requesting and holding countries can also sign a bilateral agreement whereby the former exert a pre-emptive right on auction sales. But they would still have to buy the revaluated artefacts that they once produced. This is exactly what the Scheherazade Foundation did in 2021 for a dozen objects (see Figure 4) once looted in Maqdala, now restituted to Ethiopia. Likewise, signing temporary or permanent loans may bypass inalienability laws, but it does not iron out the dominant-dominated pyramidal hierarchy that structured colonial relations and that sometimes transpires from donor-recipient partnerships in museum diplomacy.

Figure 4.

The Scheherazade Foundation bought items looted by British forces at Maqdala (1868) on auction and restituted them to Ethiopia. The British Museum does not consider restituting its own Maqdala trove. Photo courtesy of the Embassy of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, London.

Another bone of contention we touched upon when contrasting minimalist offers with maximalist demands by dispossessed countries may be crystallized in the UNESCO (2022) criterion which establishes that restituable items should have particular historical, cultural, religious, or scientific significance: “The object may be a ‘missing link’ in a given cultural tradition and/or in the country’s national collections.” The relative significance of objects raises a few questions. By failing to acknowledge cultural shifts in the relations of art to diversified ways of life, it prolongs the traditional dichotomy between high art and handicraft—a figment of episteme derived from Plato and Aristotle’s concepts of mimesis and beauty which infused the entire Enlightenment project. Under these outdated canons, a good of apparently lesser significance could not be restituted, even if an initial misconduct is well documented—a bias which the ICOM already denounced in 1979 (Ndiaye Reference Ndiay2019:2). By way of comparison, neither the passage of time nor an arbitrary pecking order among goods is alluded to in the 1998 Washington Principles on Nazi-confiscated art. This reveals how little influence notions and practices of African cultural heritage—which, rather than differentiating utilitarian, spiritual, and artistic functions, combine them in the lifecycle of a utensil—hold across the international doxa. A fairer redistribution of artefacts between Africa and Europe is therefore consubstantial with delinking epistemes from Eurocentric notions of knowledge (Mataga Reference Mataga and Laely2018:60) and Africanizing museums (Sabran Reference Sabran1999:900).

The absence of equivalent objects in the community or country of origin could cause a further revaluation of the significance of contested artefacts. In this respect, the UNESCO’s (2022) mention of a nation-based standard (i.e., “in the country’s national collections”) to proceed with international translocations is important because it overrides the universal argument, put forward by the British Museum director, according to which there is creative value in museumifying objects from other cultures (Fisher Reference Fisher2019). If a nation or ethnic group is culturally amputated of one of its core traditions, it does not make sense to contribute to its extinction for the sake of cosmopolitanism—a point Appiah (Reference Appiah2006:132) is willing to concede. This absence is even more conspicuous when rituals performed until today still rely on such objects, as is the case with the Ethiopian tabots. Since British troops looted them at the battle of Maqdala (1868), the British Museum never allowed researchers to study them, let alone display them. Not even a clash of functionalities (Western exhibitions vs. African rituals, to put it simplistically) justifies their presence in a sealed storage room. As relevantly pointed out by Herman (Reference Herman2019), under the provision that “the object is unfit to be retained in the collections of the museum and can be disposed of without detriment to the interests of students,” the tabots could be returned to Ethiopia without even contravening the British Museum Act (1963). Subsequently, looted or illegitimately acquired goods, whose value is relatively incremented by their absence in their country of origin where they are still a vital part of communities’ ceremonies, could be returned on the basis that “a museum can transfer collection items from formal colonial rule contexts to other museums through deaccession of its own accord” (German Museums Association 2021:60).

The correlation between capacity-building, state-of-the-art facilities, and Official Development Assistance (ODA) may also reinforce the viability of restitution demands. Senegal incorporated the El Hadj Omar Tall sword restituted by France in 2019 into the Musée des Civilisations Noires (Dakar, 2018), which was financed by China. Likewise, Congo designated the Musée National de la République Démocratique du Congo (Kinshasa, 2019), which was financed by South Korea, as the ideal receptacle for long-awaited restitutions from Belgium. To former colonizers, museum diplomacy may resemble modern indulgences devised to repair wrongdoings and call for forgiveness. “Drawing on the Western tradition of anti-fascism and the laicized catholic teaching about the moral debt towards God for man’s sins” (Jewsiewicki Reference Jewsiewicki2004:8), states and their individual taxpayers can correct past injustices by dedicating a fraction of public spending to rebalancing relations. When France restituted twenty-six anthropo-zoomorphic statues in November 2021, the Republic of Benin set up a temporary exhibit in the presidential palace while the Agence Française de Développement (AFD) completes the Musée de l’Epopée des Amazones et des Rois du Dahomey (MEARD), which is due to open in 2023. Similarly, the restitution of some of the Benin bronzes is pending the construction of the Edo Museum of West African Art (EMOWAA), co-funded by Nigeria, the Legacy Restoration Trust (LRT), and the British Museum.

Looking ahead, digitization is crucial at stages concerned with inventorying, sharing information, and possibly identifying missing items. At the same time, it is limited to epistemic and aesthetic scopes: the benefits of “digital sharing” stop when communities cannot use original objects to perform rituals. This is why the digitization of collections should not be equated with restitutions. It constitutes a reparation not from illegal acquisitions but from their consequences: distance and opacity. And this lack of access can be sustained by the digital divide. Technical progress allows for the making of not just virtual but tangible replicas. This idea was already the object of the 1867 Convention for Promoting Universally Reproductions of Works of Art for the Benefit of Museums of All Countries. But its parties—all European States—refrained from enforcing it on a significant scale, for it implied that once stolen cultural property had been reproduced, the original would have to be returned (Robertson Reference Robertson2019:216). Today, this idea is resurfacing. Even though artefacts believed to be endowed with special powers can be seen as non-fungible commodities, this does not mean that they should not be replicated. The director of the Humboldt Forum, Hartmut Dorgerloh, confirmed his intention of “displaying only replicas” and went as far as considering “leaving symbolic empty spaces, with the originals returning to Nigeria instead” (Oltermann Reference Oltermann2021). For Europe, the process of replicating would mean, in Benjamin’s terms (Reference Benjamin1936:42), that the object’s hic and nunc is lost, a point which the etymology of “sharing” (scearu in old English) confirms: while it seems to point to commonality, it refers to division and distribution among others (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2007). But what could be gained in return—being at peace with one’s past and partners—is worth pondering. For Africa, the objects’ value as historical witnesses could be increased by closing the circle on long exiles. It would conciliate aesthetic and utilitarian functions, with replicas substituting originals whenever ceremonies are performed. These considerations lead us further away from what we commonly understand by museums, and closer to the most material—replicas, returns, and circulation—and immaterial—digitization, rituals, and values—expressions of our paradoxical times.