Paris: With tens of thousands of African artworks in French museums, curators face the daunting task of figuring out which were looted during colonial rule in the 19th and 20th centuries and which should be returned.
During a 2017 visit to Burkina Faso, French President Emmanuel Macron pledged to return “Africa’s heritage to Africa” within five years, prompting other colonial powers, including Belgium and Germany, to launch similar initiatives.
In 2021, France returned 26 royal properties that its soldiers took from Benin during colonial rule.
That effort was thwarted, and in March the government delayed a bill that would have allowed the return of African and other cultural artifacts in the Senate after right-wing opposition.
However, the French museum is investigating the provenance of about 90,000 African objects in their archives.
Most – 79,000 – are in the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, dedicated to indigenous art from Africa, Asia, Oceania and America.
Emily Salaberry, head of the Angouleme museum, which has 5,000 African objects, said the task was “titanic and exciting”.
“It’s the opposite of how we understand our collection,” he told AFP.
Determining the provenance of an object is the center of the museum’s work, but tracking down the necessary information is difficult and time-consuming.
The French Army Museum began cataloging it in 2012, but was only able to identify a quarter of the 2,424 African artifacts.
Although he said there was a “reasonable hypothesis” that many were spoils of war, he struggled to draw any definitive conclusions.
“The main challenge … is the lack of resources,” a museum spokesman told AFP.
“It’s real research that requires research to be carried out and disseminated, sometimes to foreign countries or to sources that don’t exist at all,” said Emilie Giraud, president of ICOM France, which oversees 600 museums.
Hopefully, as this type of research becomes more common, things will get easier.
The University of Paris-Nanterre offers a special course for experiments in 2022, and the Louvre School in the middle of the famous museum continues in 2023.
Germany and France in January established a three-year fund of 2.1 million euros ($2.2 million) for experimental research.
Katia Kukawka, chief curator of the Aquitaine Museum, called the work “a moral imperative”: “We must be transparent about everything, including the lack of catalogs, dating and our labels.”
The Aquitaine Museum, which has 2,500 African objects, pooled funds with other institutions, such as museums in Gabon and Cameroon, to reduce costs.
But without the proposed legislation, it remains unclear what criteria will determine when an object must be returned to Africa.
Salaberri of the Angouleme Museum said it would have been enough if it had been acquired illegally, but the lack of a clear historical record would hamper restoration efforts.
“There will be many things whose light will not go out.”
Long-term loans and deposits can be an alternative to full compensation – as the British recently did for the Ashanti in Ghana or the Asante Palace.
But not everyone was impressed.
When Nana Oforiatta Ayim, cultural adviser to the Ghanaian government, told the BBC: “Someone comes to your house, steals something, keeps it in his house, then X years later comes and says, ‘I will lend you’ and comes back after your stuff “That doesn’t make sense.”
