Beyond the Neo-Imperial Politicizing of Object Repatriation: Restitution and the Question of Decolonization

The debates around disputed African objects in Europe continue to expose ethnographic museums as war zones that preserve colonial structures and perpetuate imperial barbarity in the twenty-first century. As pillars of imperialism, ethnographic museums became sites for authenticating white supremacy to legitimize colonial exploitation.¹ They have misconstrued narratives around Indigenous objects² to materialize racist sciences and philosophies that asserted that Blacks were inferior, irrational, and evolutionary deselected at the base of the social pyramid of ontological density, with skin color serving as the signifier of modernity. Widespread plundering in the guise of punitive expeditions and the ferrying of the continent’s material culture to Europe facilitated the inferiorization of Africa in museums. However, instead of addressing these concerns, restitution debates are dominated by the politicization of African objects, which impedes ethical compensation for Europe’s atrocities. These debates are undermined by a narrow focus on repatriation or returnism (the physical relocation of objects to their societies of origin), restitution (the legal transfer of ownership), and their European-centered discourse.

As European and African actors politicize repatriation, restitution dialogues have dissolved into diplomatic drama and convoluted economic and political power strategizing while relegating cultural reunion with expropriated Indigenous objects and their liberation from museum anthropological violence to the background. Pursuing antireturnism (the refusal to physically return objects or recognize their legal ownership), some European governments and institutions have reconfigured restitution—defined as demands for justice for imperial looting and the decolonization of ethnographic museums—into a neo-imperial financial and material missionarism. Influenced by European machinations and dictates, the national governments of some African nations approach restitution from a commercial angle; one tied to a combination of object repatriation and monetary compensation. Both approaches ignore the urgent need to address Europe’s historical and ongoing injustices against Africa. Neither restitution in terms of transferring legal ownership, repatriation regarding physically returning objects, or loan agreements involving European museums temporarily releasing objects to demanding nations nor a combination of these concepts will lead to ethical relationships and museum decolonization. Instead, they prevent anticolonial interventions needed to rid European museums of their colonial entanglements and anti-African biases. In what follows, I will show that the politicization of object return hinders ethical restitution, results in unethical relations, and fosters neo-imperial hegemonies. As an alternative, I propose three strategies for ethical restitution that will benefit institutions wherever racism has long informed the museumization of non-Western material culture.

Repatriation and Neo-imperial Politics

French President Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 political declaration in Ouagadougou³ and 2018 commissioned report, which propelled restitution into contemporary public consciousness, opened a pandora’s box that transformed demands for justice into diplomatic political debates. Today, curators, cultural experts, art critics, historians, and politicians attempt to realize restitution from political, economic, cultural, and epistemological perspectives. Various groups pursuing diverse interests under the banner of restitution derail the critical issues of museum decolonization relating to the objects’ histories, handling, and presentation. Let me hastily clarify and distance my use of decolonization from the antirationality and anti-European fundamentalism it has assumed in the decolonization industry. In this context, decolonization refers to dismantling the Eurocentric practices that continue to inferiorize Africa and other cultures in ethnographic museums through the racist objectification of their material heritage. It also refers to riding imperial institutions of their colonial entanglements. Decolonization in this usage means anticolonial and antiracist museum interventions. It is crucial to recenter decolonization demands because European actors have replaced it with capacity-building initiatives through onto-semiotic beguile.

European governments and institutions politicize restitution by spearheading partialrepatriation in the form of object loans to pacify agitating voices while preserving their colonial structures. To maintain its antireturnism policy, Britain, for example, conceptualized temporarily relocating contested objects to demanding nations as restitution. Asked in India about the return of the Koh-I-Noor diamond, which Britain forced a ten-year-old prince Maharaja Duleep Singh to relinquish in 1849, the former British Prime Minster David Cameron responded, “If you say yes to one, you suddenly find the British Museum would be empty. I certainly don’t believe in returnism.”⁴ With object loans becoming Britain’s official antirestitution policy, a spokesperson for the British Museum told Vox in July 2020, “We don’t restitute, but we are absolutely committed to lending as widely as possible. The museum’s fundamental value resides in its breath, scale, complexity, and unity; as such, it is a true library of the world.”⁵ The museum uses the pretext of displaying global history to conceal neo-imperial racism and violence. Artist and author Johnathan Harris writes that to return contested objects would imply that Britain now considers the peoples of those parts of the world capable of caring for artifacts that were initially removed due to the perceived “degeneration” of their societies.⁶

The German approach involves symbolically transferring objects’ legal ownership with an arrangement to retain them as permanent loans. In 2022, the Foundation of Prussian Cultural Heritage (SPK) and Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM) signed one such agreement to transfer ownership of 512 Benin bronzes. Abba Isa Tijani, the commission’s director, celebrated the deal as representing a future of museum collaboration even though it was apparent that the pact was political dramatology. The same year, Berlin Museums loaned twenty objects to Namibia as part of their project of envisioning creative futures. The French deal with the Republic of Benin follows a similar nation-state-to nation-state diplomatic collaboration framework. After returning twenty-six objects to Cotonou in November 2021, France promised to transform the country into a tourist destination through a one-billion-euro museum investment initiative. Like the French, the Netherlands’s return policy hinges on bilateral cooperation. Its government recently committed to return all stolen objects if demanding nations can substantively prove, with documented evidence, that they were taken without consent.⁷ In 2022, the Prime Minister of Belgium, Alexander De Croo, handed over to the Congolese government an inventory of 84,000 artifacts dating from the colonial period to build “a shared future.”⁸ This Janus-faced diplomatic deception, described by De Croo as “an olive branch between Brussels and Kinshasa,” involved merely sharing objects’ information while Belgium retains them at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren and their legal ownership.

Object repatriation or restitution misdirects a critical mass to focus on partial returns or symbolic transfer of ownership, which opacifies colonial violence and the dehumanization of Africans through anthropological racism under the pretext of cultural evolution sciences

With these agreements, a new discourse has emerged that deploys the rhetoric of collaboration to disempower African voices and dismantle the demands for anticolonial and antiracist reforms in European museums. Object loans, the symbolic transfer of ownership, museum investments, and capacity building for future collaboration have derailed Africa’s demands for justice. Veneered as object and financial missionarism,⁹ this rhetoric of cooperation is a neo-imperial hegemonic strategy that keeps African nations perpetually subject to European dictates. Loan agreement only prolongs painful histories of military defeat,¹⁰ while, according to Ethiopian historian Abebe Negasi, exhibiting the apotheosis of Europe’s pompous audacity to loan what they do not own.¹¹ It is equivalent to a plundering thief (Europe) prescribing to the dispossessed (Africa).

Europe’s tactic of concealing its neo-imperial agendas under the pretext of building trusted partnerships has a long history. French art historian Bénédicte Savoy reminds readersthat European countries were receptive to restitution during the Cold War for political reasons. They wanted to use soft power to improve relations with African countries.¹² Brazilian art critic Franthiesco Ballerini observes that in the twenty-first century, Europe and the United States are intensifying those efforts in their desperate attempts to strengthen commercial and political ties with Africa to counter the increasing influence of China and Russia.¹³ Therefore, there is validity in author Ido Vock’s conclusion that repatriation is neo-imperial geopolitics based on Europe’s desire to salvage influence among African states that are turning away from ex-colonial powers.¹⁴ I agree with their criticisms of repatriation as reanimating neo-imperial hegemonies. Yet my criticism issues from a conceptual standpoint, which they omit—repatriation conceals coloniality¹⁵ in museums and reempowers the ex-colonizers. Object repatriation or restitution misdirects a critical mass to focus on partial returns or symbolic transfer of ownership, which opacifies colonial violence and the dehumanization of Africans through anthropological racism under the pretext of cultural evolution sciences. Neither the physical relocation of objects nor the legal transfer of ownership can resolve these issues. In this sense, both restitution and repatriation obfuscate decolonization.¹⁶ I will return to this point anon.

Insidiously, the politicizing of restitution engineered by Europe has transformed African nations’ demands for justice for colonial expropriations and dehumanization to a new troubling dependence on their ex-colonizers’ benevolence. A convoluted two-pronged approach to restitution tied to partial repatriation is evident in Africa. Traditional institutions like the Oba’s Palace in Benin, the Nso Dynasty in Cameroon, and the Giriama and Pokomo communities in Kenya rightfully request the return of their stolen material culture. The Oba’s letter of March 2000 to the British Museum, which asked Britain to return all Benin Bronzes or the monetary equivalent of their contemporary market value to the Oba, exemplifies such culturally oriented demands. Contrarily to traditional institutions, some African governments engage in what I call repatriation euphoria—the fixation on the economic dimensions of repatriation because the Sarr and Savoy report implies financial compensations even as it focuses on establishing new ethical relations between the African continent and Europe.¹⁷ In December 2017, for example, Nigeria’s NCMM, through its head of public relations, Dapo Sijuade, called for the unconditional return of cultural artifacts stolen from the Benin Kingdom in 1897. However, while declaring that outright repatriation would complete the decolonization of Nigeria,¹⁸ a few months later, the commission entered into a loan agreement with Germany for the performative symbolic transfer of the objects’ ownership to Nigeria. At the same time, German museums will retain the bronzes. The Congolese government’s eager acceptance of object inventories (information) of Leopold II’s loot from its Belgian counterpart while the objects remain in Belgium is another example of African nations cajoled by Europe’s neo-imperial diplomatic facade. This nation-state to nation-state diplomacy, influenced by the Sarr and Savoy recommendation that drives some African governments’ dialogue with foreign governments and institutions, sidelines communities with genuine connections to contested objects, resulting in several battles on the continent.

Restitution and Unethical Relations

Restitution has instigated various skirmishes in Africa because governments and institutions of former European empires engage African governments instead of individuals who belong to communities whose ancestors produced the objects and currently reside on the ancestral land where the objects originate. Regrettably, Europe’s decision to overlook locals from such communities is generating tensions in Africa and between Africa and Europe. Nigeria, for example, had faced a four-way fight for the Benin Bronzes. The Kingdom of Benin, located in Edo State of present-day Nigeria, originally owned the objects and rightfully demanded their return. At the same time, leveraging on UNESCO’s 1989 Charter of Cultural Heritage Control and encouraged by European nation-state to nation-state negotiation policies, the Nigerian Federal Government laid claims at the national level. Meanwhile, the Edo State Government, administratively overseeing the Benin kingdom, also asserted official demands for the so-called bronzes. In addition, the British Museum and the German Government enlisted the Nigeria-based Legacy Restoration Trust (LRT), directed by corporate finance specialist Philip Ihenacho, to act as an intermediary for the proposed construction of an Edo Museum of West African Art (EMOWAA) to house the Bronzes if and when Europe returns them. These four competing interests culminated in a tumultuous internal conflict that served Europe’s strategy of fostering confusion to undermine Africa’s demands. Recently, the LRT amended its mission statement to distance itself from negotiating the objects’ return after the federal government transferred ownership of the bronzes to the Oba (ruler of Benin Kingdom) through a special declaration on March 23, 2023. However, the federal government’s declaration has compounded the battle between Nigeria and Europe. Outraged by the decision, museum and cultural experts accused the Nigerian government of betraying and blindsiding international museums and donors, reneging on loan and retention agreements, and jeopardizing the future of the bronzes and universal museums.¹⁹

Tensions arising from politicizing repatriation are not limited to Nigeria, as politics and economics also play a critical role in Kenya. The National Government, customs officials, the National Museum, Giriama, and Pokomo communities are all involved in various battles. After the Denver Museum of Nature and Science returned a few vigango posts to Kenya in 2014, the objects remained stuck in Nairobi airport for many years.²⁰ Customs officials demanded an exorbitant tariff of $60,000 from the Denver Museum to release the posts to the national museums. The Denver Museum refused to pay, the Kenyan government declined to exempt the duty tax, and members of the Giriama community opted out of covering the cost.²¹ This financial precondition for releasing the objects further compounds the tension between the Kenyan National Museum, the Denver Museum, and community leaders laying claims to their ancestral material culture.

Similarly, the agreement between the Belgian government and the DRC has caused controversies among the people of Mbuti, Bembe, Chokwe, and others outside Kinshasa, whose objects Belgium confiscated during Leopold II’s savage brutality. The Belgian government used the transfer of information relating to 84,000 objects to strengthen political ties between Brussels and Kinshasa without considering the desires of local communities. Congolese writer Sinzo Aanza and cultural mediator François Makanga describe the agreement as reanimating the exploitation of the descendants of the ancestors who made the objects while renewing the pains of colonial defeat.²² These controversies demonstrate the unethicality associated with politicking object repatriation that nation-state to nation-state diplomacy instigates. Object return politics also subdues African voices against repatriation. Cameroonian scholar Patrice Nganang’s opposition to repatriation as emboldening authoritarianism,²³ Director of the Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire in Senegal Hamady Bocoum’s argument that restitution devalues African history,²⁴ and Togolese artists Kikoko Kouevi-Akoe Ekoe Kokovi’s warning that repatriation will fan the embers of tribal wars,²⁵ are suppressed critical perspectives.

Repatriation and the Question of Decolonization

Repatriation hinders the goal of decolonizing European museums, deracializing African objects, and liberating them from Eurocentric anthropological fossilization. African and Afrophiles who emphasize repatriation are driven by the vacuous belief that Europe plundered all African material culture in its collections. This assumption beclouds African and non-African Africanists and politicians in determining contested objects that require a return. It further prevents them from realizing that relocating a few objects will not disentangle European museums from their imperial roots. Nor will it provide reparations for the epistualicide and artifactualicide the continent suffered during colonialism and the ongoing museum violence it is still subjected to. By museum violence, I refer to the mis-contextualization of Africa through colonial taxonomies.²⁶ Epistualicide is the destruction or de-contextualization of objects that play central roles in African socio-religious systems. Artifactualicide connotes the obliteration or carting away of objects that are tangible records of African history as much as they are aesthetic forms.

Nor will it provide reparations for the epistualicide and artifactualicide the continent suffered during colonialism and the ongoing museum violence

According to cultural commentator Christine Mungai, there are an estimated 70,000 African objects at Paris’s Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, 69,000 at the British Museum, 37,000 at the Weltmuseum in Vienna, and 75,000 at the (future) Humboldt Forum in Berlin, as well as 180,000 at the Royal Museum for Central Africa, not to mention thousands in private collections.²⁷ Not many of these objects will return to Africa. Yet African and European repatriation advocacy groups who politicize repatriation do not account for what will happen to uncontested African objects that will remain in Europe. Their continued display in animated suspense will sustain the anthropological fossilization and inferiorization of African culture and history. Since the call for decolonization is at the core of restitution, does the decolonization of African art or European museums necessarily follow from relocating a few objects to state representatives or other parties? Was plundering the continent’s tangible cultures an act of material dispossession or to materialize the racist logic of Western Eurasian supremacy? As the Canadian sociologist Budd Hall writes, to dehumanize a people, you first denigrate their culture and knowledge systems, alluding to imperialists’ perversion of Indigenous tangible heritage.²⁸ This theory is particularly true of Africa. The goal of imperial plunder and collection was not for mere material accumulation but their objectification as ethnographic objects to hierarchize civilization and valorize the subjugation of Africans.

By fixating on object return as the core of restitution, African and European actors fail to propose frameworks to address Europe’s continued museumization of African material cultures in debasing classificatory systems. They unwittingly embolden Europe’s unwillingness to decolonize its thinking, practices, and institutions.

By fixating on object return as the core of restitution, African and European actors fail to propose frameworks to address Europe’s continued museumization of African material cultures in debasing classificatory systems. They unwittingly embolden Europe’s unwillingness to decolonize its thinking, practices, and institutions. Returning a select few objects, providing funding to museums in Africa, and facilitating capacity-building initiatives diverts attention from much-needed anticolonial and antiracist interventions to a narrower focus on African empowerment controlled by dubiously repositioned benevolent neo-imperialists. Object repatriation may provide limited material indemnification but deprive Africa of ethical compensation for the past and resolution for its continuing denigration in museums. I propose we consider restitution from multivalent perspectives, with African and European actors engaging in dehierarchized dialogues beyond cultural chauvinism and diplomatic politics.

On Ethical Restitution

Achieving ethical restitution requires more than object return or legal transfer of ownership. It should involve rethinking European museums and museology in renegotiating the future of non-Western material culture. Amanda M. Maples, curator of African art at the New Orleans Museum of Art, argues that restitution presents an “opportunity to transform and be transformed by objects, access knowledge, and build a more ethical, informed, and informative future.”²⁹ The goal should be to challenge long-held misconceptions about Africa in the global north through anticolonial museum programming. Politicizing object repatriation impedes the interrogation of Europe’s colonial past and ongoing anti-African ethnographic practices. It also insulates Europe from being transformed in line with the demands for decolonization by promoting object loans and funding museums in Africa instead of opening its self-validating institutions to knowledge that will rid them of coloniality.

Politicizing object repatriation inhibits the development of anticolonial practices that could restage African material culture in new antiracial and broader universal significance when many Africans support the necessity of such anticolonial restaging. The Bamun kingdom does not seek the return of its revered royal stool but its presentation as a cultural ambassador in Germany. In an interview with Jonathan Fine, director of the Weltmuseum Wein in 2017, Nji Oumarou Nchare, the director of cultural affairs at the Bamun Palace, told Fine, “Some say the Germans stole the crown. Others say it wasn’t a gift, or if it was one, a forced gift. We think the Bamun People maintained a marriage of convenience with the Germans back then. We hope that those ties will be revived through greater cultural corporations. The Germans will appreciate the mutual benefits of helping us preserve our cultural heritage. The throne in Berlin is an ambassador of our rich culture.”³⁰ British-American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah earlier promulgated the same cultural exchange arguments, positing that all artifacts are valuable contributions to the world’s culture and should be respectfully displayed in other countries to promote cross-cultural understanding. He urged African governments to leave some in Europe in the spirit of cosmopolitan enterprise.³¹ Maples’s theory of accessing new knowledge through objects to transform the global north, Appiah’s cosmopolitan enterprise, and Nchare’s notion of cultural ambassadors provide broader perspectives for engaging restitution that European and African repatriation advocates are yet to explore fully. To achieve ethical restitution, I suggest the following:

Europe should not control restitution dialogues. Although presented as benevolent, Europe’sinvestments in African museums and capacity-building initiatives to supposedly standardize museums as part of restitution reinforce neo-imperialism. Africa cannot achieve ethical indemnification for colonial expropriations or ongoing museum violence under the dictates of the ex-colonizers who originally plundered their objects and objectified them to institutionalize racism. By controlling the restitution debate, Europe uses symbolic politics to mollify critics, rebranding rather than restructuring their institutions and practices linked to imperialism and white supremacy. European governments’ commitment to conditional repatriation (object loans), or even legal transfer of ownership without reforms to deracialize their ethnographic institutions, exemplifies Janus-faced diplomatic politics antithetical to ethical restitution, exhibiting what Nigerian philosopher Olufemi Taiwo calls elite capture.³² Europe cannot achieve anticolonial reforms in its museums when its governments leverage financial powers to protect their interest and decide the destination of objects identified for returns. African voices must be central to determining the path to ethical restitution.

Repatriation should be to Indigenous owners. Alexander Herman, assistant director of the Institute of Art and Law, posits that restitution can only be successful by “returning objects to their original homes.”³³ In Africa, in cases where object return is non-negotiable unless Europe returns them to their Indigenous owners, the current politicization of repatriation will continue to dispossess them of their revered cultural forms. I acknowledge the colonial origins of the term “Indigenous.” However, I use it to refer to individuals with ancestral connections to the creators of the objects and who reside on the ancestral lands. The twenty-six objects returned to the Republic of Benin are stored in the presidential palace in Cotonou, though they originate from Abomey, the former Dahomey kingdom. France is reconfiguring looting by handing the objects to the president of the Benin Republic instead of locals from Abomey, who have ancestral ties to the makers. Belgium’s decision to share objects’ information with the government in Kinshasa, ignoring Bwile, Sanga, Bemba, Tutsi, or Chokwe people, perpetuates neo-imperial redispossession. Furthermore, it is illogical for the British Museum or the German Government to bypass the Oba of Benin and hand the so-called Benin bronzes to the Nigerian government, the LRT, or any other body. Since the current nation-state to nation-state negotiation undermines Indigenous owners in most cases, to insist on this path will be to reanimate looting in the guise of international diplomacy.

Restitution should focus on museum decolonization. Since many African objects will remain in Europe, ethical restitution should involve dismantling colonial museum practices and reconceptualizing their presentation to gain respected universal significance. Currently, African museums hold thousands of celebrated works of art that generate little or no interest,³⁴ repatriating objects to these or other European-appointed African museums under the same Eurocentric taxonomies will devalue them. We must formulate anticolonial museal practices to address ongoing anthropological violence against the continent in ethnographic museums. While curators, art historians, cultural experts, and politicians interrogate the colonial histories and the agencies of African material culture in European museums, crucially, they must work to liberate African arts from colonial museumization and reorient the European mind to purge it of the logic of Western Eurasian superiority as a critical path to ethical restitution.

I do not claim that repatriation is insignificant. While repatriation is essential in cases of blatant plundering like in the Benin Kingdom, the current debates around object relocation or transfer of ownership perpetuate neo-imperialist maneuvering that hinders genuine amends for Europe’s past and present atrocities. Beyond returnism or transfer of ownership, restitution advocates should prioritize anticolonial museum reform since thousands of hitherto uncontested African material cultures will remain in Europe. These seemingly uncontested objects are the most damning of European museums because they evince ongoing violence against Africa. Ethical restitution must focus on anticolonial and antiracist interventions because the legacies of colonialism are still visible in museums’ continued concealment of unequal encounters and the debasing of Africa through colonial categories rooted in racism and coloniality in Europe and globally. Object repatriation or transfer of ownership cannot resolve these critical issues. Instead, European and African actors must collaborate to formulate anticolonial interventions that reenvision African material cultures considering their expanded role in the changing historical context and reimagined present and rethinking their narratives while reflecting on their complexities, where they should be, what they evidence and whom they implicate in various global locations. Cultural isolationism, antagonism, neo-imperial posturing, tokenish returnism, and symbolic transfer of ownership are not the answers to ethical restitution.

Acknowledgments

I thank the Central European University Foundation of Budapest for funding part of this research through the Global Institute for Advanced Studies (GIAS). I also express my gratitude to Professors Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi and Helene Julia Sinnreich for their valuable advice on the initial draft of this paper, and to the AJO reviewers for their thoughtful feedback.

Clement E. Akpang is an assistant professor of African art and material culture in the Corcoran Art History Department at George Washington University. He has authored Nigerian Modernism 1900–1965: Anti-Europeanization, Nationalism, and Avant-garde Art (University of Calabar Press, 2019) and Analysing Art: A Short Guide to Art Appreciation, Criticism and Research in Visual Arts (University of Calabar Press, 2020).