Why don’t Western countries return African artifacts?
Someone put it rightly:
The European countries that colonized the world brought back to Europe the loot of their aggression. Their home country felt (and still feels) that they have a monopoly on the history writing of their colonies. The self-appointed academic archaeologists are actually comprised of inventory clerks, cataloging the booty from Ancient Civilizations.
Why ?
Western countries are not yet ready to empty their colonial museums. There are hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. Those artifacts are prized and cherished possessions like the Benin Bronzes not only for colonial museums but also for private collections.
The battle to get Europe to return thousands of Africa’s stolen artifacts is getting complicated
While the public debate has mostly focused on African art, repatriation encompasses various elements of African cultural heritage. This includes art and archives, ceremonial objects, human remains, natural history specimens, and intangible cultural heritage like sound recordings and photographs. The best-case scenario figure for the number of artifacts any national museum archives in Sub Saharan Africa is 3,000—and even then, most of them are of little importance or significance when compared to those in European museums.
African art in Western collections - Wikipedia
Between 1890 and 1918, Western colonial expansion in Africa led to the looting of many pieces of sub-Saharan African art, artifacts or natural heritage that were subsequently brought to Europe and displayed.
These objects entered the collections of natural history museums, art museums (both encyclopedic and specialist) and private collections in Europe and the United States.
In its relationship with Africa, even after slavery and the slave trade, Europe has provably been moved by a certain paternalism, anchored to some sense of incorrigibility.
It is quite banal to point out the ways in which this attitude plays out. Whether it is Germany’s diplomatic contortionism about what it did in southern Africa or Emmanuel Macron telling the world Africa’s problems are due to its defective civilisation, Europeans have done it all.
Even when the TV presenter, Jeremy Paxman, went globetrotting on behalf of the BBC to discuss how the British empire had shaped the modern day, he was visibly worried that not more people were willing to say colonisation did “some good”.
But where this uniquely European posture plays out, more than other places, is in the matter of who has the right to those artifacts that were looted out of Africa.
During the heydays of European exploitation, its superpowers took what is on African land as European possessions. And so were the things that came from African minds and hands.
From the 19th century, what began as souvenir collection soon turned into ownership by force. Hundreds of thousands of concrete symbolisations of the African way of life were taken.
There is even a less-discussed angle to the debate about how the deconsecration of many of the symbols fed into the distortion of the African identity.
The world-famous Benin bronzes. Photo Credit: Nigerian Observer
For instance, most 19th century Europeans will not be open to the commercialisation or the treating of Christian iconography as simple artworks. It means more to them – but that courtesy was not extended to Africans.
In museums and universities across Europe, these artifacts are serving the purposes of tourism and education.
It would seem almost every country on the continent was a victim of the grand loot. But it is not even clear which country lost more although Egypt should hover around the top.
Quartz Africa notes that there are over 430,000 pieces of indigenous African artworks shared among some top museums in France, Germany, Belgium, Austria, and the UK.
In 2018, the French government released the report by a commission it had set up to investigate the matter. Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr and French historian Bénédicte Savoy concluded that some 90% of known material arts of ancient Africa is outside the continent.
It was the first time the weight of the matter had been put into a quantifiable perspective. Yet, for those who had hopes that restitution would be quickened, they have been disappointed.
What has rather happened is the loudening of the fears of those who are shaken by what may come of these European museums once restitution is made.
And this is one of the reasons Europe is not looking to do what is right anytime soon.
Comments
Post a Comment