User:Munfarid1/Restitutions of non-Western cultural heritage

Demands and debates concerning restitutions of cultural heritage, created by non-Western civilizations and kept in Western collections, have been raised notably by African and other countries since the early 1970s. African intellectuals, such as filmmaker Nii Kwate Owoo and archaeologist Ekpo Eyo, both from Nigeria, or writers of the Moroccan magazine Souffles had called for the recovery of African artefacts in Western collections as an act of re-establishing their countries cultural identity.

Following the 2018 report on the restitution of African cultural heritage in France, public debate as well as discussions among academics, museum curators and representatives of governments have raised both arguments against and in favour of restitutions of artefacts or other cultural objects. Main arguments against restitutions have been the traditions of museums as self-proclaimed "guardians of cultural heritage", perceptions of inadequate expertise and unsuitable institutions in the countries of origin, and the legal status of artefacts in terms of ownership claimed by the present owners. On the other hand, advocates of restitution have argued that many of such objects had been taken away by people or institutions in Western countries under colonial domination, by force or illicit terms of trade.

Starting in 2018, museums in France, Germany and the Netherlands have restituted some items as a reaction to demands by African and other countries and have issued guidelines for new concepts of the social responsibilities of museums, changing attitudes to collecting and presenting works of cultural heritage.

In view of the many outstanding artworks in public or private collections of the global North, one can hardly imagine the loss of cultural heritage caused by the refusal of restitution to their countries of origin.

Debates about restitution in the 1970s and 1980s

Following the independence of numerous African countries in the 1960s and the emergence of new kinds of cultural identities, such as the Négritude movement in West Africa, people from African countries have called for restitutions of illicitly acquired cultural heritage from the northern to the southern hemisphere. Further, they brought these calls to the attention of international organizations like the United Nations and UNESCO, as well as professional networks of art historians, museum curators, archaeologists or journalists. As these cultural objects had been taken to museums or other collections in the global North during colonial domination often under circumstances of violence, oppression and deceit, and as they have not been accessible in the countries of origin, these debates and demands were seen as crucial by their proponents, but as a threat to the integrity of collections in the North.

Artists and academics

The following quote from the preface to the 2018 Report on the restitution of African cultural heritage, was originally published in French in the Moroccan cultural magazine Souffles.

“The conservation of culture has saved the various African peoples from the attempts at erasing the history and soul of Africa’s peoples […] and if it [culture] binds humans together, it also impels progress. This is the reason why Africa has gone to such great lengths and taken such care in recovering its cultural heritage, in defending its personality and tending to the flourishing of new branches of its culture.”

— “Manifeste culturel panafricain”, Souffles, 16-17, 4th trimester, 1969, January-February 1970, pp. 9 and 13

While studying at the London film school in the 1970s, Ghanaian filmmaker Nii Kwate Owoo made the short documentary film You Hide Me, subtitled "The colonization of African art in the British Museum". The film wants to provide insight into the "theft and concealment of ancient and rare African art, from Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan and South Africa, hidden in wooden boxes in the basement of the British Museum." Making a case for the artworks to be returned to their place of origin, it had its première at the Africa Centre, where Owoo had invited professors of African history from the School of Oriental and African Studies, and from Oxford and Cambridge University.

International organizations

After having attained independence from former colonial powers during the 1950s and 1960s, several nations from the global South prompted UNESCO to "create an international treaty to combat the illicit trafficking of cultural property. Their concern was mainly related to the growth of the black market during this time and, in particular, to the dismemberment of monuments and ancient sites to meet the demand." On 14 November 1970, the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property was adopted.

On 10 September 1971, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) stated in its Resolution no. 3 that all museum professionals may "respond to appeals from scholars and from source countries for help in maintaining and contributing to the reconstitution of their cultural heritage."

On 4 October 1973, the president of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko, made the first speech by an African Head of State at the Headquarters of the United Nations. Among other issues, he referred to the plundering of African artefacts by colonial powers and to the consequence that many African countries were therefore deprived of their cultural heritage. To restore this imbalance, he requested a resolution so that the rich countries, "which possess works of art of the poor countries, may restore some of them, so that we can teach our children and our grandchildren the history of their countries."

On 18 December 1973, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted their Resolution no. 3187 about the Restitution of works of art to countries victims of expropiration.

In 1978, Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, Director-General of UNESCO at the time and first African head of an UN organization, pleaded in favour of a rebalancing of global cultural heritage between the northern and the southern hemispheres. In his speech "A plea for the return of an irreplaceable cultural heritage to those who created it" he said:

The peoples who have been victims of this plunder, sometimes for hundreds of years, have not only been despoiled of irreplaceable masterpieces, but also robbed of a memory which would doubtless have helped them to greater self-knowledge and would certainly have helped others understand them better. [...] They know, of course, that art is for the world and are aware of the fact that this artwork, which tells the story of their past and shows what they really are, does not speak to them alone. They are happy that men and women elsewhere can study and admire the work of their ancestors. They also realize that certain works of art have for too long played too intimate a part in the history of the country to which they were taken for the symbols linking them with that country to be denied and for the roots that have taken hold to be severed. [...] These men and women who have been deprived of their cultural heritage therefore ask for the return of at least the art treasures which best represent their culture, which they feel are the most vital and whose absence causes them the greatest anguish. This is a legitimate claim.

— Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow, former Director-General of UNESCO, Paris, 1978

Accounts on the first historical phase of calls for restitutions

In her book Africa’s struggle for its art: history of a post-colonial defeat, first published in German in 2021, art historian Bénédicte Savoy documented the numerous endeavours by African nations to recover cultural objects acquired under colonial circumstancess. during the 1970s and the 1980s. Following her and Felwine Sarr's 2018 report on the restitution of African cultural heritage, she shows "how extensively these stories have been silenced and suppressed by European cultural leaders." In Acquiring Cultures: Histories of World Art on on Western Markets, Savoy and her co-authors published various studies on the "history of seizure, trade and collecting of non-Western heritage from Asia, the Pacific, the Indian subcontinent, Africa, Australia and the Americas, and the foundation of public or private collections in Europe and the United States" since the mid-18th-century.

Debates following the Sarr/Savoy report

international agreements on cultural property of The Hague, 1907 and 1954, UNESCO of 1970

its origin on morally or legally disputed grounds... stealing, plundering, looting, coersion, translocation

perceptions of the cultural and social role of art

Claims by art historians, museum curators and other cultural commentators for...

cultural guardianship and temporary loans or circulating exhibitions

Peter-Klaus Schuster, at the time General Director of the State Museums of Berlin stated in his article about the "Treasures of World Culture in the Public Museum":

"In connection with the demand for the restitution of art works in the possession of our museums, we distinguish four categories of case. Firstly, there are historical art works, which were as a rule purchased legally. Secondly, there is war booty seized on behalf of the State as reparation or as war trophy. This is the case between Germany and Russia. Thirdly, there are cultural possessions acquired as a consequence of persecution – art looted by the Nazis. And lastly, there are stolen goods from illegal excavations and plundering."

The international museum community shares the convictionthat illegal traffic in archaeological, artistic, and ethnic objectsmust be firmly discouraged. We should, however, recognizethat objects acquired in earlier times must be viewed in the light of different sensitivities and values, reflective of that ear-lier era. The objects and monumental works that were installeddecades and even centuries ago in museums throughoutEurope and America were acquired under conditions that arenot comparable with current ones.Over time, objects so acquired – whether by purchase, gift, orpartage – have become part of the museums that have cared forthem, and by extension part of the heritage of the nations whichhouse them. Today we are especially sensitive to the subject of a work’s original context, but we should not lose sight of the factthat museums too provide a valid and valuable context forobjects that were long ago displaced from their original source. The universal admiration for ancient civilizations would not beso deeply established today were it not for the influence exerci-sed by the artifacts of these cultures, widely available to an inter-national public in major museums. Indeed, the sculpture of classical Greece, to take but one example, is an excellent illus-tration of this point and of the importance of public collecting.The centuries-long history of appreciation of Greek art began inantiquity, was renewed in Renaissance Italy, and subsequentlyspread through the rest of Europe and to the Americas. Its acces-sion into the collections of public museums throughout theworld marked the significance of Greek sculpture for mankindas a whole and its enduring value for the contemporary world.Moreover, the distinctly Greek aesthetic of these works appearsall the more strongly as the result of their being seen and studiedin direct proximity to products of other great civilizations.Calls to repatriate objects that have belonged to museum collec-tions for many years have become an important issue formuseums. Although each case has to be judged individually, weshould acknowledge that museums serve not just the citizens of one nation but the people of every nation. Museums are agents inthe development of culture, whose mission is to foster knowledgeby a continuous process of reinterpretation. Each object contri-butes to that process. To narrow the focus of museums whosecollections are diverse and multifaceted would therefore be a dis-service to all visitors.

Signed by the Directors of:

The Art Institute of Chicago; Bavarian State Museum, Munich (AltePinakothek, Neue Pinakothek); State Museums, Berlin; ClevelandMuseum of Art; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of ArtLouvre Museum, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkThe Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, NewYork; Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence; Philadelphia Museum ofArt; Prado Museum, Madrid; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; StateHermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum,Madrid; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The BritishMuseum, London

From the British Museum Web site:

www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/newsroom/current2003/universalmuseums.html

Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums"

https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/british-museum-story/collecting-histories

"In the article “Digital Heritage Surrogates, Decolonization, and International Law: Restitution, Control, and the Creation of Value as Reparations and Emancipation”, Lucas Lixinski at the University of New South Wales, Australia, investigated the role assigned to digitization in the so-called “Sarr-Savoy report” of 2018, postulating the return of artifacts and collections from France to Sub-Saharan African nations. Lixinski explores the complex legal status of digital surrogates, focusing more specifically on the issue of digital copyright in cases of contested cultural objects. Throughout his discussion he argues that digitization and colonialism have not yet been sufficiently addressed by international law."

Lixinski:

Sociocultural contexts

The recent debates about restitutions have been situated within a broader narrative of post-colonial reparations and structural inequality between the Global North and South.

postcolonial theory

decolonization

civil society Black Lives Matter, Black Europeans of African ancestry

These debates and restitutions have been seen as part of the decolonization of museums and as a wider, contemporary reappraisal of colonial history in Europe. For example, streets named after colonial historical persons in Berlin have been renamed after victims of German colonial oppression, such as Rudolf Duala Manga Bell in colonial Cameroon or Cornelius Frederiks, a tribesman who was killed in 1907 in a prison camp in the town of Lüderitz, modern-day Namibia.

Tess Davis, an archaeologist and lawyer for the NGO Antiquities Coalition, took sides with non-Western claims for restitutions: “So-called leaders in the field still justify retaining plunder in order to fill their "universal museums", where patrons can view encyclopaedic collections from all over the world. A noble idea, in theory, but in practice, a Western luxury. The citizens of New York, London, and Paris may benefit, but those of Phnom Penh? Never.”

Debates in Western countries since the late 2010s

France

Royal statues of Abomey in Quai Branly museum, with explanation about their future restitution, May 2021

The report on the restitution of African cultural heritage

Main article: Report on the restitution of African cultural heritage

Commissioned by the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, the aim of the report was to assess the history and present state of publicly owned collections of African artworks in France, as well as claims and a plan for subsequent steps for eventual restitutions. This report marks the first time a French president announced the restitution of African artefacts, and it has since prompted numerous debates and plans for a "decolonization" of museums in a number of countries.

"To restitute” literally means to return an item to its legitimate owner. This term serves to remind us that the appropriation and enjoyment of an item that one restitutes rest on a morally reprehensible act (rape, pillaging, spoliation, ruse, forced consent, etc.) In this case, to restitute aims to re-institute the cultural item to the legitimate owner for his legal use and enjoyment, as well as all the other prerogatives that the item confers (usus, fructus, and abusus).

— Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, The restitution of African cultural heritage. Toward a new relational ethics, p. 29

The Musée du quai Branly, but also the Louvre and many other French collections...

Great Britain

Elgin or Parthenon marbles

Benin Bronzes in the British Museum, London, Great Britain

More than two hundred years after the installation of the Parthenon friezes in the British Museum, Greece continues to claim the the so-called Elgin Marbles from Britain. Even though Greece claims that the marbles should be returned to Athens on moral grounds and wants to present the sculptures in its National Archaeological Museum, British authorities continue to insist on their legal ownership. Since 2009, the trustees of the British Museum have indicated their agreement to a "temporary" loan to the new Athens museum, but state that it would be under the condition of Greece acknowledging the British Museum's claims to ownership.

Benin bronzes

Collections in the UK have also received requests for restitution from former colonies, most prominently regarding the world-famous Benin Bronzes from modern-day Nigeria. Still, the directors of both the British Museum and of the Victoria & Albert Museum and the British Minister of Culture have spoken against permanent restitutions.^, Like some other cultural organisations in Europe, they prefer cooperation and a "circulation of objects" from their collections in the form of temporary exhibitions in Africa.

The British Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum have joined the international Benin Dialogue Group, set up to coordinate scientific exchange, assistance for a new museum in Benin City, and eventual restitutions of artefacts.

The first British institution to return a statue after proof that it was looted directly from the royal court of Benin, is Jesus College, University of Cambridge. Following a campaign by the college's "Legacy of Slavery Working Party" (LSWP), they announced the handover to Nigerian delegates for 27 October, 2021. Other collections in the United Kingdom, such as in Aberdeen or Bristol, have announced their own investigations on the provenance of such artefacts and their openness towards restitution.

New directions

In the context of local and international debates, the Pitt Rivers Museum of the University of Oxford started a broader programme of decolonization and reconciliation that centres on four tenets: provenance, transparency, repatriation and redress. Thus, the museum invited professionals from East Africa to share their view of the cultural objects in the collection. In 2020, Bénédicte Savoy and other art historians at the Technical University of Berlin and the Pitt Rivers Museum were started the joint research project Restitution of Knowledge to study, how art and cultural assets from other countries were collected in major museums of Europe.

Germany

Ethnological museums in Berlin and other cities

Bronze statue from Kingdom of Benin, Nigeria, in the Ethnological Museum Berlin

Despite Germany's relatively short colonial history, limited to a few African countries such as modern-day Cameroon, Namibia, Tanzania and Togo, as well to parts of New Guinea, a very large number of African cultural objects are in German public collections. One prominent example is the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, which is scheduled to be reopened as part of the future Humboldt-Forum in 2021. Similar questions to those raised by Sarr and Savoy have led to intensive public discussions about Germany's colonial past and its colonial collections.

Given that cultural policy in Germany is the domain of the different federal states (Länder) and that many museums are independent or semi-public institutions, museum directors face fewer legal obstacles towards restitution than in France, and there have been several cases of recent restitutions, for example to Namibia. Moreover, at the beginning of 2019, the Department of International Cultural Policy of the Federal Foreign Office, the Ministers for Cultural Affairs of the Länder and the municipal cultural organizations issued a joint statement on the handling of collections from colonial contexts. With these guidelines, the collections in Germany have set new foundations for the research on provenance, international cooperation and repatriation. With respect to a new kind of cooperation, the Ethnological Museum of Berlin and the University of Dar es Salaam have started a Tanzanian-German research project about shared histories of cultural objects.

An article written for the German cultural institution Goethe-Institut in September 2019 states that Germany has failed to critically examine the cultural objects taken from Africa to Germany during colonial times, and that according to historian Jürgen Zimmerer from Hamburg University, even the ongoing efforts of provenance research "are a strategy to postpone the necessary political resolutions" for timely restitutions. In National Geographic magazine of December 2020, Jacob Kuchner also reported about the controversial discussion and current state of restitutions in Germany.

Mbangu mask from DR Congo in the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Belgium

Belgium

In Belgium, the Royal Museum of Central Africa (aka. Africa Museum) houses the largest collection of more than 180,000 cultural and natural history objects, mainly from the former Belgian Congo, today's Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). As part of its first major renovation in more than a 100 years, a new approach of “decolonization” towards the presentation of cultural heritage in the museum has been carried out. To this end, the public collections of the Africa Museum have been complemented by elements of contemporary life in the DRC. Also, Belgian sculptures showing Africans in a colonial context have been relegated to a special room on the history of the collections. The influence of the discussion in France has also led to announcements to change the relevant laws and to intensify cooperation with representatives of African countries.

Spain

former colonies in Latin America

Moroccan library in El Escorial

Other countries

Austria, Switzerland, Serbia,

Views from African countries

As African countries such as Benin, Ghana, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mali, Nigeria or Namibia for several decades have made requests for restitution to France, Great Britain and Germany, the report by Sarr and Savoy has prompted positive comments and generated expectations by commentators in Africa: Kwame Opoku, a Ghanaian cultural journalist, reported in 2019 that the International Council of African Museums (AFRICOM) had "formally addressed support" for the restitutions as suggested by the Sarr/Savoy report.

Some African curators have reacted critically to one-sided European initiatives regarding restitutions. Flower Manase, a curator at the National Museum of Tanzania, for example, said that first of all, African experts have to be involved as equal partners, share their own narratives and involve the communities of origin.

Other African cultural commentators, such as Tanzanian journalist Charles Kayuka have pointed to the ethnocentric Western nature of museum exhibitions, which explains why they tend not to find much interest with local visitors in Africa. Another argument of his concerns the importance of traditional cultural heritage for modern, globalized African societies, is expressed in the following quote:

It's time to repair our stolen identity. (...) But the masks and fetishes that are now stored in European museums—there would be no point in giving them back, because these pieces have no value for the Africans. They are empty, dead, de-souled—they have lost their original meaning because they are torn from their context and thus have become meaningless objects. Because they were not art objects, but religious, ritual, and magic objects. That's why they were so important to African societies back then.

— Charles Kayuka, Tanzania

Nigeria

exhibitions of Benin bronzes

Asia and Oceania

Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka has lost cultural property both in colonial times as well as during ethnic conflicts since independence.

See also

• List of museums with major collections in ethnography and anthropology
• African art in Western collections
• Restitution (law)
• Repatriation (cultural property) - The repatriation debate
• Collection (museum)
• Deaccessioning
• Decolonization of museums
• Decolonization of knowledge
• Provenance
• Postcolonial theory

Works cited and further reading

• Ardouin, Claude Daniel, E. N. Arinze, West African Museums Programme, International African Institute (eds.) (1995). Museums & the community in West Africa. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. ISBN 0-85255-227-0. OCLC 32986108. {{cite book}}: |last= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Chambers, Iain; Angelis, Alessandra De; Ianniciello, Celeste; Orabona, Mariangela; Quadraro, Michaela, eds. (2016-03-14). The Postcolonial Museum: The Arts of Memory and the Pressures of History. London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315554105. ISBN 978-1-315-55410-5.
• Laely, Thomas; Meyer, Marc; Schwere, Raphael, eds. (2018). Museum cooperation between Africa and Europe: a new field for museum studies. Bielefeld, Kampala: Transcript Fountain Publishers. ISBN 978-3-8376-4381-7.
• Leiris, Michel; Edwards, Brent Hayes (2019). Phantom Africa. ISBN 978-0-85742-700-7. OCLC 1111005361.
• Mark, Peter. "Is there such a thing as African art?" Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University, vol. 58, no. 1/2, 1999, pp. 7–15. doi:10.2307/3774788. JSTOR 3774788.
• Nayeri, Farah. "France vowed to return looted treasures. But few are heading back" The New York Times, 23 November 2019.
• Price, Sally, and Dan Hicks. "Has the Sarr-Savoy report had any effect since it was first published?" Apollo, January 2020.
• Sarr, Felwine; Savoy, Bénédicte (21 November 2018). "Rapport sur la restitution du patrimoine culturel africain. Vers une nouvelle éthique relationnelle" [The restitution of African cultural heritage. Toward a new relational ethics] (pdf) (Report) (in French original and English official translation). Translated by Burk, Drew S. Paris. p. 240. ISBN 978-2848767253.{{cite report}}: CS1 maint: unrecognized language (link)
• Savoy, Bénédicte; Guichard, Charlotte; Howald, Christine, eds. (2018). Acquiring cultures: histories of world art on Western markets. Berlin Boston: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-054508-1. OCLC 1039210631.
• Savoy, Bénédicte (2021). Afrikas Kampf um seine Kunst : Geschichte einer postkolonialen Niederlage (in German). München: C.H.Beck. ISBN 978-3-406-76696-1. OCLC 1201188411.
• Savoy, Bénédicte (2021). Beute: eine Anthologie zu Kunstraub und Kulturerbe (in German). Berlin: Matthes & Seitz. ISBN 978-3-7518-0312-0.
• Savoy, Bénédicte (2022). Africa's Struggle for Its Art. History of a Post-Colonial Defeat. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Shylon, Folarin (2000). "The Recovery of Cultural Objects by African States through the UNESCO and UNIDROIT Conventions and the Role of Arbitration". Uniform Law Review - Revue de droit uniforme. 5 (2): 219–240. doi:10.1093/ulr/5.2.219.

External links

• UNESCO 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property

• UNESCO webpage on the Fight against Illicit Traffic in Cultural Property