Dealing with the ‘phantom limb’ pain experienced as a result of colonial artefact theft
When French President Emmanuel Macron commissioned a report on the restitution of African art objects and cultural artefacts stolen from France’s former colonies — and subsequently kept in its museums — he turned to an art historian, Bénédicte Savoy, and an economist, Felwine Sarr. He got more than he bargained for.
Since it was published in 2018, Sarr and Savoy’s report, “On the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Towards a New Relational Ethics”, has exposed the assumptions of curators, politicians and cultural practitioners in various European and African countries. It proposes a profound shift in the way that former colonisers and postcolonial states understand one another: the “new relational ethics” to which the report’s subtitle refers.
Sarr was in Johannesburg this week, visiting the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research. A passionate public intellectual — he is also a musician, poet and novelist — he gave a talk in which he set out the challenges and opportunities presented by the restitution process.
The scope is vast. There are more than 70,000 items in Parisian collections alone, nearly as many at the British Museum and more than both of these put together in Belgium.
Sarr shared with the audience his frustration that, when the report was released, most of the responses came in the form of questions about the legitimacy of claims to ownership and about logistics. How would the artefacts be transported? Where would they be deposited? Did the African countries to which they were being returned have the capacity to “look after” them properly? Would they be “safe”?
The latter point of contention infuriates Sarr. It adopts the false premise that these artefacts should eternally be encased in glass, “defying time”, projecting monumentality and representing a static, past cultural practice. Yet many of the items, whether viewed aesthetically (as artworks) or understood spiritually (as sacred objects), would traditionally have had use, repair and care — or even ritual destruction or burial, sometimes but not always followed by reconstruction — inscribed into their life cycle.
Not all of the artefacts would easily be integrated back into the places and communities from which they were taken. Each art object itself has, after its removal and decades or centuries of separation, become part of a diaspora. It has “changed” in its meaning and significance because it was displaced, because it has come to be seen in a certain way: through the ethnographic gaze of European museum curators and visitors. Or it has been incorporated into European art history as (for example) an influence on Modernism.
A “resocialising” of the object is required. This entails not only trying to account for the “biography” of the object, but also addressing the likely amnesia of the community from which it originally came. Rebuilding the collective memory of a family, a village, a region or even a whole country is a psychologically restorative process.
For Sarr, it means reminding young people in particular of “a long history of creativity” and encouraging them to embrace — to reappropriate — their history and heritage. Connections must be made between the artefact and present-day issues and experiences.
Sarr noted that in Mali, objects that have been returned from Europe have been successfully shared between museums and communities, allowing the artefacts to serve different purposes (or have different meanings) in different contexts: spiritual, memorial, creative, pedagogical and so on. With such a model, over time, the “phantom limb” pain experienced as a result of colonial theft can be treated.
But the benefit is not just to people and places in former African colonies. Sarr argues that the stolen objects have become “sites of the creolisation of culture” because they have informed, and have been informed by, both European and African imaginaries. They are opportunities for dialogue and for a sharing of ideas: the basis for a new ethics of “exchange, mutual recognition and respect”, rather than the “economic and cultural asymmetry” that has been sustained for so long.
If, as Sarr envisions, collaboration between European and African arts institutions and museums over these artefacts makes possible “a reinvention of social, political and economic forms ”— indeed, “a renewed imagination of the future ”— then they will prove to be very powerful objects indeed.
CONNECTIONS MUST BE MADE BETWEEN THE ARTEFACT AND PRESENT-DAY ISSUES AND EXPERIENCES