For me this is the best book I have read on the restitution of cultural assets. It particularly focuses on African looted assets.
The editors say in the foreword that of 24 books published on the call for restitution, only one had been written by an African. An additional problem is that there were very few publishers in Africa.
This book is different, each chapter is written by a group of Africans, some of them are based on conversations between Africans.
The only chapter not written by Africans is the one describing how the author 70 years ago had been a film student and had blagged his way into the African section of the British Museum. He had filmed items that only specialists knew existed.
This film has only recently resurfaced and is being shown all over the world as part of the restitution campaign and in 2020 won an award for short films in Paris.
What the book shows is how many campaign groups exist in Africa. Importantly they are discussing what they mean about artefacts being returned and who should get them.
Many of the borders have been changed. Some of the items are seen as belonging to a particular group, others are relevant to a smaller or larger area.
Battlefield, palaces and places of worship
The discussion around this is organised around fifteen particular items. These are categorised as: Battlefield, Palaces, and Religious.
Many of the so called battlefield items were taken by the German colonial army, in totally asymmetrical wars. They were either taken off bodies, forced to be given by captors, or simply looted out of houses. German museums, like Leipzig , Berlin, Strasbourg, have tens of thousands of spears, shields and cloaks. The museums sent their experts, with the military expeditions, to select the items they wanted. The best were kept by the officers, who either donated them to museums or sold them, including to American museums [the big payers].
These expeditions at the turn of the 20th Century were genocidal. They killed hundreds of thousands and they used the survivors as slave labour. It is not difficult to see where the ideology for the holocaust came from.
Of course the British activities around the Benin bronzes and during the Zulu wars are well covered. It also covers the Royal Palace in China.
In defeating resistance armies the colonisers tried to make sure they couldn’t rebel again so they killed the kings or other leaders, mostly decapitating them or took them back to Germany or the Britain. They destroyed the legendary palaces or significant buildings and stole religious items, for example a particular drum. Local religious ceremonies were then banned and the accompanying Christian priests carried out conversions. So there was a cultural destruction.
The campaign groups discuss the nature of the stolen cultural assets and the consequent appropriate actions. The Benin bronzes for example often represent particular people; the Battle standards represent a group. Many of the Cameroonian assets represent religious items. One major item they think should be buried with its ancestors. As for the heads the demand for these and other body parts are obvious, the problem is identification.
No negotiation about theft
What the discussions make clear is that this is not a negotiation with the colonialists, these are stolen items and all should be returned to the African owners who then need to discuss what to do with them.
These discussions can help restore their own histories to the African nations and groups. Who decided the borders of their countries? What is the root of their own culture?
Also what about financial as well as cultural retribution? The colonists came for the minerals which they still control. Once popular movements control the cultural assets there is a clear link to controlling the mineral assets.
This book is useful for the description of how the colonialists stole Africa and considered Africans as sub-human. They used divide and rule to exploit and steal culture and assets and they still try to control the looted cultural assets. They decide which ruler gets the tiny quantity of returns and use that as colonial whitewashing.
The African genocide needs exposure to show people from the West their own history.
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