Restitution and the Logic of the Postcolonial Nation-State

It is no accident that so many accounts of the dramatic new turn restitution policy has taken in Europe begin with a mention of French president Emmanuel Macron’s now-famous November 28, 2017, remarks in Ouagadougou, where he called for “the temporary or definitive restitution of African cultural heritage to Africa.” Like the Tennis Court Oath of 1789, this was a rhetorical gesture self-consciously made for History with a capital H: in one single statement, Macron drew a sharp line between the Old Regime of cultural policy and the new. As recently as August 2016, the French state had steadfastly resisted calls from the Republic of Benin to return objects plundered during the Second Franco-Daho-mean war (1892–1894); a bit more than a year later, the Elysée Palace Twitter feed reinforced Macron’s statements with the triumphant declaration that “African heritage can no longer remain a prisoner of European Museums” (Saar and Savoy 2018: 1).

Macron’s grand gesture was not simply a matter of objects. In the official advisory report prepared at his request after this declaration, Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy noted that the French president’s proclamation “was inscribed within a much more general approach toward the emancipation of memory”—by which they meant that it was part of a broader effort to come to terms with France’s past as an imperial power (Sarr and Savoy 2018: 1). Since decolonization, metropolitan French political life has been marked by a strong tendency to minimize the violence and grotesque inequity of nineteenth and twentieth century imperialism. As recently as 2005, the French National Assembly overwhelmingly supported a law mandating that school curricula “recognize in particular the positive role of the French presence overseas” (Price 2007: 41). When it comes to the presentation of objects in French national museums, as Sally Price has incisively observed, this reluctance to face the colonial past in all its brutal specificity has promoted a mixture of universalizing aestheticism and cultural contextualization that censors the facts of colonial domination in order to evoke a “1950s-style ethnographic present” (Price 2007: 174.) Macron’s stance is very different. Rather than obscuring the realities of conquest in a haze of ahistorical primitivist fantasy, he has explicitly called colonization “a crime against humanity, a true example of barbarism.” Where his predecessors congratulated themselves for imagining France’s interactions with its former colonies as a “dialogue” among equals, Macron has instead proposed to take France down a peg by “earnestly apologizing to those toward whom we have committed these acts” (Sarr and Savoy 2018: 2).

Macron is clearly aiming for a self-conscious break with the past, an effort to establish French national identity on terms better suited to the present reality of a globalized world—though it is true that he has remained oddly silent about the heritage of far-flung territories still under French control, such as New Caledonia. Inconsistent as it may have been, Macron’s declaration seems to have triggered something: in response, other former colonial powers have revived and intensified their own discussions about what to do with the African heritage objects in their national museums. The possibility of restitution, previously a subject more theoretical than practical, has begun to look like it might become a fait accompli. Increasingly the issue is not whether historically significant objects of African heritage should be returned, but rather when, how, and under what conditions.

At the same time, however, archival evidence reveals a telling mixture of continuity and discontinuity that is important to acknowledge if we are going to understand the full ramifications of this incipient new phase in the lives of certain historically significant African objects held for the time being in French and other national collections. When these objects return, they will function in a context dramatically changed by the postcolonial emergence of the nation-state as the primary unit of political organization in Africa. As such, they will afford scholars opportunities to pose new questions and reassess old paradigms of interpretation.

Surprisingly enough, this is not the first time the French government has...