African Restitution in a North American Context A Debate, A Summary, and a Challenge

I will give an example from my work about the question of restitution of [Congolese] objects.… [B]eing an artist, I try to appropriate for myself these objects and this history, because they don’t have meaning anymore [as they did] when they were taken. The objects are dead … because their history has been interpreted differently by the people who stole them.… I try to have these objects; by putting them in my works, for me it’s a kind of restitution. I try to give them back their rightful value, their powers. My work is entirely a work of self-appropriating this history of these objects.

—Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga, Kinshasa, 2019¹

On a continent where 60% of the population is under the age of 20, what is first and foremost of great importance is for young people to have access to their own culture, creativity, and spirituality … To fall under the spell of an object, to be touched by it, moved emotionally by a piece of art in a museum … to admire its forms of ingenuity … to let oneself be transformed by it: all these experiences—which are also forms of access to knowledge—cannot simply be reserved to the inheritors of an asymmetrical history, to the benefactors of an excess of privilege and mobility.

—Sarr and Savoy (2019: 4)

A NORTH AMERICAN TSUNAMI

In November 2018, a blockbuster report entitled The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage by Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr² called for the return of thousands of African artworks from French museum storerooms to the continent. Commissioned by France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, amid optimistic promises for prompt returns (Codrea-Rado 2017), its seismic impact reverberated across Europe, sending shivers down vaulted spines, shaking columns, and rattling storage doors— metaphorically of course. The authors have noted the far-reaching impact of this call for restitution (beyond France) and its importance particularly for young artists, such as Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga (Fig. 1), quoted in the epigraph. As they state:

Thinking restitutions implies much more than a single exploration of the past: above all, it becomes a question of building bridges for future equitable relations. Guided by dialogue, polyphony, and exchange, the act or gesture of restitution should not be considered as a dangerous action of identitarian assignation or as the territorial separation or isolationism of cultural property. On the contrary, it could allow for the opening up of the signification of the objects and open a possibility for the “universal” … to gain a wider relevance beyond the continent

(Sarr and Savoy 2018).

As predicted, almost a year later, the tidal waves hit the shores of North America at a moment when France’s own momentum was waning (Rea 2019; Herman 2019). In October 2019, I attended three separate conferences on issues of repatriation, restitution, return of works of art and the ownership and distribution of cultural heritage. All three took place along the East Coast of the United States (Chapel Hill, NC; New York City; and Washington DC respectively) and illustrate the hyper-importance and interest in the issue in the United States.³

Other symposia at North American museums and institutions followed, most notably during panels and roundtables at the November 2019 African Studies Association meetings in Boston, where the debates were fierce, and a February 2020 discussion at San Francisco’s de Young Museum that reflected on the restitution of art from the Benin Kingdom, long at the center of the restitution debate. One could argue that these conferences were/are part of a broader museum trend of the last two decades that has gained even more traction in recent years. Scholars, critics, museum practitioners, and art historians have all urged museums to face their imperial origins and take responsibility for the gross inequities that have resulted,⁴ amid public cries for the decolonization of museums and their holdings (most recently DeBlock 2019; Kolb and Richter 2017; Mirzoeff 2017, among others).⁵ Museums face ever-increasing scrutiny for their mis- or under-representation of racial and gender identities and are repeatedly subject to...