First Nations leaders talked about the need to develop a national repatriation strategy for artifacts, cultural items and ancestral remains at the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) annual general assembly in Winnipeg.
Kulasumb Kalinoe (East Sepik area, Papua New Guinea; currrently James Cook University, Australia) focuses on the collection and removal of cultural material from Papua New Guinea (PNG) during the colonial era. She discusses views among the Papua New Guinean diaspora in Australia on museums and PNG collections, and argues that cultural heritage issues must be addressed before the work of decolonisation can begin.
Ahmad Mohammed writes: Sacred objects, ancestral remains, and ritual artifacts remain estranged from the communities that created and cherished them. This condition is what many scholars and practitioners now identify as cultural heritage alienation: the systematic displacement of heritage from its social, spiritual, and cultural lifeworlds into the frameworks of Western curatorial authority. But community control is crucial.
Muhammad Nishat Hussain writes: The 100th anniversary of the first formal excavation at Harappa (Punjab, NE Pakistan) is more than a commemoration of a century-old dig. It is an opportunity to reimagine how Pakistan studies and safeguards its past. Since the 1970s the country has tried to regain lost treasures. In vain.
Nigeria should establish a bilateral negotiating group with Germany on reparations to pay for its crimes against humanity, comprising the indigenous peoples of Nigeria and other African nations. Not as charity, but as a binding act of justice and a guarantee that such atrocities will never be repeated.
Tilda Gladwell likes to divert your attention from news of war and geopolitical instability for just a moment to an equally pressing issue: the decades-long debate concerning repatriation.
In 2013, the AfricaMuseum near Brussels closed its doors and embarked on a major redesign. The architectural changes must have felt less challenging than the long overdue re-evaluation of the holdings and their presentation. Jeremy Harding reports.
[ in Dutch ] How are Belgium and the Netherlands dealing with the sensitive issue of returning looted art and researching its colonial origins? An exploration of some treacherous areas in the quagmire of new Dutch and Belgian restitution policy. A discussion between museum director Wayne Modest and activist Nadia Nsayi.
[ French translation ] La France débat actuellement de la création d’un cadre juridique pour la restitution des collections publiques historiques, principalement d’origine coloniale. La Belgique dispose déjà d’une telle loi. Ce court article propose une comparaison entre les deux dispositifs – la loi belge et le projet de loi français – en se concentrant sur trois points :
• l’approche centrée sur l’État,
• le champ d’application,
• la procédure de restitution.
Reclaiming stolen artefacts: Africa’s landmark museum at the heart of global discussion about restitution.
Senegal’s Museum of Black Civilisations is asserting Africa’s right to secure its cultural heritage and tell its own story.
Kwame Opoku writes: The French Minister of Culture presented a legislative text on 30 July to facilitate the restitution of artefacts in French museums by derogating from the principle of inalienability. It will not likely lead to a rush of restitutions from France. Excluding archaeological materials, military materials, and public records eliminates many objects. Archaeological finds from Egypt, Mali, and other African countries, such as those on the ICOM Red Lists, would be excluded.
This paper is the outcome of joint reflections by the two authors, based in Europe and in Africa. Since the diverse practices of restitution have attracted more attention than certain concepts related to it, this paper addresses this imbalance by focusing on conceptual issues.
The article 'Journey of No Return: The Impact of Looted Heritage on Nigeria’s Cultural Legacy' explores the profound impact of looted heritage on Nigeria’s cultural legacy, highlighting the historical, cultural, and economic implications of the plundered artifacts.
The path to true restitution requires more than symbolic gestures, demanding that Britain repeal its obstructive laws, France accelerate its glacial restitution process, and all former colonial powers establish transparent frameworks for repatriation.
This year’s theme explores the material return, digital reunification, and recontextualization of Philippine artefacts, manuscripts, and sound heritage kept in institutions outside of the Philippines.
[ in Dutch ] Tervurologie sets its sights on the AfricaMuseum and radically bets on imagination - to think new Tervurens, plural. Not as escape, but as intervention. Not as recovery, but as restart. Not as an answer, but as another question. Tervurologie is an attempt at exorcism.
This article postulates that what we have seen in the past decade has been a turning point in memory politics of the colonial past, and it asks whether a new Franco-German paradigm in memory politics has emerged?
Southern Africa is spearheading a transformative shift in the restitution discourse. This shift means reframing restitution as an act of healing, justice, and empowerment for communities still grappling with the enduring scars of historical dispossession.
[ in Italian ] From the dawn of Italian exploration in Africa and throughout the colonial period, objects and samples from overseas came to the Peninsula, finding their way into temporary exhibitions and more than one hundred permanent displays, where they were studied, described and presented to the public.
Tamara Lanier, who sued the school in 2019 over daguerreotypes of her enslaved ancestors held in its museum, called the outcome “a turning point in American history.”
The exhibition explores the current debate surrounding collections gathered during the colonial period and the question of restitution. Visitors not only learn about the provenance of cultural objects but also to reflect on ownership, value, and the ethical implications of a colonial history that continues to resonate in museum collections today. [ English version and Dutch version ]
British Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy: “In the arts and creative industries, Britain and India lead the world and I look forward to this agreement opening up fresh opportunities for collaboration, innovation and economic growth for our artists, cultural institutions and creative businesses." (Not a single word about restitution)
Pope Francis died on April 20 at 88, marking the end of an epoch for the Catholic Church and the beginning of its search for the next spiritual leader, who will also become proprietor of the Vatican’s library and vast art collection.
Dan Hicks' 'Every Monument Will Fall - A Story of Remembering and Forgetting' reappraises how we think about culture, and how to find hope, remembrance and reconciliation in the fragments of an unfinished violent past.
At Galeria Avenida da Índia in Lisbon, Uriel Orlow’s exhibition Memória Colateral unfolds like a sensory mapping of historical violence and of how memory is inscribed – or erased – within Western structures.
The African Union (AU) has said that the Year of Reparations 2025 is about economic liberation and ending Africa’s systemic wealth drain. Onyekachi Wambu writes: 'Restitution is a key part of the agenda. it has been explicitly mentioned in all the AU related reparations meeting I have attended.'
The collection of the Musée des Rois Bamoun (MRB, Museum of the Bamoun Kings), located in Foumban in Cameroon’s West Region, testifies to the richness and diversity of the Bamoun Kingdom’s art, culture, and history.
[ open access ] 'Displacing and Displaying the Objects of Others - The Materiality of Identity and Depots of Global History' brings a diverse range of contributions inspired by research from the "Hamburg’s (post-)colonial legacy" research center.
The centuries-old African artifacts housed in European institutions and that are worth billions of dollars should be returned to the rightful owners, Global Black Centre (GBC) Vice President and the prominent historian Robin Walker said.
A foundational handbook for critical heritage research about Africa and its diaspora. Part III African Objects and the Global Museum-Scape is relevant for RM*.
The State-centric discourse that surrounds Indonesia’s cultural heritage protection and repatriation policies impede locally-led activism related to cultural heritage.
[ in German, English and French ] German museums of world cultures hold 40,000 objects from Cameroon, more than the entire African collection of the British Museum, according to a new study, presented by Bénédicte Savoy (Technische Universität, Berlin) and Albert Gouaffo (University of Dschang).
This article explores the ownership of cultural objects within national and traditional customary law in Suriname, with the aim to provide a legal context to the issue of claims for the return of some of these cultural objects from the Netherlands.
In Switzerland, the decolonization of ethnological and historical museums and collections is in progress. This is true in practice, especially by federally funded provenance research projects and by single restitutions of human remains and colonial objects.
The Cape Verde President, José Maria Neves, has called on African nations to unite in demanding compensation for the invaluable properties and artifacts stolen from the continent by colonial powers.
[ in English and in Dutch ] In April 2024, a Netherlands delegation visited Suriname and mapped out which objects are present in Dutch public collections through the colonial history of the Netherlands and Suriname.
During the European expansion constant fighting and violence and the taking of spoils of war went hand-in-hand. Palaces, shrines, homesteads and entire villages were plundered and destroyed. In the restitution debate, the focus is mostly on state-collections resulting from these confrontations. There is ample evidence, however, that many more parties were involved. This blogpost has soem of the evidence.
Why is research into colonial collections in the private sector - I mean art dealers, auction houses and private collectors - so tough? The main reasons is that most of them have built a wall around themselves, and there is rarely a hole in this wall through which an outside observer can look inside their closed bulwark.
Museums from Glasgow to Cambridge are proactively repatriating objects. Glasgow has become the first UK museum to repatriate objects to India (“a very emotional event”, as Glaswegians of Indian heritage said).
How do we trace the origin of collections? What new insights can be gleaned from these provenances? And what should become of such collections, within and beyond museum walls?
Once, The Art Newspaper called the historical relationships of the art trade with museums a ‘foggy world’. That was in 2016. I dare say the relationship of trade with museums still is very foggy. How does this relationship look like?
With tens of thousands of African artworks in French museums, curators face a huge task in trying to identify which of these were plundered during colonial rule in the 19th and 20th centuries and should be returned.
Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy discuss what African cultural objects are in French publicly owned collections, why so few have been repatriated and what measures should be taken for restitutions to their countries or communities of origin.
Sarah van Beurden: What is new is the wave of research on the origins of colonial collections, and several projects – both academic and artistic – reflect on the larger cultural loss the removal of these objects caused in their communities of origin.
Kodzo Gavua has called for an intensive education on the plunder of African cultural heritage objects and systems and the need for their return. Such efforts would help safeguard the nation’s cultural legacy and contribute to tourism and scholarly research.
An estimated 350,000 African artefacts and manuscripts, as well as human remains, photographs and natural history specimens, have been found in the stores and archives of the eight museums and the Botanic Garden which together make up the University of Cambridge Museums, as well as the University Library and less-well known collections in university departments and institutions.
