The new museum was roundly criticised by scholars and the Congolese diaspora in Belgium for the inadequacy of its ‘decolonising’ ambitions.
One charge was that too little had been done to explain how the collections were amassed. The museum responded by placing far more emphasis on provenance.
An exhibition last year, ReThinking Collections, offered a detailed itinerary of several artefacts and set out Belgium’s current policy on restitution: an object is unlikely to be returned if there is evidence that it changed hands without coercion, but if it can be shown that it was taken without consent – looted, stolen or acquired by deception – there are grounds for handing it back.
Between the two extremes lies a grey area: consent without payment, for example, alleged consent, or that equivocal token of exchange, the ‘gift’.
Several of the consultants who played a role in the museum’s reinvention believe that provenance isn’t the central issue when it comes to restitution.
The museum ‘will never be able to answer all the questions about the origin of the collections’, according to Sarah Van Beurden, the co-curator of ReThinking Collections and a historian of Central Africa. ‘Other pathways ... should be possible.
For example, what if a certain type of object no longer exists locally, would that not be just as good a reason for a restitution?’
Anne Wetsi Mpoma, a Congolese gallerist based in Brussels, argues that provenance may even be an obstacle to restitution. It’s easy to imagine an artefact stranded in limbo as scholars rummage in the archive hoping to discover how it made its way to Belgium 150 years ago.
Near the end of his life, dogged by criticism of the Free State, Leopold destroyed many papers held at the International African Association, a propaganda organisation created in Brussels in the 1870s to press his claims in central Africa.
