In recent years, pressure has been growing on European museums to return artifacts taken from Africa during colonial times.
When the Royal Museum for Central Africa reopened after its renovation in 2018 under the brand name AfricaMuseum, diaspora protests called for the restitution of colonial collections.
These demands are not new. They have a long history that dates back to Congolese independence in 1960 and even before.
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.(Re)Making Collections: Origins, Trajectories & Reconnections, a recent bilingual volume that I co-edited with Didier Gondola from the Johns Hopkins University and Agnès Lacaille from AfricaMuseum, takes stock of provenance research – including on the collections of the AfricaMuseum.
Given the time and cost of this type of research, it will not be possible to research entire collections. And even if we could research them, many objects will remain essentially silent: we will probably never find out how they were removed from their contexts of origin because that information is simply lost to time – another colonial legacy.
