Although most these contributions are more than one year old and RM* does not have any long articles, it is useful to listen to this African voice.
At a recent UNESCO meeting he said:
- These objects […] have been displaced and torn from the African continent, condemned to exile and silence. But they have not been silenced. In my opinion, their mission is to create links.
Last year, he spoke to an audience of the Ethnographic Museum of Geneva. The museum summarised his thinking as follows:
- For some years now, the issue of the return of African heritage objects to the continent where they were born has haunted public debate. But there is nothing straightforward about the meaning and practicalities of such a return. To speak of a “return” presupposes not only that an origin can be identified each time, but also that the regions from which these objects come have not changed, as if time had stood still and all we had to do was “go back”. It also presupposes that the objects themselves have not affected the spaces in which they have been displayed and seen. Souleymane Bachir Diagne proposes the notion of “mutant objects”, which encourages us to rethink the properties of these works and artefacts, and to reimagine the museums that will house them, in Africa and around the world.
His lecture [ in French ],
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmL6ggHxUyY
Kwame Opoku finds it
- shocking that a leading African scholar proposes a theory that would enable the French to keep looted African artefacts in France.
Maria Pia Guermandi commented:
- I listened to Bachir Diagne’s lecture, but he is not a voice against restitutions. Bachir Dianne dismantles the concept of universalism expressed by Western museums and supports the need for African museums to have back the objects of their heritage in order to negotiate a “universal” circulation.
