[restitution matters]

Open Restitution Africa calls it “journeys”

Open Restitution Africa (ORA) describes restitution as a pan-African process of remembrance, research, and the digital sharing of knowledge – an interview with Chao Tayiana Maina and Karen Ijumba. 'The bulk of the work in the restitution lies on the African side: the work of reintegration, the negotiation, and supporting people in dealing with the return of the artifacts.'

Our “open data platform” is essentially a centralized open access space about restitution processes, or rather, what we call “journeys”.

From our perspective this is a very important distinction because oftentimes people assume that the project is about inventories or provenance.

But what we really wanted to surface is:

What are the strategies?
What are the efforts that Africans are putting into restitution?
And how do we turn those strategies, efforts and knowledge into insights that people can use?

Oftentimes when we think about restitution: we think of the taking and the removal of objects and belongings and their return. But if you ask people, what they think happens in between there’s less clarity and much less information about what restitution process involve. That is the core focus of our database. It is not a database about objects per se but about people and processes.