Kwame Opoku considers the return of of the Djidji Ayôkwé, the talking drum that the French seized from Côte d’Ivoire in 1916 as ‘undoubtedly, one of the most essential restitution events in the last few months’.
Equally significant was the attempt by the French government to secure a new general law, loi-cadre, which would have made restitution easier by not requiring specific legislation for every object to be returned, by creating a general exemption to the rule of inalienability of State property. The government that presented the relevant bill fell victim to a vote of non-confidence
demanded by the Prime Minister on 8 September 2025.
But…
Western dedain
In the area of restitution of human remains and looted artefacts we clearly see the disdain and disrespect of Western States for the African peoples.
They keep our artefacts, which they do not need, because these looted objects are mostly in depots and basements that are hardly visited by museum officials, some of the objects being in the original packages used to send them to Europe.
The Western public does not know about the thousands of looted African artefacts in Western museums.
Return of heads of King Toero and two other resistance fighters beheaded in 1897 by French troops. The human remains had been kept in Musee de l’Homme, Paris, France.
For whom then are they keeping these looted objects? The Dutch government has returned since the last Restitution Day 119 Benin artefacts to
Nigeria, which is encouraging, but what about other Nigerian and African artefacts in Dutch museums? They act as if Benin art were all the colonialists stole from Africa.
Interesting publication
The report of the Open Restitution Africa entitled Demands-Based Inventory Models-Rethinking
- On inventories:
1.Inventories don’t guarantee returns. Our research found no direct link between publishing inventories and the actual return of heritage items. Instead, most successful restitution efforts are driven by communities who discover their belongings through chance encounters or grassroots mobilisation.
2. The costs are enormous. Digital Benin cost €3.9 million to document just 5,246 items from a single kingdom. The Atlas of Absence identified over 40,000 Cameroonian items in German museums alone — a scale that makes comprehensive inventories financially unrealistic for most African countries.
3. Colonial distortions persist. Museum records created during colonial rule use labels like “fetish” or “amulet” that obscure true meaning, while most Western institutions still tightly control access to their collections.
