On the one end, the Belgian art dealer and historian Bernard de Grunne believes restitution advocates are overlooking countless examples of fairly purchased items due to political aims.
“It’s not an objective, historical issue. It’s become a political issue and a pressure point,” he said. “I think the West did a great service to save what was left of these artistic heritages of Africa. I think a majority of it would have disappeared.”
On the other end, “more communities [in Cameroon] are interested in restitution, but also in reparations for the people killed, sometimes in the hundreds,” Richard Tsogang Fossi, a fellow at the Technical University of Berlin, who helped make an inventory of ancient objects from in German museums.
The essay ends thus: “We are still stuck in what we call the ‘universal museum,’ and the sacralization of objects.”
French art lawyer Corinne Hershkovitch concludes: “To say that another country is not capable of conserving [artworks]—those are our norms, which we are imposing … We are still far behind being able to discuss these questions in a dialogue between equals, on equal footing.”
