In the West, we ask ourselves how to proceed from a legal and institutional perspective, or we focus on the historical aspect, asking: what epistemologies and political tensions gave rise to the Colonial Museum?
What do these often unaddressed histories reveal about the construction of a paradigm of African devaluation that begun a hundred years after the transatlantic slave trade? If colonialism’s asymmetric cultural relations led to the looting of cultural objects, how did we construct colonial frameworks?
Above all, we must listen to the looted communities. Colonization inhibited African cultural heritage, severing communities from communion with their ancestors and forcing colonized peoples, deprived of their culture, to adopt superficially assimilated Western cultural values to fill a void.
This issue of Africa e Mediterraneo, ‘Restitutions: Ethics and Methodologies for a Contested Heritage’, has, amongst others, contributions about Belgian archives and oral sources in DR Congo, Ethiopia’s peculiar position in the restitution discourse, and old and new legal frameworks for restitution.
