Acknowledgments

Restitution vs. Retention: Reassessing Discourses on the African Cultural Heritage

“…This reveals how little influence notions and practices of African cultural heritage—which, rather than differentiating utilitarian, spiritual, and artistic functions, combine them in the lifecycle of a utensil—hold across the international doxa. A fairer redistribution of artefacts between Africa and Europe is therefore consubstantial with delinking epistemes from Eurocentric notions of knowledge (Mataga 2018:60) and Africanizing museums (Sabran 1999:900).…”

“…Alexander Herman (2021:65) defines the restitution process as “the return of cultural material to an individual, group or nation with the overall aim of doing justice for a past or ongoing wrong. In this context it is not, strictly speaking, a legal term, though it does evoke notions of justice, equity and fairness.” Beyond their juridical dimension, restitutions thus raise ethical but also highly political questions (Sarr & Savoy 2018:67–68; Rassool 2018).…”

“…Each of these institutions’ stance can only be fully understood in relation to the others’ reservations and openings. To this end, this article seeks to go “beyond the workings of bilateral ties between two particular museums,” beyond the “notion of museums in Africa and Europe as self-contained institutions” (Laely et al 2018:4).…”