Introduction
In December 2022 the German Minister of Foreign Affairs, Annalena Baerbock, accompanied by Minister of Culture Claudia Roth, travelled to Nigeria to give back 20 of at least 1100 art pieces from the palace of Benin City that had been stored in German museums for over 100 years (Tagesschau 2022). In 1897, the British colonial military had looted these pieces, known as the Benin bronzes, during a military expedition against the capital of the Edo Empire. German ethnological museums, among many other institutions, had acquired them through the European art market (see Hicks 2020; Phillips 2022). This diplomatic event was a result of decades of sometimes more, sometimes less, intense debates about colonial looted art in Europe and the struggle for its restitution. These debates have taken up increasing space in the European feuilleton in recent years, with good reason: hundreds of thousands of African belongings that were taken away to Europe during the colonial era, most acquired under duress or simply through physical violence, are material evidence of enduring postcolonial inequalities and neocolonial relations between Africa and Europe on various levels (see Sarr and Savoy 2018).
European debates on restitution, in the UK, France or Germany, have been dominated by scholarly disciplines such as cultural studies, ethnology, art history or critical legal studies (see Sandkühler, Epple, and Zimmerer 2021). Stakeholders often ignore the politico-economic context or, at most, consider it superficially by reducing centuries of colonialism to art theft. In contrast, scholars working on colonial theft and extraction in Africa in the field of international political economy usually deal with natural resources. This article attempts to bring together two debates that are intrinsically connected. What does the mass extraction of spiritual, religious, political and symbolic artefacts, or even everyday belongings from former African colonies have to do with political economy? And in which international political and economic relations are these belongings, their restitution, and debates about them embedded today?
Literature dedicated to these questions is scarce. For this reason, I draw from studies in the broad field of postcolonial restitution and combine them with analyses from the field of political economy. This work is enriched by reports and opinion articles that present the current political situation. Overall, the paper’s framework cannot offer a detailed and conclusive treatment of the questions asked above. Rather, it is intended to pave the way for a deeper examination of the international political economy of postcolonial restitution and to provide the initial impulse for such an examination.
To this end, I first outline the key political events surrounding the restitution of African cultural heritage to trace the long path this debate has taken. Some historical background on the massive presence of cultural property from Africa in European museums is then laid out, where I frame the practice of colonial plunder in its politico-economic context and highlight its significance for the European colonial project at the time. I argue that the violent extraction of material cultural property was an important building block in making African societies available to the capitalist world market. With this hypothesis in mind, I venture that international politico-economic relations shape the restitution of these cultural goods today and, to some extent, debates about them. In doing so, it becomes apparent that the continued presence of cultural objects in Europe and their possible restitution can deepen neocolonial relations of dependency; on the other hand, restitutions offer the potential to break such relations or provide an impetus to do so. Questions surrounding the restitution of African cultural property must therefore always be considered in the context of its international political economy, power relations that are also deeply influenced by colonialism (see, for example, Rodney 1973).
Colonial looted art in European museums and the debate over restitution
Demands for the return of cultural heritage looted from Africa during the colonial period are not a twenty-first century phenomenon. Africans whose (or whose ancestors’) belongings were expropriated have kept on claiming these since they were stolen (Sandkühler, Epple, and Zimmerer 2021, 12). The European debate on the fulfilment of such demands is not new either. It first occurred 50 years ago, and was wilfully silenced by political and scientific stakeholders, the media and, finally, museum professionals (Savoy 2021b). The main arguments against restitution were the same back then as they are now: on the one hand, restitution should not fuel nationalism in postcolonial states; on the other hand, the artefacts had come to Europe legally (Savoy 2021b, 8). Since then, the debate has been kept alive mostly by experts on art and museum collections. It is only in the last decade that the broader public has become aware of the controversial presence of these belongings in museums and the stories attached to them.
One of the landmarks of the current debate was the speech given by French President Emmanuel Macron to students at the University of Ouagadougou in November 2017. Instead of downplaying European colonial crimes, as his predecessors had done, he openly acknowledged them and presented himself as a pioneer in restoring memory of the colonial era. According to Macron, culture is key to improving France’s relations with its former African colonies: ‘African heritage must be promoted in Paris but also in Dakar, Lagos, Cotonou; this will be one of my priorities. I would like to see the conditions for temporary or definitive restitutions of the African patrimony in Africa agreed upon within the next five years’ (Macron 2017).1 With this speech, the French president took up the aforementioned demands for reparations for the crimes of the colonial era and restitution of cultural assets: restitution was no longer a niche topic. The Ghanaian author Kwame Opoku (2017) even proclaimed a new era not only for France, but for the entire Western world: in the ‘post Ouagadougou period’, ‘one can no longer advance old arguments used to justify the retention of African artefacts in the Western world.’ As a result, Macron commissioned the art historian Bénédicte Savoy and the Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr to report on African cultural heritage held in French museums. They were entrusted with studying the conditions for future restitutions and laying the groundwork for such restitutions (Sarr and Savoy 2018). After locating the topic in the broader historical contexts of colonialism and its violent crimes, the Sarr–Savoy report dealt in three parts with conditions for, challenges of, and prerequisites linked to restitution processes. The key issue for them was not whether the objects should be returned – this is the premise underlying the report – but how restitutions could be made possible. Among other things, they should be accompanied by a commitment to a ‘new relational ethics’ in Euro-African policy (Sarr and Savoy 2018).
Emmanuel Macron’s speech and the Sarr–Savoy report also generated some attention in Germany and fuelled an existing debate on how to come to terms with the German colonial era. The non-governmental organisation Berlin Postkolonial, for example, edited an open letter calling on the German government to follow Macron’s advance and gathered many civil society initiatives, organisations, and private individuals as signatories (Mboro and Kopp 2017). However, the German government did not adopt as clear a position as Macron’s regarding restitution. The German Guidelines for Dealing with Collections from Colonial Contexts, issued by the German Museums Association (‘Leitfaden zum Umgang mit Sammlungen aus kolonialen Kontexten’, Deutscher Museumsbund e.V. 2021), and the results of an experts’ roundtable on Macron’s speech convened by the then-Minister of State for Culture Monika Grütters, instead focused on the reliance on provenance research, thereby avoiding a commitment to restitution (Sandkühler, Epple, and Zimmerer 2021, 17).
At the centre of the German debate stands the Humboldt Forum, newly inaugurated in late 2020. As a ‘modern’ rebuilding of the ancient Prussian Berlin Palace, the building is subject to controversy.2 Additionally, among others, the Museum of Asian Art and the Ethnological Museum Berlin, and thus a large part of the material colonial heritage in Berlin, were to be given a place in the Humboldt Forum. Initiatives such as No Humboldt 21! (2013) have long criticised the plan to exhibit looted art from the colonial era in a copy of the Prussian Palace. The pressure on the Forum and those in charge grew when the Nigerian ambassador Yusuf Tuggar, only a few days before the digital opening of the Forum in December 2020, publicly demanded the return of the famous Benin bronzes (Starzmann 2020). The bronzes were originally to be on display in the Humboldt Forum’s ethnological exhibition. However, since there is no doubt about the illicit origin of the Benin bronzes (see Hicks 2020; Phillips 2022), it is no longer possible to justify exhibiting the pieces and ignoring demands for their return. Consequently, agreement on restitution finally came about.
Thus, almost five years after Macron’s speech in Ouagadougou and 125 years after the violent looting of Benin City, the issue has reached another ‘tipping point’ (Hicks 2022). For the Benin bronzes were not the only returns announced in the summer of 2022 in Germany: a few days earlier, the board of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz) had decided to return the deity Ngonnso’, from present-day Cameroon,3 as well as some objects from present-day Namibia and Tanzania (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz 2022a, 2022b). France has also taken steps towards restitution: 26 belongings looted by French troops from the royal palace of Abomey during the colonial period were officially returned to the Republic of Benin in November 2021 (Firtion 2021). In the USA, museums have also reported that they intend to return at least their Benin bronzes (McGlone 2022). Belgium and British institutions, such as the University of Aberdeen, also announced restitutions of cultural property. Even the elite British universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which have long opposed restitution, have announced that they are returning Benin bronzes (Harris 2022).
While the first restitutions are being carried out, the debate that Monika Grütters (2019) called the ‘art historians’ dispute’ (‘Kunsthistorikerstreit’) continues. Historians Thomas Sandkühler, Angelika Epple and Jürgen Zimmerer (2021, 20), however, recognise that the debate extends far beyond the discipline of art history: it is ‘an interdisciplinary dispute between ethnologists, (art) historians, philosophers and lawyers about the historical, aesthetic and political dimensions of restitution claims, a dispute between historians, art, politics and jurisprudence … an international one for that matter’.4 They locate the political dimension of the dispute in current public debates about monuments, the boom in postcolonial studies, the continuities and differences between racism and anti-Semitism, and between the Holocaust and colonial crimes: in short, political issues that currently affect society as a whole and above all, revolve around identity, representation, and memory politics. They summarise:
However, by limiting political power to identity, representation and memory, the authors again relegate international politico-economic relations to the shadows. Yet, those debates on culture, heritage and memory, as well as their material and non-material manifestations, are embedded in politico-economic relations that shape current and future considerations of Europe’s alleged ‘sovereignty of disposition and interpretation’ of non-European art and life. Issues around distribution, economic dependence and neocolonial relations are too quickly swept under the rug in a debate still largely shaped by institutional discourse. In the rest of this article I aim to expand the scope of the debate to include perspectives centred around issues of international political economy.A political economy of colonial lootings
To understand the controversies around restitution and their politico-economic implications, it is necessary to understand the historical context of the lootings. A large proportion of the objects from Africa that are now in European ethnological museums arrived in Europe during the height of the colonial period, between the Berlin Conference of 1884/85 and the First World War (Sarr and Savoy 2018).6 This is no coincidence. In the aftermath of the conference, in which the imperial powers divided Africa among themselves, they still needed to secure their claims to rule on the ground. Looting of royal symbols, ivory, or precious objects of currency, often accompanied by the seizure of cattle and means of subsistence, was a useful means for colonialists to legitimise their rule. Some pursued their own individual interests with the plunder of African possessions. For museums, it was a cheap source of so-called ethnographic material, and for colonialists, art dealers or companies, it was profitable business. The looting was thus part of the violent process of integrating African societies into a larger system of colonial exploitation and extraction.
The Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde and German colonial rule
Zimmerman (2001, 153f.) shows that collections looted during the colonial era played an important role in establishing the German Empire as a colonial power, both epistemically and economically. The simple act of placing objects in a museum and constructing around them a narrative of racial hierarchy and distinction between the colonisers as ‘civilised people’ and the colonised as ‘primitive peoples’, under the guise of anthropological science, was a political strategy for the legitimisation of colonial rule and economic domination. Moreover, the imperial German government and the Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde (MfV) were bound by a reciprocal partnership ratified in 1889. In an order issued by the Bundesrat, the museum was granted the right to become the central repository for cultural objects seized by colonial officials during military expeditions financed by the government. This helped the Berlin Museum to establish its sphere of influence and soon led it to become the largest ethnological collection in the world. In return, anthropologists were invited to act as consultants for the Foreign Office, assisting as diplomats in international relations. The exchange of what Europeans viewed as primitive art became an integral part of Western international politics. For Zimmerman (2001, 156), there is therefore a clear link between colonial governance practices and looting: ‘Colonial governing strategies, involving as they did the intimidation and expropriation of indigenous people, produced collections of anthropological objects.’ These strategies included, above all, military force. Military campaigns and so-called punitive expeditions were an opportunity to collect objects, as the colonialists used their breech-loaders and machine guns to access items they could not buy or exchange. Zimmerman (2001, 155) cites the assistant director of the Berlin MfV, Felix von Luschan as follows:
It is in the nature of the situation that a warship often finds itself in a position to collect large wood carvings or entire series of important objects at little or no cost, whereas a private man, despite all his scientific knowledge and personal contacts, can get such things only at a price so high, if at all, that the museum would not easily be able to make any more purchases.
Otherwise, everything is going on smoothly and in the best [schönste, literally ‘most beautiful’] order. The Foreign Office has sent us a magnificent collection of fetishes and other carvings of a completely new kind, from the Ngolo punitive expedition of Captain von Kamptz – worth a good 2–3000 Marks, a quite splendid acquisition. In addition, one of my students, Lieutenant von Arnim, will join a new, large punitive expedition against the Ngolo in October (top secret!!). We can expect brilliant things. Mr. v. Arnim has been well informed on what we need and will endeavour to find something for us. The costs will likely be zero. (Luschan 1897, 26; terms with racist bias stricken through)7
Military undertakings, including undocumented ones, were actively supported by museums, and the looting and shipping of war booty served to expand and legitimise the German colonial system and, incidentally, to enrich museums, colonial officials and the colonial state, with the spoils and profit generated by their sale often covering the costs of conquest (Künkler 2022, 110).
‘Corporate militarist colonialism’ and the Benin Expedition
In the case of Germany, the imperial state and its military arm were the main agent of plunder. In British colonies, however, profit-seeking companies such as the Royal Niger Company (RNC) were often the driving forces behind the colonisation of Africa, the dispatch of military campaigns, and the looting of cultural heritage: ‘The RNC became increasingly direct in their use of force, and increasingly coerced the Protectorate into military engagements’ (Hicks 2020, 63). The RNC even built up its own armed force. In his work on the looting of Benin City in 1897, Dan Hicks (2020) highlights the important role that the monetary interests of these companies played in the violent acquirement of the Benin bronzes, a complex that he calls ‘corporate militarist colonialism’. The British Empire and its colonial system were able to harness corporate interests for profit to expand its sphere of influence and secure territories for further exploitation. One aim in the plunder of the Benin kingdom was to hit the Oba – ruler and custodian of the Edo people's culture – and his realm at the heart of their identity and the self-representation of their power, stealing the symbols of his rule – which also happened to be his wealth – in order to diminish his political power and legitimise colonial rule (Hicks 2020, 136). For local societies, Hicks (2020, 149) emphasises, the violent pursuit of profit had devastating consequences:
It was … a culture attacked with the intention of the erasure of one form of sovereignty and its replacement with colonial governance, that led to this scattering, this fragmentation. But the role of the market was and is also a central driver. The annihilation of the Royal Court’s material culture was a new but coherent next step in the growing momentum of corporate militarist colonialism – of destruction for extraction in the name of profit.
The art market and commodification of belongings
In their report, Sarr and Savoy (2018, 11) identify a connection between theft, museums and the art market:
Within the context of the 19th century, one can indeed see that the violent acquisition and economic capitalisation (through the art market) as well as symbolic capitalisation (through the museum) of African and Asian objects of cultural heritage goes hand in hand with the wars of that same era.
Richard Tsogang Fossi (2020, 2) shows how looted objects become commodities whose trade is determined by ‘mercantile intentions, patriotic inclinations, or the pursuit of fame’. The popularity of so-called ethnographica grew in Europe, and ethnological museums and colonial racist human zoos attracted many visitors (Bandah Panga 2020, 214). This market logic also had an impact on the African continent: some Africans no longer produced sacred objects, but objects for sale instead (Fossi 2020, 12). Thus, not only the objects but also their producers were assimilated into a capitalist market for African art that still exists today. This holds true even when colonialists and missionaries did not resort to plundering objects, but instead bought or traded cultural goods, or received them as gifts: because the market functioned exclusively according to the rules and demand mechanisms of the colonial metropoles, regardless of the rights and laws of local production, local traders hardly benefited from it (Bandah Panga 2020, 214). It is crucial to emphasise that, within these market rules, claims to authenticity and rarity had an impact on the economic value of those cultural goods. Artworks made specifically for sale were of little interest to museums and art dealers. The (often violent) seizure of objects that were precisely not intended for sale – according to that specific logic, the most valuable ones – was thus the most economical way of appropriation (Zimmerman 2001, 156).
Booty, primitive accumulation, and the division of the world
To characterise the mass accumulation of (war) booty from the colonies, Hicks (2020, 21, 151) draws on the Marxian concept of primitive accumulation. But he only touches on it for the argument of how European colonialism created ‘temporal exclusions, prejudices and dispossessions’ (Hicks 2020, 22), without further elaboration (see also Savoy 2021a). However, it is also worth asking what the concept of primitive accumulation tells us about the functions of colonial looting.
Marx ([1867] 1887, 505f.) introduces the concept of primitive accumulation to describe the process ‘that clears the way for the capitalist system’. Using the transformation from feudalism to capitalism in England as an example, he characterises primitive accumulation as a violent process of expropriation of farmers from their land. In this way, the capitalist class forced the English rural population into wage labour fit for exploitation. The colonial system, for Marx, was one of the ‘chief momenta of primitive accumulation’ establishing a capitalist world market:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. (Marx [1867] 1887, 531)
At the same time, colonial looting helped to integrate the African colonies and their inhabitants into the global capitalist system, fit for further exploitation. Marx ([1867] 1887, 506) defines primitive accumulation as:
the process which takes away from the labourer the possession of his means of production; a process that transforms … the social means of subsistence and of production into capital … The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process.
The military undertakings that served to expropriate African peoples from their land and their belongings, which historian Peter Sebald (1988, 155f.) in his work on German Togo euphemistically calls ‘conquering campaigns’ or ‘pacification campaigns’ (‘Eroberungs’ or ‘Befriedungsfeldzüge’), formed the basis for the final division of (West) Africa. According to Sebald, during these military ventures, colonial powers such as Germany, France and Great Britain had finally entered the imperialist stage. In doing so, he invokes Lenin’s ([1917] 1963) theory of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism. The subjugation of African societies and final redivision of the world among capitalist superpowers is thereby the condition for the entry of capitalism onto the imperialist stage. The Berlin Conference of 1884/85 and the military campaigns that produced masses of booty laid the groundwork for colonial borders, many still visible today. In addition to the scramble for territories on the African continent, the imperialist powers and their museums also competed for the largest, most appealing and most diverse ethnological collections.
In summary, I understand colonial looting to be inherent to processes of primitive accumulation both on a global level and on the African continent. On the one hand, mass accumulation and commodification of African belongings served the simple capital accumulation of different European actors. Simultaneously and more importantly, imperialist powers forcibly assimilated African societies into a capitalist system and divided them up among themselves. By violently expropriating indigenous peoples, they created the basis for the complete exploitation and extraction of the African continent and its (cultural) resources. The consequences for local societies were manifold and devastating – murder, robbery and destruction being just a few.
A political economy of restitution
The very act of looting thus followed a system from which certain actors clearly profited. It became a means of expanding and legitimising power, as well as of private enrichment. For the most part, the looted belongings became valuable goods or capital and were embedded in international politico-economic contexts of colonialism. Today, claims for restitution and repatriation cannot be considered without these relations and how they shape a neocolonial world.
The looting continues
Actors involved in restitution, including those with decision-making power over the future of cultural heritage, each pursue their own interests. The documentary Restituer? directed by Nora Philippe (2021) sheds light on how the first major wave of restitution demands was thwarted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, among others – with so-called structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s which failed to foresee the development of cultural capital infrastructure for Africa (Philippe 2021, 51:40–52:20). In addition, the art market played a major role in drying up not only demands for restitution, but also public debate on the issue. Returning objects that have been exchanged for money and thereby travelled around the world would call into question the very existence of such a market (Philippe 2021, 52:35–54:20). A global acceptance for restitution would also affect the future of both museum and private collections: Benin bronzes are today scattered across over 150 museums and galleries around the world (Hicks 2020, 3). At the British auction house Sotheby’s alone, 51 pieces from Benin City were sold between 2002 and 2016, for a total of €14 million (Bodenstein 2018, 270).
The market for African art from colonial (violent) contexts that emerged at that time has grown until today, and museums have played their part in this market. ‘Museums are devices for extending events across time: in this case extending, repeating and intensifying the violence’ and are thus ‘warehouses of disaster capitalist-colonialism’ (Hicks 2020, 15). By extending the violent looting across time, museums also preserve the relationships and asymmetrical power relations that are the basis of those very events. Hicks (2020, 137) thus criticises the view that the looting is completed and lies entirely in the past:
The arrival of loot into the hands of western curators, its continued display in our museums and its hiding-away in private collections, is not some art-historical incident of ‘reception’, but an enduring brutality that is refreshed every day that an anthropology museum like the Pitt Rivers opens its doors.
Museums as market actors
Museums have, among other things, to be understood as actors on the market (DesRoches 2015). They too are dependent on private and corporate sponsors, and are increasingly taking on corporate structures; they depend on attracting more visitors to make profit. Competition between large cities over tourists and investors leads to cultural institutions such as museums being required to contribute to the economic development of cities: ‘Iconic architecture and cultural events are inscribed into economic policies for urban governance’ (DesRoches 2015, 16). Contemporary cities need attractions that pull in large purchasing power. ‘In the “creative city”, museums are not merely places of education or even entertainment, but are also pivotal locations of consumption and placed-based marketing’ (DesRoches 2015, 16). Artefacts like the Benin bronzes thus function as tourist attractions: a source of profit for the museum, the city and the state. The loss of prominent objects – those that are the first to be claimed – would therefore mean a loss of capital that needs to be compensated.
At the same time, the social responsibility attributed to museums as educational and research institutions is growing. Ethnological museums (or those renamed as ‘world museums’), for example, are under pressure from civil society and political parties to deal with their colonial heritage and communicate this self-reflection to their visitors through exhibitions, or via transnational research partnerships and restitution processes. These two developments – economic pressure on the one hand and social pressure on the other – lead to tensions:
There is a growing disconnect between the corporatist model of growth favored by museum directors and administrators and the conception of museums as equitable and inclusive places with inherent value. Equating museums’ value with consumption, including everything from visitation to sales in the gift shop or café, risks overlooking that these actions are carried out with the goal of fulfilling museums’ social mandate, and are not an end in and of themselves. (DesRoches 2015, 9)
The Humboldt Forum and the state-led Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, for example, have been trying to take advantage of this tension by mimicking critical discourse to polish their public image and ultimately turn it into financial and political capital. In the Humboldt Forum’s shop, the Sarr–Savoy restitution report has been put on sale next to critical literature on the subject of restitution (Humboldt Forum 2022a). The Humboldt Forum also published a call for contributions on ‘The Instrumentalisation of Critique’, illustrated with a photo of a jumper with ‘Decolonise’ written on it (Humboldt Forum 2022b). Due to over a decade of criticism led by scholars and activists from the No Humboldt 21! campaign, from the project’s inception to its opening, this new institution has opted to engage superficially with its problematic history, absorbing critical discourses in the public arena and converting these tokens of self-reflectivity into monetary profit and a more favourable public image. Friedrich von Bose (2017) calls this dynamic ‘strategic reflexivity’ (‘Strategische Reflexivität’): the Humboldt Forum addresses its colonial entanglements superficially, but is not able to fundamentally question itself as an institution, even less to question the rebuilding of the Berlin palace, the former centre of German imperial power. Consequently, ‘restitution has become both the central bone of contention and the most effective commodity to characterise the future of ethnological museums’, as the curator and former director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, Clémentine Deliss (2020, 88), fittingly wrote. The central question in the field today seems to be: which museum, or even which European state, can distinguish itself by becoming the most progressive and self-critical? The race is on, and, according to Hicks (2022), it uncannily resembles the 1884–85 ‘scramble for Africa’, when imperialist powers competed for colonial territories and the most efficient system of exploitation. Hicks coined the term ‘scramble for decolonisation’ to qualify the current zeitgeist. The stakes at hand are whether these dynamics of competition actually lead to postcolonial justice and change the current conditions of museum holdings.
France’s restitutions
On an international level, too, the presence of this large quantity of objects in Europe and simultaneous absence in their African societies of origin, as well as the debate on restitution, has been a relevant political issue since the independence of many African countries. France, Germany or Great Britain, former colonial powers, are losing diplomatic leverage on the African continent, and politicians from these countries have surely recognised that the presence of treasures from Africa in their collections can be a valued currency. France ceremoniously loaned the sword of El Hadj Oumar Tall to Senegal for five years in November 2019. Philippe’s documentary (2021, 1:13:45–1:17:40) relates this ‘return’ to a quid pro quo in the French interest: ‘In exchange for the return of a single sabre, France negotiates an arms sale worth several hundred million euros. Measures to curb migration from sub-Saharan Africa are outsourced.’8
Since Macron’s speech, France has also overseen the restitution to the Republic of Benin of 26 royal symbols from King Béhanzin’s palace in Abomey. The French government did not proceed with drafting a general law for restitution, as was expected after Macron’s promise in Ouagadougou, but has issued a derogation for these 26 objects. In order to compensate as much as possible for the loss of these belongings, which had been on display at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris since its foundation, the restitution process became an event, in both France and Benin. The museum exhibited the objects again separately before returning them (Firtion 2021). Furthermore, the place where they are exhibited in Cotonou (and not in Abomey, where they were looted from) is financed with a €20 million loan from the French development agency AFD (Costa-Kostritsky 2021), and administrated by a private foundation, the Fondation Zinsou, led by a French magnate.
Instead of developing jurisprudence to allow for future restitutions, France has so far only made two exceptions possible and politically staged them as successful and effective restitutions. Valeria Costa-Kostritsky (2021), however, quotes Senegalese curator Wagane Gueye who stated that, for Macron, restitution is ‘“a very diplomatic way of avoiding real debates, which are about France’s economic and geopolitical presence in Senegal”, exemplified by issues such as the CFA franc, France’s military presence on Senegal’s soil, and France’s increasingly hostile immigration policies’. Thus, while Macron presents himself as the saviour of French African policy with these restitutions, he ensures that restitution claims remain dependent on France’s willingness to make exceptions, as no state law has been ratified. Moreover, debates on France’s Africa policy are so focused on restitution that media attention has relegated other forms of neocolonialism (see, for example, Sylla 2021 on the CFA franc) to the background, or rather continues to leave those central issues unaddressed.
Unravelling the anticolonial potential of restitution?
Pressure on museums and politicians is increasing and bearing fruit. Unlike 50 years ago, it is no longer possible to simply dismiss or silence the demands for restitution; they are too loud and have too many supporters. However, activists as well as academics have so far failed to overcome the silencing of calls for political and economic decolonisation: the examples of the Humboldt Forum and the French restitutions carried out so far show that the loss of capital is to be absorbed as best as possible – by museums making criticism their new sales model, and by European and African states using their political power for themselves or maintaining their influence while returning African belongings.
This is why restitution must not represent an end in itself but rather serve as means to an end of emancipating African societies from neocolonial dependencies. For twentieth-century decolonisation thinkers like Kwame Nkrumah, a conceptual return to communalist African social forms from precolonial times, for him inherently African culture, was essential to achieve Africa’s economic independence. Restitution also emerges in this context: Nkrumah called for the ‘restitution of Africa`s egalitarian and humanist principles’ (Nkrumah [1964] 1970, 76) in order to overcome European (neo)colonial and capitalist structures in Africa and to establish an African version of socialism. Within the masses of objects stored in European museums and files stored in European archives, there is also knowledge about past African societies that can be invoked while pursuing political and economic decolonisation. Returning objects with, for example, Nkrumah’s vision in mind thus has the potential to serve as a decolonisation process on a larger scale.
Conclusion
In this work, I started from the assumption that the spiritual, religious or political objects, personal belongings, weapons and items of clothing that European colonialists looted from the African continent during colonial times became part of a different, destructive, exploitative economy during colonialism. Given that the current restitution debate barely touches on this part of the issue, while discourse on international political economy fails to recognise the relevance of the topic, I have combined the two strands and showed that the systematic mass theft of objects during the peak of colonisation functioned as a strategy of conquest and followed clear economic motivations. It was an inherent part of a process of assimilation of African societies into a global system of capital accumulation and exploitation. Outlining some elements and events of the time and placing them within their politico-economic contexts revealed that this perspective opens space for criticism of the political zeitgeist of the post-Ouagadougou era, especially high-profile restitutions. Critique from an international political economy perspective is thus essential to highlight who profits from those returns and who does not.
The fact that Macron’s 2017 speech has already been canonised in the history of art because of its cultural-political consequences, even though this landmark seems unable to alter postcolonial and neocolonial relations between Africa and Europe, should give pause for thought. Questions around resource extraction, migration, labour struggles, armed conflicts and so on are so far only related to restitution issues in the political reality. In the academic debate as well as in museum practice, it is also necessary to overcome the ideological separation between disciplines, to address and problematise these connections in order to do justice to the normative claim of both restitutions and critical political economy. A more detailed analysis of these connections, their backgrounds, and who profits remains to be undertaken. Future research in this vein might ask: how do questions around the migration and mobility of people relate to the mobility of ‘things’? How are struggles for the restitution of looted cultural goods related to other social struggles such as labour struggles? To what extent do actors at the international, national and local levels use these struggles for their own ends?
These are only a few places where an international political economy of postcolonial restitution can start. What will become clear is that, in order to be able to really realise the ‘new relational ethics’ called for in the Sarr–Savoy report, both the restitutions themselves and the struggles with them must be under decidedly anticapitalist and anticolonialist premises. Otherwise, restitutions degenerate into empty performances that serve the profit of former colonial powers or European and African elites.