Ln November 28, 2017, Emmanuel Macron announced the implementation of the restitution of African heritage to Africa. A mined subject: about 90% of African heritage is mainly found in Europe. And the hundreds of thousands of works that fill Western collections are the result of spoliation perpetrated during the colonial era. A year later, two academics, Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy submitted the conclusions of a report on this subject and revived a thorny debate: to restore the works, it is necessary to identify the conditions of acquisition, name the cultural exploitation and recognize violence, real and symbolic.
The world is witnessing a veritable explosion. The time for final restitution seems to have come. The European countries especially then say they are ready to give back. African museums are multiplying and preparing for returns. “The time of the action” however, “stretch” deciphers the director. If the colonial specter continues to haunt this complex geopolitics, will European states keep their promises?
This is the vast and important subject that journalist and director Nora Philippe tackled in her documentary “Return? Africa in search of its masterpieces ». The questioning form of the title allows the author to explore the issue, six years after its resurgence in public debate. As for the word “quest”, it takes on its full meaning in a work of setting abyss of a long story, which deserves that we take the time to untangle its threads.
A restitution that goes down in history
“To restore is to recognize that something happened that perhaps shouldn’t have happened,” replies Bénédicte Savoy immediately, when asked about the approach of the word restore. In doing so, she inscribes the relationship to the subject in a historical dynamic. Using maps, sounds or film extracts (La Noire de…, by Ousmane Sembène, Statues also die, by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker and Ghislain Cloquet), see television news reports , Nora Philippe goes back in time, and gives the floor to experts, museum managers, researchers or artists in order to shed precise light on the theme of restitutions. And very often, in their responses, they demolish preconceived ideas that still persist, despite the large number of documents now available. Example, “in Abomey, the French colonial troops of General Dodds left with hundreds of works during the sacking of the palace of Abomey in 1892”, says “France has long presented this looting as a rescue because the King Béhanzin in his defeat had set fire to the palace”, but what is less known is that all of this was orchestrated from the Berlin conference of 1884 between the great colonial powers. It is that there is a direct correlation between what is happening on the ground of the colonial conquest and the advent of giant museums in Europe: the British Museum is the first of them, will follow, the Museum of ethnography of Berlin, inaugurated in 1873, that of Tervuren, near Brussels, in 1908. They must be filled in, and for that we try to convince the natives to get rid of their works and to better achieve this, the States appeal to the missionaries, responsible in particular for bringing back the most precious pieces.
Everything starts from this reading according to which art is part of humanity and must therefore be visible in the territories where the conceptions of freedom and humanity are thought out. The idea is to affirm that we free these objects and that we make them available to humanity and therefore that others are not capable or even unworthy of possessing these works, worse, we accuse them of mistreating them . “The idea of rescue will become a dogma with regard to collections from the colonies”, analyzes Bénédicte Savoy. The economist and researcher, Felwine Sarr, for whom these pieces are “inhabited objects, acting as subjects to bear witness to the presence of the invisible in the visible” expresses an almost traumatic relationship with museums. He describes how objects that were an integral part of people’s daily lives have become almost dead objects. “The scene of the crime is there,” he blurts out about the Quai-Branly museum.
READ ALSORestitution of works to Africa: where are we?
A plea for restitution to Africa
Nora Philippe’s documentary goes further and creates bridges between objects that are in museums and from the 19th century to integrate and protect through the inalienable heritage of European countries and ethnological practices. A vast traffic of bodies which consists in capturing, preserving and exhibiting human remains was born during this period. In fact, corpses have been shown behind display cases in Europe since the end of the 16th century, with mummies brought back from Egypt. It will be necessary to wait until the 2000s to see the emergence of an “awareness” when South Africa claimed to bury the remains of Saartjie Baartman, a woman from the Khoisan people exhibited in England and France, dissected by Cuvier and kept at the Trocadéro, after his death in the 19th century.
“When I came in 2015, says Nanette Snoep, there was a large so-called anthological collection, so 6,000 bodies in my reserves. It’s very hard. There was a story of restitution, it had been twenty-five since 1992 that a group of Hawaiians had made a request for restitution of their ancestor. But every year they either received a “No” or no response. It’s still enormous violence, I think that since I’ve been in Germany as director of the museum, I’ve really become radicalized”.
This is the strength of Restore? Africa in search of its masterpieces, since it gives the floor, in an unprecedented way, to African specialists, as well as Europeans, who each in their own way respond with hindsight to the questions that public opinion is asking. The idea, behind, is to show that the journey is not necessarily one-sided, it is shared, and has been for decades. “We plunder the Negroes, under the pretext of teaching people to know and love them, that is to say, ultimately, to train other ethnographers, who will also go to ‘love’ them and to loot”, notes bitterly, the writer Michel Leiris, “secretary archivist” of the Dakar-Djibouti mission in a letter of November 1931, addressed to his wife.
“Returning such and such a work of art to the country that produced it (…) is to allow a people to recover part of its memory and its identity”. This call launched in June 1978 by Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, then director general of Unesco, is widely echoed. It is not just material works that have been taken away from Africans, but a part of themselves. By taking the head of Unesco, he will have done everything to shake up international institutions, while Africa was boullonnnait from Dakar, to Algiers via Kinshasa. The deafening silence of European museums, supported by the art market, only accentuates, on the other hand, the urgency of finding solutions, despite the adjustment plans of the 1990s imposed by the Monetary Fund international and the World Bank, which have prevented many African states from investing in culture. The lines have since moved, museums are under construction everywhere, many of them have emerged with well-trained executives and large-scale projects. Europe could no longer ignore it. This fascinating documentary looks back at the conditions for the restitution of certain looted cultural works, as was the case with the decision of the French government to return to Senegal a sword and its scabbard attributed to El Hadj Omar Tall, a great western military and religious figure. -nineteenth century African. As well as 26 works from the “Trésor de Béhanzin” from the looting of the Abomey Palace in 1892 and returned to Benin.READ ALSORestitutions and revelations: a historic moment in Benin!
* « Restore? Africa in search of its masterpieces. » Documentary by Nora Philippe, to see on Arte, Tuesday April 5 at 10:30 p.m.