Today there are tens of thousands of works of African art in French museums. It has become a daunting task for curators to try to identify which works of art were looted during colonial rule in the 19th and 20th centuries and should be returned.
During a visit to Burkina Faso in 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron promised to return this African ‘heritage’ within five years. This also encouraged other former colonial countries, including Belgium and Germany, to undertake similar initiatives.
In 2021, France repatriated 26 art objects belonging to the kingdom that its soldiers took from Benin, Nigeria, during their colonization of that country.
Those efforts stalled, and in March the government indefinitely postponed a bill allowing the return of African and other cultural artifacts, following resistance from right-wing groups in the senate.
Museums in France are still studying the origins of some 90,000 African art objects in their archives.
Most of them, or 79 thousand, are in the Quai Branly museum in Paris, which is a place to store original works of art from Africa, Asia, Oceania and America.
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“The task is enormous but exhilarating,” said Emilie Salaberry, head of the Angouleme Museum, which houses some 5,000 pieces of art from Africa.
Identifying the provenance of an object is important in the work of a museum curator, but tracking down the necessary information is difficult and time-consuming.
The French Army Museum began its inventory in 2012 but was only able to study about a quarter of the 2,248 existing works of African art.
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Although there is a reasonable hypothesis that many of these were spoils of war, it is difficult to draw definite conclusions. “The main difficulty is the lack of resources,” a museum spokesman told AFP.
Emilie Giraud, president of ICOM France, which oversees 600 museums, said: “This is real investigative work that requires cross-checking clues and finding sources that may be scattered, sometimes abroad, or may not even exist at all.”
The University of Paris-Nanterre introduced courses for such skills in 2022, and the University of the Louvre followed suit in 2023. Germany and France launched a three-year fund worth 2.1 million euros (US$2.2 million) for research into these art objects in January Then.
“We have to be transparent about everything, including gaps in our catalogue,” said Katia Kukawka, chief curator of the Museum of Aquitaine. (AFP/M-3)
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