In a new book, the art historian Bénédicte Savoy unearths a coördinated effort among European museums to block restitution claims. “Her scrupulous investigation reveals a conflict much more complicated than Africa versus the West,” jcljules writes.
-designed Edo Museum of West African Art. Yet there are also rumblings of a backlash. Only a handful of objects have actually been restituted, despite thousands of outstanding requests. Few governments have enacted general return policies. And some of the largest institutions, like the British Museum, have actively avoided the conversation.
Savoy, an art historian at the Technical University of Berlin, isn’t just an expert on restitution but an architect of its twenty-first-century advance. In 2018, she co-authored France’s landmark report, with the scholar Felwine Sarr.
These grievances burst onto the world stage in October, 1973, when Mobutu Sese Seko, the President of Zaire, speaking on the floor of the United Nations, denounced the “barbarous, systematic pillaging” of Africa’s cultural patrimony. His speech inaugurated a highly public debate on art restitution, which accelerated, the next year, when Ghana’s kingdom of Asante asked the British Museum to return regalia stolen during the sack of Kumasi, in 1874.
Savoy’s account of the war against restitution begins in 1972, when Nigeria’s young director of antiquities, Ekpo Eyo, asked the West German Embassy in Lagos to facilitate a “permanent loan” of Beninese art works. The foreign office forwarded his inquiry to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation , then the custodian of the world’s second-largest collection of Benin Bronzes. Eyo’s request was seconded by members of the Bundestag, one of whom approvingly added that “Nigeria’s wishes are modest.
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