Emmanuel Macron’s Bold Promise to Repatriate African Objects:
“Hey! Wha’ Happen’?”
Ron McCoy
In November 2017, France’s president Emmanuel Macron visited the Republic of Burkina Faso, a land which until 1960 was part of his nation’s vast West African colonial empire.[1] Speaking to an audience of attentive students at the national flagship University of Ouagadougou, he focused on the wildly unequal relationship between formerly colonizing European powers and Africa’s formerly colonized peoples.
The colonial era was buoyed by not just by greed or religious fever but by its own self-affirming ideology. This ideology condoned and even mandated the removal (through means both fair and foul) of almost inconceivable amounts of sub-Saharan African material culture, i.e. indigenous art forms, from their places of origination and subsequent speedy incorporation into the public and private European collections where they remain to this day.
Macron appears to be eager to put what he sees as the “grave mistake”[2] of European colonialism in the rearview mirror. “I belong to a generation which was not that of colonization,” he has explained.[3]
“I cannot accept that a large part of cultural heritage from several African countries is in France,” President Macron told the students. “African heritage can’t just be in European private collections and museums.” What Macron then unveiled was a sweeping vison born of a confluence of interests and aspirations in which he posited that, yes, “African heritage must be highlighted in Paris, but also in Dakar [Senegal], in Lagos [Nigeria], in Cotonou [Benin].”
Macron represents a nation which, like some others in the West — Great Britain, Germany, Belgium, and Italy spring to mind — historically enjoys what might best be described as a tangled relationship with the peoples of the African continent, thanks to the lingering effects of the profoundly disruptive and disorienting colonial experience. Although the colonial era may not register much with most Westerners, for Africans (and others) its effects are complex and immediate. For many of them it remains, as Macron says, “a crime against humanity.”[4]
There is general agreement that colonialism, via what could perhaps best be understood as its second- and third-order effects, manifests itself in virtually all areas of former colonies’ human activity, including the political, economic, and cultural spheres. Colonialism’s legacies are also felt in the societies of the former colonial powers. Until not so long ago, one of the cultures involved in this dynamic perceived the material culture of the other as “primitive art,” exotica hoicked from far away and ensconced in some version of a wunderkammer; those objects signified something else altogether when viewed from the perspective of the pieces’ originating culture. Those two competing perspectives, and the attitudes they nourish and reinforce, provide the makings for a toxic brew.
Speaking to the students in Burkina Faso, Macron laid out a schedule of sorts for carrying out the restitution of some of the African art in France to Africa. “In the next five years, I want the conditions to be met for the temporary or permanent restitution of African heritage to Africa,”[5] he pledged. If Macron’s timeline seemed a bit vague and dizzyingly ambitious, it was probably because what he envisioned was still only ethereally defined. It was, after all, a more or less inchoate development at best. Still, it does not require a lot of imagination to foresee emanations from the ideas to which Macron lent his voice being encountered not somewhere way down the road but, rather, soon; definitely a feature of the near-future. Shortly after giving the speech, Macron reiterated his position in (what else?) a Tweet: “African heritage cannot be a prisoner of European museums.”[6]
Macron’s bold plan for the restitution of material culture on a grand scale is heady stuff. For some, it represents the culmination of ages of frustration and the emergence of hope for cultural rejuvenation in a region which could doubtless profit from it. Others see an impossible dream. Whatever one’s view, any interest or enthusiasm Macron generated with his pledge was tempered by a fundamental question: How, exactly, could or would this revolutionary redistributive act be brought about?
The amount of material taken out of Africa and deposited in non-African collections is staggering. It has been estimated that “over 90% of the material culture legacy of sub-Saharan Africa remains preserved and housed outside of the African continent.”[7] (A figure like that should raise some suspicions and command scrutiny, to be sure, but it remains useful for providing a sense of the scene.)
Because it figures so prominently in our narrative as a kind of ground-zero for Macron’s plan, let’s take a brief look at the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris. Musée du Quai Branly ranks as one of the world’s foremost museums, a vast storehouse dedicated to preserving more than 300,000 pieces of ethnographic art from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, including some 70,000 objects of sub-Saharan African origin alone.[8] The museum draws on its cosmopolitan setting in aspiring to serve as a force for “creating bridges between cultures,” to the point of offering visitors a “permanent collection area [which] presents 3,500 works geographically without partitions. The juxtaposition of these works encourages original dialog between the cultures of four continents.”[9]
Macron’s grand plan and its five-year timeline for completion was revolutionary. Just how much his proposal rocked some boats started to become clear around November 2018, a year after the Burkina Faso speech. That’s when the French president received a report on the subject he commissioned eight months earlier.”[10] The Savoy-Sarr Report was authored by art historian Bénédicte Savoy, chair for Modern Art History/Art History as Cultural History at the Tecnische Universität Berlin,[11] and economist Felwine Sarr, director of the Civilizations, Religions, Arts, and Communication research center at Gaston Berger University in Saint-Louis, Senegal.[12]
The 2018 Savoy-Sarr Report focused on the delivery of what its authors call “the emancipation of memory.”[13] This is Big Picture stuff, a rather amorphous, global endeavor that can be at least partly attained by restoring to Africa material which was often obtained under decidedly nasty circumstances. When they looked at what they viewed as “the crux of the problem,” Savoy and Sarr espied “a system of appropriation and alienation — the colonial system — for which certain European Museums, unwillingly have become the public archives.”[14] (If you have anything at all to do with the museum world you may hear alarm bells ringing and notice some red-and-blue lights flashing just about now.) According to coauthor Bénédicte Savoy, the ultimate goal does not involve “emptying French or European museums to fill up African ones.”[15] Instead, she talked of “rebalancing” the currently “extremely imbalanced” situation in which “European museums have almost everything and African museums have almost nothing.”[16]
Man-Shark by Sossa Dede (c. 1890), a Fon statue symbolizing Béhanzin, musée du quai Branly, Paris, France. via Wikimedia Commons
Upon receiving the Savoy-Sarr Report, Macron let it be known the Musée du Quai Branly would repatriate twenty-six objects — including “statues and thrones looted by French troops during a military raid against the once powerful West African Kingdom of Dahomey in 1892”[17] — and would do so “without delay.” (This “raid” was the Second Dahomean War of 1892-1894, during which France crushed the power of the king of Dahomey and his army, including its famed Amazon contingent.) Further, the French government pledged a $22.5 million loan to Benin in order to construct a suitable museum at the southern city of Abomey, a UNESCO World Heritage site where the kings of Dahomey once lived.[18]
Souleymane Bachir Diagne, a Senegalese professor of French at Columbia University in New York who provided input for the Savoy-Sarr Report, thought those twenty-six objects repreented “a good place to start.”
First, symbolically: This was the kind of restitution that would give full weight to Macron’s promise. These were spoils of war, taken punitively after a well-documented historical battle, and put in the [Musée d'Ethnographie du] Trocadéro [and subsequently to the Musée du Quai Branly]. They were taken directly from a king, the king of Dahomey. The second aspect is that some of these works were already lent to Benin. They were on view at Cotonou in 2006, and drew 275,000 visitors in an African country where people do not usually go to museums.[19]
Whatever else Macron accomplished, he certainly put a challenging goal on the table. “We should pay attention to how national institutions like the Musée du Quai Branly,[20] France’s pre-eminent ethnographic museum, proceeds with loaning or returning African object to their countries of origin in the next few years,” suggested archaeologist Rachel King, who teaches cultural heritage studies at University College London.[21] In other words, buckle up your seatbelts, folks, because this could be a real learning experience.
Well, that was then and this is now. So, here we are two years after Macron’s speech, and where are we?
That’s what some observers asked recently, when the second anniversary of Macron’s address came around without even one of the twenty-six pieces wending its way from the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris to the still-unbuilt museum in Abomey. These queries boiled down to some variation of American comedic actor Fred Willard’s trademark “Hey! Wha’ happen’?”
That question is answered in large part by referring to the Savoy-Sarr Report itself. In all of its thoroughness, depth, and nuancing, the report — while sometimes swaddled in the sort of opaque prose that relegates so much academic writing to the margins[22] — makes two points abundantly clear.
First, the ripping-off of African material culture by European colonial powers was a sordid business, and a strong case can be made for returning quite a bit of the African loot. (And I mean “loot,” in the sense of something that was actually stolen, as in war booty, e.g. those twenty-six pieces at the Musée du Quai Branly.)
Second, Macron’s ambitious promise remains unfulfilled — for the moment, not necessarily forever, maybe not for long, nobody really knows — because the situation in this instance mirrors the general run of the often-horrendous relationship between Africa and the West. In other words, it’s complicated.
Alexander Herman, assistant director at Institute of Art and Law (which publishes the Art Antiquity and Law quarterly), points out that while the Savoy-Sarr Report “inspired a great deal of tense discussion in the museum world (both in France and abroad), most commentators agree it was too ambitious to be workable.” This was perhaps at least partly attributable to the report’s status as “the brainchild of academia, not the balanced submission of practitioners in the field.”[23]
Significantly, Herman suggests the “unwillingness of the authors to take account of the valuable role played by museums in conserving historical artefacts and educating the public — not to mention the importance of provenance research for the objects at issue” transformed the project “from a call to arms into a veritable pariah amongst many museum practitioners.”[24] In other words, it appears the Savoy-Sarr Report may have alienated a key constituency, one on which the entire effort is pretty much dependent: museum professionals, among many of whom, according to one knowledgeable observer, the document quickly morphed from “a call to arms into a veritable pariah.”[25]
Stéphane Martin had served as the Musée du Quai Branly’s president (director) for twenty years when the Savoy-Sarr Report dropped in his lap. To say he found the document unpersuasive and unhelpful is an understatement. Martin immediately blasted what he saw as the report’s advocacy for “maximal restitution,” criticizing what he saw as an unfair, broad-brush indictment of all collecting with “the impurity of colonial crime.”[26]
Even beyond even that, there’s this: French law regards objects held in the nation’s public museums as “inalienable.”
Think about that for a sec.
French law is constructed to work against deaccession of objects form public collections. This is done through a system of procedural roadblocks designed to make it extremely difficult to legally transfer such an object to some other institution located elsewhere.[27] In fact, it appears that starting to get ready to commence to begin carrying out Macron’s plan requires nothing less than — for openers — legislation permitting it to wend its way through Parliament, something for which there does not currently appear to be much support.
Whether or not you agree with all, part, or none of Emmanuel Macron’s proposal, still, he’s caught a whiff of something in the wind. Perhaps you see that wind as blowing for good or, alternatively, ill. But it’s definitely there, although nothing about that makes anything easier. Because these matters are…insanely complex affairs involving governments, museums, researchers, special pleaders, the appropriation and allocation of funds, changing laws, bidding and contracting, local politics, drafting committees, planning groups, claims and counterclaims, questions about conversation and preservation, and a multitude of other just plain stuff. One thing you can say about the report Macron’s speech generated: it insisted more attention be paid to a group least listened to, historically speaking: indigenous peoples.
Consider, in that light, the words of Kwame Opoku, who frequently contributes articles about museums and African cultural objects to the Modern Ghana news website. Opoku basically considers just cutting to the chase when he suggests Westerners “should keep the looted artefacts until they finally accept that it is wrong and condemnable to steal the artefacts of other peoples and after 100 years pretend they are doing us a great service by even discussing the issues involved.”[28]
Obviously, the goal Emmanuel Macron sketched out for those students in a former French colony just a little more than two year ago still remains out of sight, hidden somewhere over the horizon. But that does mean it hasn’t or isn’t exerting influence in the larger tribal art world. This is certainly a topic worth revisiting soon.
For now, this has been an interesting, cautionary tale. “Returning material to its homeland is never a simple process,” Alexander Herman of the Institute of Art and Law explains. “Rather, it is part of a larger web of exchange and cooperation, one primarily built on relationships. Those relationships neither begin nor end with restitution, which is only one part of a larger story.”[29]
Please note: This column does not offer legal or financial advice. Anyone requiring such advice should consult a professional in the relevant field. The author welcomes readers’ comments and suggestions, which may be sent to him at legalbriefs@atada.org
ENDNOTES
[1] Burkina Faso’s colonial period officially ended in 1960, at which time it was known as the Republic of Upper Volta. In 1984 the nation underwent a name change when it became Burkina Faso (Land of the Upright People). Lawrence Rupley, Lamissa Bangali, Boureima Diamitani, Historical Dictionary of Burkina Faso (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), ix, liv, 4, 33, 191.
[2] “Macron Calls Colonialism a ‘Grave Mistake’ During Visit to Ivory Coast,” France24 (Dec. 21, 2019), https://www.france24.com/en/20191222-frence-president-macron-on-official-visit-to-ivory -coast-calls-colonialism-a-grave-mistake
[3] Ibid. Macron has been consistent in his condemnation of France’s colonial activities. “During his election campaign, Macron created a storm of controversy in France by calling the colonisation of Algeria a ‘crime against humanity.’ In a 2017 TV interview, he said French actions in Algeria, which achieved independence in 1962 after eight years of war, were ‘genuinely barbaric, and constitute a part of our past that we have to confront by apologising’.”
[4] Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics (Paris, 2018), 1, hereafter referred to as “Savoy-Sarr Report,” is available in English translation at http://restitutionreport2018.com/sarr_savoy_en.pdf
[5] Anna Codrea-Rado,”Emmanuel Macron Says Return of African Artifacts Is a Top Priority,” The New York Times (Nov. 29, 2017), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/arts/emmanuel-macron-africa.html
[6] Ibid.
[7] Savoy-Sarr Report, 3.
[8] “Missions: A Bridge Between Cultures,” (Musée du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac, n.d.), http://www.quaibranly.fr/en/missions-and-operations/the-musee-du-quai-branly/#:~:text=; Farah Nayeri, “Museums in France Should Return African Treasure, Report Says,” The New York Times (Nov. 21, 2018), https:/ /www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/arts/design/france-museums-africa-savoy-sarr-report.html/.
[9] “Missions: A Bridge Between Cultures.”
[10] Codrea-Rado.
[11] “Biography: Bénédicte Savoy,” Collège de France (n.d.), https://www.college-de-france.fr/site/en-benedicte-savoy/Biography.htm
[12] “Felwine Sarr,” OSIWA (Open Society for Initiative in West Africa, 2020), http://www.osiwa.org/osiwa_member/felwine-sarr/
[13] Savoy-Sarr Report, 1.
[14] Ibid., 2.
[15] Farah Nayeri.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Heleluya Hadero, “Benin’s New Museum for Artifacts Looted by France Is Being Built Using a French Loan,” QuartzAfrica (wJuly 23,2019), https://qz.com/africa/1672922/france-will-help-fund-benin-museum-housing-looted-artifacts/
[18] Ibid.
[19] Jason Farago, “Artwork Taken From Africa, Returning to a Home Transformed,” The New York Times (Jan 3, 2019), https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/arts/design/african-art-france-museums-restitution.html
[20] The Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris.
[21] Nayeri.
[22] You didn’t ask for it, but here’s a small taste: “Guided by dialogue, polyphony, and exchange, the act or gesture of restitution should not be considered as a dangerous action of identitarian assignation or as the territorial separation or isolation of cultural property.” SS 2.
[23] Alexander Herman, “One Year After the Sarr-Savoy Report, France Has Lost Its Momentum in the Restitution Debate,” The Art Newspaper (Nov. 12, 2019), https://www.theartnewspaper.com/comment/one-year-after-sarr-savoy-where-are-we-on-colonial-restitution
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Naomi Rea, “A French Museum Director Pushes Back Against a Radical Report Calling on Maron to Return Looted African Art,” Artnet News (Nov. 28, 2018), https://news.artnet.com/art-world/quai-branly-president-macron-africa-restitution-report-1404364#:~:text=
[27] “Deaccessioning in France,” Museums & Deaccessioning in Europe (Creative Culture Consultancy, Mondriaan Fonds (n.d.), https://www.museumsanddeaccessioning.com/ countries/france/; Herman.
[28] Kwame Opoku, “Miracle Abjured: Stéphane Martin Reiterates His Objection To Restitution Of Looted African Artefacts,” Modern Ghana (Jan. 9, 2020), https://www.modernghana.com/news/978035/miracle-abjured-stphane-martin-reiterates-his.html
[29] Herman.