15 Colonial Thefts: A Guide to Looted African Heritage in Museum Collections
Pluto, edited by Sera Adjei and Jan Le Gall, £25
The European colonization of Africa was not just about military conquest, genocide, and the exploitation of resources. It was also about the theft of spiritual and political symbols. It led to the disappearance of social, cultural, and symbolic worlds.
The book, “15 Colonial Thefts: A Guide to Plundered African Heritage in Museum Collections,” adds to the growing literature on the history of colonial plundering of African art and heritage and issues of reparation, reappropriation, and restitution. Published by Pluto, the book is edited by Ghanaian-born multidisciplinary artist Sela K Adjei and Berlin-based postdoctoral researcher Yann Le Gall.
The book begins with a powerful introduction by Peju Laiwola, art historian, visual artist, and professor of art history at the University of Lagos. It is followed by 33 African and Afrodiaspora authors, including historians, curators, artists, and activists, who detail the political, symbolic, and cultural meanings of what they refuse to call “things.”
These documents document the circumstances of their looting, their fate in Western institutional and private collections, the efforts required to excavate them from loss or obliteration, and the questions raised by their restitution in each case.
To read each chapter is to understand the perverse world of colonial collecting. To be made aware of the lies, the arrogant ignorance, and the foolish confidence of colonial officials, collectors, and explorers. Each chapter shows us that colonization was about the humiliation and degradation of the human spirit.
Wartime art looting is not new, but what is unique about European colonial looting is that the objects were collected in specific institutions: museums.
European museums are overflowing with colonial plunder, so much so that museum officials still cannot describe the exact contents of their collections. The variety and scale of the looting testifies to the greed of European colonialists who were not content with stealing 10 sacred drums or 100 bows, but stole thousands. They took everything from talismanic shirts, weapons, jewels, statues, arrows, symbols of power, and more.
All the authors therefore argue that time is needed to uncover what colonialism has obscured and what Eurocentrism has ignored.
Anyone who wants to participate in the debate on the dispossession of the African continent should definitely read 15 Colonial Thefts. This book is a strong argument for involving African experts and communities in the process of re-dispossession. It is based on thorough research and does not focus on archetypal cases such as the Benin Bronzes. More importantly, it conveys the perspective of the descendants of those whose land was dispossessed.
The idea of getting African artists to illustrate the book rather than using colonial imagery is a great one, as is incorporating QR codes into the text to allow readers to find out more about people and events, opening up a dialogue between different sources of knowledge.
The book also serves as a model for publications on systemic violence, dispossession, silence, and reparations.
The book is divided into three parts: the battlefield, the palace and the sacred places. These parts are further divided into chapters. The 15 chapters provide a wide range of examples to impress upon you that the plundered heritage of Africa was not limited to the masks and carved doors ripped from palaces. For example:
• The “treasure of Samori Touré” – his saddle, sabre, battle cap, battle axe, necklaces, rings, amulets, soldiers’ skulls and a wooden box containing gold – was taken to Paris.
• German cartridges repurposed as snuff boxes to symbolize Chagga resistance in Tanzania
• The fate of the Mahdist flag in Sudan, which expressed group loyalty and was evidence of a society that valued literacy.
• The chief of the town of Boma in the Democratic Republic of Congo was publicly hanged by Belgian colonialists.
The authors recover every aspect of the 15 colonial-era stolen objects, acknowledging that the term “objects” robs the collection of its humanity and spiritual essence.
The editors cite a 1914 book by Heinrich Umlauff, director of the Berlin Ethnological Museum and German art dealer JFG Umlauff, who wrote that “Africans are very attached to their possessions, especially their old heirlooms… Only in times of war or great expeditions, when the powers exert a certain pressure, do the circumstances become more favorable.”
This not only proves that violence was necessary to take “things” from Africans, but also that Africans placed great value on their heritage, contrary to colonial ideology.
European colonial powers sought to erase all signs of cultural, social and spiritual life by stealing and appropriating spiritual and political symbols, burning palaces, libraries and temples, and orchestrating humiliating public rites of surrender.
African cosmology and knowledge were ignored.
This guide is an invaluable addition to the decades-old debate over the restitution of African art and heritage, the urgency of which was reaffirmed by a 2018 report commissioned by French President Emmanuel Macron, which detailed the systematic looting of African art, early demands for restitution, and the defensive response of European museums. Its authors called for a “new ethics of relations.”
While restitution is no longer a light topic, there have still been few successes: obstacles are numerous, including reluctance from museums, the difficulty of obtaining visas for Africans to visit Europe, research costs, legal barriers (African heritage remains the property of museums), and conditions imposed on restitution.
For the authors of 15 Colonial Thefts, restitution means more than challenging Eurocentric narratives and rewriting African history: it is a long process that must take place together with the communities themselves who are demanding the return of their heritage.
Françoise Vergé is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Sarah Parker Lemond Centre for Advanced Study, University of London (UCL).
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
