A draft framework law allowing the repatriation of works illegally taken from former French African colonies was due to be debated in the Senate last April. However, it has been postponed until the fall of 2024.
But it seems that the new government reshuffle will further delay the issuance of the law on the restitution of cultural property looted during colonialism.
This delay is unfortunate because the commitment made Emmanuel Macron In 2017, it states that “within five years the conditions necessary for the provisional or definitive recovery of African heritage works on the African continent will be met.”
Regulatory law
In 2018, a report on “Recovering African Cultural Heritage,” prepared by art historian Bénédicte Savoy and Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr on behalf of the French president, indicated that there were still 90,000 African works of art of high historical and artistic value in France, 70,000 of which were kept at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris.
To design a bill regulating the restitution process, Emmanuel Macron has commissioned the former president of the Louvre, Jean-Luc Martinez, to prepare a text that will be the subject of law in 2021.
With this mandate, the former president of the Louvre published a report in April 2023 covering all areas of restitution. It recommends the adoption of three general laws: one for property looted in the context of anti-Semitic persecution, another for human remains, and a third for cultural property claimed by its owners or illegally seized from colonies in Africa.
Since then, Parliament has voted in favour of the first two texts, respectively, in July and December 2023. The last text, prepared by former Minister of Culture Rima Abdulmalik, has remained pending until now.
This is why since Macron’s speech, only one large-scale recovery operation has been organised in November 2021, of 26 royal treasures from Abomey in Benin looted by colonial forces in the 19th century.
Within a few months, 200,000 visitors went to see these works at the presidential palace in Cotonou“This proves the lie of all those who claim in Europe that African peoples are not interested in their heritage,” Benedict Savoy confirmed at the time in her statement to the French press.
Why does the “return movement” take so long?
Historian and colonial affairs specialist Pascal Blanchard told Sky News Arabia that France recently returned important works to Senegal, human remains to Algeria, and a large collection of art pieces to Benin. “This large-scale recovery represents a symbolic and institutional force. This clearly proves that there is also a desire to make it a reality.”
He continues: “However, there are difficulties that France’s goodwill has faced, the most important of which is the process of identifying African artefacts and their history. To do this, we need competent researchers to engage in a careful search for origins, while allocating large financial budgets, which has not been achieved to date. In addition to the draft law that has been voted on since 2017 due to political deadlock and the unwillingness of right-wing parties to enact this law.”
Furthermore, Blanchard adds, “some museum directors reject the idea outright and demand that African countries wishing to repatriate their works provide the financial resources to prove the identity of the works and verify their ownership.”
“It is strange,” he said, “that the initiative was launched in Europe, but Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands moved faster and more dynamically than Paris because it enabled museums to decide to return the artwork without going through a federal law, making the process much faster.”
Creation of a Franco-German Fund
To move the stagnant water, France and Germany decided, in 2023, within the framework of bilateral cooperation, to join forces to create a Franco-German fund for a period of three years.
This €2 million pilot fund is dedicated to researching the provenance of objects and artworks from sub-Saharan Africa in its collections.
But this solution remains “insufficient,” says the historian and specialist in colonial affairs, because “despite the allocation of this budget, the number of researchers working in this field does not match the number of looted works, estimated at tens of thousands of pieces that must be traced to determine their identity.”
To date, about eight countries have made formal requests to France. Senegal claims 10,000 objects, Ethiopia 3,000, Chad 10,000, Mali 16 and Benin wants to continue recovering the rest. Madagascar, for its part, is demanding the official return of the crown of Queen Ranavalona III (currently on loan from France) and Côte d’Ivoire is demanding the return of 148 works, starting with the Djedji Ayokwe, the speaking drum of the Iberi people, confiscated in 1916. These requests sometimes overlap with other requests for human remains.
