Germany and France will investigate the origin of African artifacts in museums

Fund of €2.1 million will finance research into the origin of objects from sub-Saharan Africa. Items from former colonies will have priority in analysis, in an action that could lead to new returns and historical reparations. Germany and France will allocate 2.1 million euros (R$ 11.3 million) to a research fund to track their origin exact collection of colonial-era African objects held in public museum collections.

The initiative, launched this Friday (19/01) in Berlin by the Franco-German research center Center Marc Bloch, will last three years and will give priority to the analysis of items from former colonies of the two countries, such as Namibia, Togo and Cameroon.

The research could lead to the repatriation of more pieces looted in the colonial era, in a process of historical reparation that has been gaining traction in recent years. Germany, for example, has been involved in several similar actions, repatriating items such as dinosaur fossils and cultural artifacts, in addition to financing other research in the field.

“France and Germany understood that this issue is essential for dialogue with African countries today,” said Eric-André Martin, secretary general of the committee studying Franco-German relations at the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), to French newspaper Le Monde.

To apply for funding, research projects must be led by Franco-German researchers and museologists who work in partnership with African professionals. “Just them [africanos] can tell us whether the objects could have been donated or sold spontaneously by a community, or whether it is impossible that they were simply handed over voluntarily”, pointed out Felicity Bodenstein, member of the fund's scientific committee, also in a statement to Le Monde.

Debate has gained traction in recent years

The debate on the restitution of African cultural goods gained traction across Europe after French President Emmanuel Macron announced in 2017 that he would do “everything possible” to restore items looted in the colonial period.

In 2021, France returned 26 artifacts to Benin, but repatriations have since stagnated. A law on the restitution of cultural assets looted abroad, which should have been approved by parliament at the end of 2023, ended up blocked by the opposition.

Germany has seen the opposite trend. And although the country had many fewer colonies in Africa than France, and for much less time – the German colonial period lasted from 1884 to 1919 – its museums house a much greater number of works from there.

In 2022, Germany returned 23 antiquities looted in the 19th century to Namibia. Instead of effective restitution, however, the objects were given in the form of loans – although without a defined deadline. The action generated criticism, but the foundation that organized the action defended itself by stating that the measure was taken for purely bureaucratic reasons.

Also that same year, the German Foreign Ministry returned 22 bronzes to Nigeria. At the time, the German Minister of Culture, Claudia Roth, stated that the restitution was the “recognition of the injustice of a colonial past” and an attempt to “return the cultural identity that we stole”.

The pieces, dating from the 16th century, had originally been looted by British troops in 1987 and represent a small portion of the 1,130 artifacts stolen from the royal palace in Benin City that are in several museums in Germany. The objects in bronze, ivory and metal These precious works are among the most important artistic works in the history of the African continent.

Administrative and diplomatic challenge

Handling objects taken from former German colonies is an administrative and diplomatic challenge. Cameroon, for example, was first colonized by the German Empire in the late 19th century and then invaded and divided by the United Kingdom and France following the outbreak of the First World War.

A project to map Cameroonian heritage objects held in German museums, published last June under the title “The Atlas of Absences”, identified more than 40 thousand objects, more than 8 thousand of them stored in the Linden Museum alone , in Stuttgart.

One such artifact is the Mandu Yenu, a colorful throne richly adorned with pearls and shells, said to have been gifted to German Emperor Wilhelm II by King Njoya of the Kingdom of Bammun in 1908. The piece is on display at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. Last year, Cameroonian King Nabil Mouhamed Mfonrifoum Mbombo Njoy caused a stir when he sat on his great-grandfather's stolen throne during a visit to the museum.

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