Elias Aguigah looks at the restitution of looted objects from Africa by colonial troops and plunderers. Aguigah discusses the debates which have located restitution in questions of identity, representation, and memory politics. However, these debates ignore the crucial political-economic context, or only pay superficial attention to these issues by reducing centuries of colonialism to art theft. Aguigah provides an alternative framework for understanding restitution.
By Elias Aguigah
In December 2022, the German minister of foreign affairs Annalena Baerbock accompanied by minister of culture Claudia Roth travelled to Nigeria to give back 20 of at least 1,100 art pieces known as Benin Bronzes that had been looted by British troops from the palace of Benin City in 1897 and stored in German museums for over 100 years. This diplomatic event was a result of decades of sometimes more, sometimes less intense debates, about colonial looted art in Europe and the struggle for its restitution.
While claims to give back the stolen objects are as old as the lootings themselves, the recent debates have largely been fuelled by Emmanuel Macron’s speech he held in Ouagadougou in 2017. The French president had presented himself as a pioneer in restoring memory of the colonial era, acknowledging European colonial crimes and, above all, promising “temporary or definitive restitutions of the African patrimony”. Consequently, he commissioned the art historian Bénédicte Savoy and the Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr with writing a report on the holdings of African cultural heritage in French museums. The key issue to them was not whether the objects should be restituted – this is the premise underlying the report – but how restitutions could be made possible. Among other things, they should be accompanied with a commitment for a ‘new relational ethics’ in Euro-African policy.
Since then, debates around the issues addressed in the report have taken up more and more space in the European feuilletons. The scholarly restitution debates in the UK, France or Germany, have been dominated by disciplines such as cultural studies, ethnology, art history or critical legal studies (cf. Sandkühler, Epple, and Zimmerer 2021), locating restitution debates in broader political questions around identity, representation, and memory politics. But stakeholders frequently ignore the political-economic context, or, at most, consider it superficially by reducing centuries of colonialism to art theft. In contrast, scholars working on colonial theft and extraction in Africa in the field of international political economy usually deal with natural resources. In order to highlight the political relevance of the subject of restitution, I want to connect these two threads: What does the mass extraction of spiritual, religious, political and symbolic artefacts, or even everyday belongings from former African colonies have to do with political economy? And in which international political and economic relations are these belongings, their restitution, and debates about them embedded today?
Functions of colonial looting
The violent extraction of material cultural property was an important building block in making African societies available to the capitalist world market. For instance, the German Empire used collections looted during the colonial era to establish itself as a colonial power, epistemically and economically. The simple act of placing the objects in a museum and constructing around them a narrative of racial hierarchy and distinction between the colonisers as ‘civilised people’ and the colonised as ‘primitive peoples’, under the guise of anthropological science, contributed substantially to the genesis of scientific racism that was a political strategy for the legitimisation of colonial rule and economic domination (Zimmerman 2001: 153f.).
Beyond the ideological function of so-called ‘ethnographica’, looting often followed clear strategic motives. One aim in the plunder of the Benin kingdom was to hit the Oba and his realm at the heart of their identity and the self-representation of their power, stealing the symbols of his rule – which also happened to be his wealth for that matter – in order to diminish his political power and legitimise colonial rule (Hicks 2020: 136). The motivation for trade companies to support and individuals to participate in military expeditions and lootings were clear: The flourishing European art market promised huge revenue to be made out of objects from the colonies that were sold as commodities. Conforming to capitalist market logic, the most valuable objects were often those not for sale or exchange – consequently, appropriation was frequently violent. For colonial powers, colonial museums and individual colonialists, looting was a win-win situation, at the cost of African lives and societies.
The political economy of colonial looting – interrogating Marx
The structural entanglement between military campaigns and the commodification of looted objects has led me to the conclusion that the mass extraction of weapons, spiritual, religious, political, or everyday belongings can be seen as a process of primitive accumulation.
Karl Marx ([1867] 1887: 505f.) introduces the concept of primitive accumulation to describe the process ‘that clears the way for the capitalist system’. Using the transformation from feudalism to capitalism in England as an example, he characterised primitive accumulation as a violent process of expropriation of farmers from their land. In this way, the capitalist class forced the English rural population into wage labour. The colonial system, for him, was one of the ‘chief momenta of primitive accumulation’ establishing a capitalist world market:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. (Marx [1867] 1887: 531)
In addition to hunting human bodies and their remains for museums, the colonial system with museums in the background turned Africa into an enclosure for hunting material cultural goods with the purpose of accumulating symbolic and economic capital. Because in addition to the political value of manifesting tyranny, these objects had a monetary value for the colonialists. ‘The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated back to the mother-country and were there turned into capital’, wrote Marx ([1867] 1887: 533). Thus, the looting and commodification of African material goods served as a means of capital accumulation for colonisers, museums, and their home economies.
At the same time, the colonial looting helped to integrate African colonies and their inhabitants into the global capitalist system fit for further exploitation. Marx ([1867] 1887: 506) defines primitive accumulation as
the process which takes away from the labourer the possession of his means of production; a process that transforms […] the social means of subsistence and of production into capital […]. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process.
In the case of European colonisation, expropriating indigenous peoples from their land on the one hand and looting their material belongings on the other were part of the same logic. Through the violent theft of weapons, cultural, spiritual, religious, or personal belongings, colonial powers not only physically separated the producers from the products of their labour and their means of subsistence but stripped a part of their history, culture, and knowledge about pre-capitalist modes of production from communities.
The very act of looting thus followed a system from which certain actors clearly profited. It became a means of expanding and legitimising power, as well as of private enrichment. For the most part, the looted objects became valuable goods or capital and were embedded in the international political-economy of colonialism. Today, claims for restitution and repatriation cannot be thought without these relations and how they shape a neo-colonial world.
Restitution of looted artefacts
Various actors involved in restitution, including those with decision-making power over the future of cultural heritage, each pursue their own interests. The documentary Restituer? directed by Nora Philippe (2021) sheds light on how the first major wave of restitution demands was thwarted by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, among others. The Structural Adjustment Programmes in the 1980s degraded cultural capital infrastructure in Africa (Philippe 2021: 51:40-52:20). Nowadays, though, as calls for restitution cannot be ignored any further, the return of prominent objects would mean a loss of symbolic and economic capital for museums, cities, and states.
Museums, for example, increasingly try to incorporate critical debates in their programmes making ‘restitution’ and ‘decolonisation’ their sales model to keep up with the zeitgeist and prevent the loss of relevance. As the curator and former director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, Clémentine Deliss (2020: 88), fittingly wrote, ‘restitution has become both the central bone of contention and the most effective commodity to characterise the future of ethnological museums’.
The central question in the field today seems to be the following: which museum, or even which European state, can distinguish itself by becoming the most progressive and self-critical. The race is on, and, according to Dan Hicks (2022), it uncannily resembles the 1884-1885 ‘scramble for Africa’, when imperialist powers competed for colonial territories and the most efficient system of exploitation. In this comparison, Hicks coined the term ‘scramble for decolonisation’ for qualifying the current zeitgeist. The stakes at hand are: can these dynamics of competition actually lead to postcolonial justice and change the current conditions of museum holdings?
The French restitutions that have taken place since Macron’s speech in 2017 suggest otherwise. As Europe is increasingly losing geopolitical influence on the African continent, politicians have recognized that the presence of treasures from Africa in their collections can become a valued currency. France ceremoniously loaned the sword of El Hadj Oumar Tall to Senegal for five years in November 2019. Nora Philippe’s 2021 documentary relates this ‘return’ to quid pro quos in French interests: ‘In exchange for the return of a single sabre, France negotiates an arms sale worth several hundred million euros. Measures to curb migration from sub-Saharan Africa are outsourced’.
Secondly, since Macron’s speech, France has overseen the restitution to the Republic of Benin of twenty-six royal symbols from King Béhanzin’s palace in Abomey. In order to compensate as much as possible for the loss of these belongings, which had been on display at the Musée du Quai Branly since its foundation, the restitution process became an event, both in France and in Benin. The museum exhibited the objects again separately before returning them. Furthermore, the place where they are exhibited in Cotonou (and not in Abomey, where they have been looted from) is financed with a loan of 20 million euros from the French development agency AFD, and administrated by a private foundation led by a French magnate, the Fondation Zinsou.
Unravelling the anticolonial potential of restitution
In summary, what we are witnessing is not a sudden philanthropic turn of European politicians and museums, but rather European attempts to maintain African dependency on Europe in times of increasing awareness for European colonial crimes on the one hand, and rising Chinese and Russian influence on the continent on the other.
This blogpost – a shortened version of a longer article that will appear later in the year in ROAPE’s journal – should be read as a strong urge for scholars and activists to continue critically examining the place of restitutions in a neo-colonial political economy. Already for 20th century decolonisation thinkers like Kwame Nkrumah, a conceptual return of African culture, was essential to achieve Africa’s economic independence. Restitution already emerges in this context. Nkrumah called for the ‘restitution of Africa`s egalitarian and humanist principles’ (Nkrumah 1970 [1964]: 76) in order to overcome European (neo-)colonial and capitalist structures in Africa and to establish an African version of socialism.
In the great mass of objects stored in European museums and archives, there is knowledge about past African societies that can be invoked while pursuing political and economic decolonisation. Restituting objects with Nkrumah’s vision in mind thus has the potential of serving a decolonisation process on a larger scale. But without further critical examination and a genuinely anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist vision historic restitutions risk degenerating into empty performances from which only European and African elites profit.
Elias Aguigah is a researcher at the Technische Universität Berlin. Elias’ full article on the political economy of restitution will appear later in the year in ROAPE’s journal.
Featured Photograph: Benin royal shrine head from 15th century (Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, 24 February 2017).
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