The renovation of paradoxes: decolonising the Africa Museum without restituting DR Congo’s cultural heritage

Restitution vs. Retention: Reassessing Discourses on the African Cultural Heritage

“…In Ouagadougou, Macron (2017) declared: “in the next five years, I want the conditions to be met for temporary or permanent returns.” Now that we have reached this five-year deadline, this article reexamines the restitution vs. retentionist debate and its practicalities. Since Macron’s allocution reverberated well beyond France and its former colonies, this article does not exclusively focus on French public collections, on one encyclopedic museum in Europe, or on a newly-built museum in Africa that could host restituted goods (Eyssette 2020, 2021, 2022). Instead, it seeks to offer a cross-cutting vista of the arguments that were put forward by and about four institutions whose ethnographic collections are among the largest in Europe: the British Museum (69,000 ethnographic artefacts), the Musée du Quai Branly (70,000), the Humboldt Forum (75,000) and the AfricaMuseum (120,000).…”