When talking about returning<\/a> these artworks, the former imperial states speak of \u201crestitution\u201d. Restitution is taken to mean the return of \u201cobjects\u201d to their homes or places of origin. It is confined to individual works of art, and human remains, that were brutally deported and displayed in museums or subjected to laboratory research. It includes animals too. These were hunted and taken to satisfy the interest of imperial science, museums and zoos. <\/p>\n But the language of restitution fails to take into account historical responsibilities. <\/p>\n As I discuss in a recent paper on catastrophic art<\/a>, restitution fails to note that taking \u201cobjects\u201d from Africa went hand-in-hand with the murder or destruction of knowledges in the continent. It thus eliminated the possibility for future knowledge practice and circulation. <\/p>\n Restitution ignores the annihilation of life forms \u2013 of social, political, ecological and epistemological organisation \u2013 that was perpetrated in Africa by the empires. <\/p>\n I have been working on understanding the British colonial destruction of the Kingdom of Benin<\/a> in 1897. The destruction was an imperial response to Oba (king) Ovonramwen Nogbaisi<\/a>\u2019s refusal to submit to control by imperial legislation. The kingdom was first made to disappear in a great fire and then turned into a British colony with a \u201cnative council\u201d. <\/p>\n The British empire had already destroyed the Ashanti Kingdom<\/a> (in 1874) in what is today Ghana and the German empire had destroyed Cameroon<\/a> in West Africa (in 1884). At the Berlin Conference<\/a> of 1884\u201385, representatives of predatory empires met and divided the continent<\/a> of Africa between them into areas over which they would have sole rights. <\/p>\n The French destruction of the Kingdom of Dahomey<\/a> in 1892\u201394 followed. <\/p>\n Read more: Germany is returning Nigeria’s looted Benin Bronzes: why it’s not nearly enough<\/a> <\/strong> <\/em>\n<\/p>\n The political violence of these empires was driven by what they termed a \u201ccivilising mission\u201d. This meant conquest of land. And that meant the annihilation of life forms. It destroyed different knowledges and was followed by the extraction of artworks and human remains. Colonial ethnologists and ethnographers had the power to treat destroyed knowledges as \u201cobjects\u201d or \u201cartefacts\u201d. <\/p>\n As imperialists, they could create theories to prove that plundered knowledges were nothing more than objects. They stripped from these knowledge systems their ability to transmit knowledge. <\/p>\n In the Kingdom of Benin, art was never seen as art alone, but a system of knowledge that shaped life. The critical thinker, poet and Senegal\u2019s first president, L\u00e9opold S\u00e9dar Senghor<\/a>, wrote<\/a> of African art as \u201csocial life, goodness, beauty, happiness, and the \u2018knowledge of the world\u2019\u201d. <\/p>\n <\/a> By denying that the artworks carried knowledge they brought with them, the colonial ethnologist or anthropologist could make scientific knowledge claims about these \u201cobjects\u201d. <\/p>\n But the colonialist system of classification, categorisation and hierarchy denied the fact that the artworks carried knowledge they brought with them. This process destroyed the ability and right of an artwork to speak of life forms.<\/p>\n The \u201cobjects\u201d were then put on display and turned into spectacles to entertain the masses, or \u201csleeping beauties\u201d, as the philosopher Frantz Fanon<\/a> put it in The Wretched of the Earth<\/a>. <\/p>\n The empires used spectacle to institute imperial citizenship and to justify violence and destruction in the colonies. <\/p>\n To this day, the Louvre<\/a> in Paris, the British Museum<\/a> in London and the Humboldt Forum<\/a> in Berlin continue to lay legal claim to, and to display, \u201cobjects\u201d from Benin, Dahomey and Cameroon. The undisturbed display prevents any thinking of the \u201cobjects\u201d as the colonial murder of knowledges.<\/p>\n States and museums see themselves under no historical, political or ethical obligation even to inquire into their colonial histories of murdering knowledge. <\/p>\n Quite the opposite. The language of restitution and provenance is a \u201cnew\u201d spectacle, a way of remembering colonialism and writing colonial history. Restitution is declared and controlled in the metropoles and governed by museums, provenance researchers, archives and curators there.<\/p>\n Read more: Returning looted artefacts will finally restore heritage to the brilliant cultures that made them<\/a> <\/strong> <\/em>\n<\/p>\n In fact, the rhetoric of restitution celebrates colonialism and imperial relations of power.<\/p>\n In a speech<\/a> at the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso on 28 November 2017, President Emmanuel Macron<\/a> of France declared that \u201cAfrican heritage must be showcased in Paris but also in Dakar, Lagos and Cotonou; this will be one of my priorities. Within five years I want the conditions to exist for temporary or permanent returns of African heritage to Africa.\u201d <\/p>\n A similar approach was taken in a presidential report<\/a> on restitution that Macron commissioned. <\/p>\n The rhetoric of restitution also unfolded in Germany and Britain, demonstrating that the imperial will to know is the will to dominate<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u2018Civilising mission\u2019<\/h2>\n
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\nThe murder of knowledges<\/h2>\n
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<\/div>\nA call for historical responsibility<\/h2>\n
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