Catalogue of Uncommon Legal Precedents
Repatriation Discourses: A Benin Case Study
by Lauren Summers
Contents
Introduction
Opening Interlude
Cross Cultural Scholarship
Historical Context: The Dahomey Kingdom
The Last Independent King of Dahomey
The Legacy of French Colonial Collections of Art and Artifacts
King Béhanzin’s Asen
European Care Discourses
20th Century European Care Discourse Timeline
African Repatriation Discourses
20th Century African Repatriation Discourse Timeline
The Moment and Momentum of Policy Change
The Turning Point: The Sarr-Savoy Report of 2018
Outcomes of the Sarr-Savoy Report
Conclusion
Bibliography
Introduction
Fig 1: Cover Africa Report, January 1974. (Savoy 2022: Plate 4)
This case study examines the November 2021 repatriation of 26 colonial-era royal treasures from the Kingdom of Dahomey (~1625-1894), taken by the French military in the late 19th century and returned from France's Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac to Benin, West Africa. Not to be confused with the widely publicized Benin Bronzes which reflect the Edo culture of Nigeria, the Dahomey treasures represent a distinct lineage, the Fon culture, whose geographic roots are to the east of Nigeria in the modern-day country of Benin. The Benin Bronzes are metal works looted by the British military in 19th century colonial expeditions from the Kingdom of Benin (its geographic heritage lies in modern-day Nigeria), which flourished from the 11th century to the 19th century. Conversely, the Dahomey treasures include wood carvings, metalworks, and textiles looted by the French military in 19th century colonial expeditions from the Kingdom of Dahomey (located in modern-day Benin), which flourished from the 17th century to the 19th century. The latter are the subject of this case.
Using the tools of discourse analysis, this case compares Western legal rhetoric with West African socio-religious narratives. It explores how French discourse has employed a strategy rooted in Western legal epistemologies to adjudicate Benin’s right to its own cultural works. Juxtaposing Western and West African care discourses, it argues that French institutional “care” of Benin’s cultural treasures failed to acknowledge the former West African colony’s fundamental human right to self-determination, a form ofepistualicide(to be defined below) (Akpang, 2024). It shows how Benin equated French care of its material culture with an attempt to possess the essence of what gives life to the society—its soul. Accordingly, it seeks to illustrate that in West African epistemology, repatriation is not simply a legal matter of recovering objects taken in colonial expeditions, it’s a battle to retrieve pieces of a country’s soul.
Prelude
somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff
not my poems or a dance i gave up in the street
but somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff
like a kleptomaniac workin hard & forgettin while stealin
this is mine/ this aint yr stuff /
now why dont you put me back & let me hang out in my own self
(Shange, 1975: 20)
This segment of Ntozake Shange’s 1975 choreopoem, For Colored Girls who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, conjures self-possession in the face of exploitation. It speaks of a relationship that takes advantage of intimate emotional, psychological, and physical spaces—an unhealthy bond with someone who reaches into the essence of what makes your heart beat, and having found that priceless treasure, snatches it from you, rendering you helpless—unable to stand on your own. Shange’s work addresses the question of what happens when someone tries to steal your very soul.
I would argue those who fall victim to such a calamity have but two choices: surrender themselves, and let their identity slip away, or spend the rest of their lives fighting to recover their “stuff.” For African nations who live daily with the reality that 90% of their “stuff” is held outside of the continent (Godonou, 2007: 61), the discourse of repatriation is a soul retrieval mission. On such a mission, Benin, West Africa fought for its “stuff,” and in 2021 recovered 26 treasures: a tiny proportion of the 150,000 items of African cultural property in French Museums, 70,000 of which are in the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac (Julienne, 2024). This case study is the story of that mission.1
Intercultural Scholarship
To ground the case study in scholarship that incorporates intercultural epistemological perspectives, I draw primarily upon the report co-authored by Bénédicte Savoy, French art historian and professor at the College de France and Technical University of Berlin; and Felwine Sarr, Senegalese-born economist, writer, musician, and professor at Duke University. Together they worked to complete The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics,” published in 2018 by the French Ministère de la culture; colloquially known as the “Sarr-Savoy Report.” In addition, Savoy’s 2022 book, Africa’s Struggle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat, is a central conceptual resource for this essay. These two publications reflect core research that contributed to the restitution of 26 treasures to Benin.
Geographic Context: The Dahomey Kingdom
A geographic orientation to the Dahomey Kingdom provides essential context for this case. Dahomey reached its peak in the 19th century, having amassed wealth and power as a slave-trading nation. It was situated within what is now called Africa’s Gold Coast, an area that included the Asante, Yoruba, Edo and many other kingdoms, empires and cultural groups. In present-day terms, the former Dahomey Kingdom is now incorporated into the Republic of Benin, located to the east of lands that included the Asante Kingdom, which is now encompassed within the Republic of Ghana. To the West, the Federal Republic of Nigeria now includes the Yoruba and Edo Kingdoms among others.2 I highlight these cultures because of their prominence in recent repatriation news headlines. The countries of Africa’s Atlantic coast include numerous distinct identity groups, but over centuries of shared borders, competition, and trade, commonalities have developed among their belief systems.
Fig 2: Map of West Africa, 1200 - 1700 (Sayre, 2013)
The Last Independent King of Dahomey
Fig 3: King Béhanzin, 1892 (Le Petit Journal)
At its height, the Dahomey Kingdom was known for its wealth, regional power, and its all-female military unit, whose soldiers were called Agoje; nicknamed by the French as Amazon warriors. In 1892 colonial tensions between France and Dahomey brought war. The regining monarch of Dahomey was King Béhanzin, and his palace at Abomey was seized by the French Legion, led by Colonel Alfred-Amédée Dodds. Having heard through the French press and individual travel reports of the kingdom’s treasures, Dodds and his soldiers seized a significant collection of objects (Lucas, 2015). These treasures were taken to Paris, donated by Dodds to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, and over time, became a part of the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac’s collection.
The Legacy of French Colonial Collections of Art and Artifacts
hey man/ where are you goin wid alla my stuff/
(Shange, 1975: 20)
In ‘walking off with the king’s stuff,’ Dodds acquired numerous items, among them 26 treasures: ceremonial thrones, clothing, ritual objects of spiritual significance, and anthropomorphic statues that embodied the king’s mystical identity and powers (Beaujean-Baltzer, 2009). This collection, combined with other “stuff,” from the colonies filled France’s ethnographic museum at a time when, as scholars Clement Akpang and Boaventura de Sousa Santos have said, such institutions “became sites for authenticating white supremacy to legitimize colonial exploitation” (Akpang, 2024; de Sousa Santos, 2022).
According to Bénédicte Savoy, a large proportion of the 150,000 African items in French museums are objects and art collected as war booty; stolen or attained through coercion in punitive missions, scientific raids, and ethnological missions designed to build the collections of museums and serve research agendas at European institutions (Julienne, 2024; Savoy, 2022: 81, 141). This evidence underscores the value of this “stuff” as an epistemic prize for Western victors. Indeed, as Akpang says, it demonstrates how Europe used colonial taxonomies for “the destruction or de-contextualization of objects that play central roles in African socio-religious systems,” a practice which he describes as epistualicide (Akpang, 2024). The sheer volume of African material culture reflected by these collections represents what Akpang terms artifactualicide, “the obliteration or carting away of objects that are tangible records of African history as much as they are aesthetic forms” (Akpang, 2024).3
King Béhanzin’s Asen
this is mine/ this aint yr stuff/
(Shange, 1975: 20)
Fig 4: Asen of Béhanzin (Miller, 2007: 80)
Analyzing one of the 26 treasures helps bring the concept of epistualicide into focus. In the 2024 film Dahomey by Mati Diop, the viewer sees a group of regional chiefs touring a display of royal asen from the Dodds Collection. The asenoffers a symbolic gateway to one’s ancestors. It could be compared both to a mobile altar and a liminal means of communion. It would have been kept in a dedicated house within the king’s palace where ritual offerings were made on it as a way of facilitating communication with the spirits of ancestors. The king’s asen would engender the force of unseen powers and ensure the continued wealth and prosperity of the nation. As a sacred object it would be cared for with strict provisions. “A living being may not see their asen,” says the guide in the film as he narrates the display (Dahomey, 2024). The king’s asen would have been kept away from public view during his life. The guide in the film therefore asks how it was possible during the 1892 defeat of King Béhanzin for Colonel Dodds to extract the king’s asen while he was still alive. The artifactualicide of the asen is more than just a violation of material culture, it is an attempt to ‘walk off with all of a culture’s stuff.’ Holding the king’s asen not only meant possessing a part of his soul, but the Dahomean spiritual connection to its own ancestry as well.
While the Sarr-Savoy Report does not use the term artifactualicide, it validates the concept by confirming that there was a deliberate system of French “cultural extraction in Africa (and throughout the rest of the world),” with “the military as well as civilians, colonial administrators and scientific experts...invited to gather samples of African cultural materials…and to assure their transfer back to mainland France” (Sarr-Savoy, 2018: 50). Gathering objects for Europe’s budding museum system was an intentional practice conducted by Western colonial regimes.
European Care Discourses
my stuff is the anonymous ripped off treasure of the year
(Shange, 1975: 20)
European discourses have historically cloaked artifactualicide and epistualicide in legal narratives of care that justified Western countries’ right to possess African works.4 In fact, Europe encoded its system of artifactualicide in legal protections when the 1919 Covenant of the League of Nations, delineated rule over former imperial colonies in the aftermath of World War I. From this juncture, the evolution of Europe’s care discourses can be traced across a series of critical moments, leading to Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 commitment to return or lend looted “stuff.” The following timeline details these moments. It draws heavily from reporting by the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) (Julienne, 2024).
20th Century European Care Discourse Timeline
1919:The Covenant of the League of Nations, Article 22 placed the colonies in a “sacred trust of civilisation” and created a paternalistic care responsibility for colonizers. It was claimed that the colonies were ill-prepared for the modern world and could not stand on their own (United Nations Office at Geneva, 1919). Not only were they deprived of the right to control their own culture, but they were also declared incapable of handling their “stuff” amidst a post World War I order. This premise set a legal precedent for Europe’s self-proclaimed care mandate to steward West African societies along with their art and artifacts.
1954: The Hague Convention following World War II declared plundering cultural property a crime under international law, but this law was only meant to restitute European art looted during the war. It was declared not applicable to colonial plundering committed by European countries prior to World War II.
1960: The French Ministry of the Colonies transferred its museum holdings (including the Dobbs Collection) to the Ministry of Culture making these works part of France’s “inalienable culture,” a technical designation meant to protect against repatriation claims (Julienne, 2024). Notably, this action coincided with the independence of 17 former colonies including Benin.
2016: The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to Benin’s repatriation demand by claiming that the treasures are legally “...part of the [French] public domain...inalienable, imprescribable, and unseizable” (Julienne, 2024). This act of care, protecting the legal status of Benin’s “stuff” as French heritage, harkened to the 1960 decision to move colonial treasures to the French Ministry of Culture. It demonstrated strategic epistualicide, recasting Dahomey’s material culture as an expression of French national identity and ensuring France’s legal ability to shield its artifactualicide from future claims.
2017: French President Emmanuel Macron’s Speech at Ouagadougou University in Burkina Faso called for temporary or permanent return of African art to Africa within five years. Given the prior denial of Benin’s claim to its “stuff,” Macron’s declaration, one year later, was a surprising rhetorical shift. Stating that “African heritage cannot be a prisoner of European museums...” (Élysée, 2017), Macron acknowledge the right of former French colonies to an African epistemic identity. He commissioned the Sarr-Savoy Report to investigate the history of French artifactualicide and prepare recommended legal frameworks for freeing Africa’s “stuff” from French institutions. By articulating a metaphor of imprisoned subjects, he inferred a status of personhood for these “objects” and implied the injustice of their possession according to European legal epistemologies. In this way, he seemed to recognize the West African epistemological claim that these “objects” are more than material items, they are imbued with the soul of a people.
Macron’s comment could be perceived as a rare acknowledgement by European political leadership that West African epistemology assigns something akin to personhood to these works. But, Savoy’s research proves that West African leaders had long lobbied European authorities to acknowledge the ontological significance of their “stuff.” According to Savoy, in 1974 the British Parliament debated one such care claim from the Asante Kingdom. Parliamentary proceedings show Lord Montagu of Beaulieu addressing his fellow members of parliament: “The Ashanti people have deep feelings about the return of these sacrosanct objects which are supposed to contain the soul of the Ashanti people” (Savoy, 2022: 42). A lively discussion ensued, during which Lord Gisborough asked: “Gentlemen, would it be possible to keep the booty and return the soul?” (Savoy, 2022: 42). This exchange, though not directly related to the 26 Dahomey treasures, speaks to the epistemic divide between European and West African repatriation discourses. In the West African worldview, when it comes to certain works, it is not possible to separate the soul from the object. It is all the same “stuff.”
African Repatriation Discourses
like a kleptomaniac workin hard & forgettin while stealin
this is mine/this ain’t your stuff
(Shange, 1975: 20)
In 1965 Benin born writer Paulin Joachim wrote what Savoy describes as the first public appeal for repatriation, an editorial in Bingo magazine called, “Give us Back Negro Art” (Savoy, 2022: 3). In his piece, Joachim expressed that African works in European institutions were stripped of their life-giving context, describing them as, “stacked in glorious uselessness, in a frigid universe of galleries without sunlight and colour” (Joachim, 1965: 7; Savoy, 2022: 7). He called upon African people to fight for their “stuff” just as in the opening paragraph of this essay, I suggest a person would do if they found someone trying to usurp their life force.
Joachim’s discourse casts Western institutions as similar to Shange’s poetic “kleptomaniac;” they are “working hard” to hold onto what’s not theirs, and “forgetting while stealing,” that this “stuff” belongs to someone else (Shange, 1975: 20). Joachim writes: “There is a battle that we must valiantly fight on all fronts in Europe and America…the battle for the recovery of our artworks which are scattered across the globe” (Joachim, 1965: 7; Savoy, 2022 6-7). He refers to these works as “material witnesses of the black African soul” and states that priests who participated in cultural extraction “killed the spirituality of the black peoples” (Joachim, 1965: 7; Savoy, 2022: 6-7).
The language of Joachim’s discourse makes it clear that the West African epistemological view connects its material culture to its life force, and views these treasures as imbued with the soul of the society that created them. Felwine Sarr elaborates on this idea by explaining how “things [can] appear as living beings: they are born, live, die, and become ancestors” (Cousin, 2023). They remain “In motion within their original contexts, [but when extracted into the West,] collected things become objects or masterpieces ‘petrified, held motionless under the gaze’ of the Western museum” (Cousins, 2023; Diagne, 2020). Moreover, they serve a spiritual purpose in African society, as evidenced in Joachim’s rhetoric: “Is it not time….to liberate the black deities, which have never been able to play their role in the frosty universe of the white world where they are held captive?” (Joachim, 1965: 7; Savoy, 2022: 8).
Joachim’s discourse reverberates over 50 years later in a 2016 letter from the Government of Benin to the French Minister of Foreign Affairs: “...these objects have considerable heritage and historical value for all Beninese men and women. But even more, they have considerable spiritual value insofar as they refer to the souls of our illustrious departed…” (Julienne, 2024). The letter laments the loss of Benin’s “stuff” because without it, the spiritual purpose it serves is impeded. He writes, “...our parents and children have never seen these cultural goods, which constitutes a handicap in the harmonious intergenerational transmission of our collective memory…” (Julienne, 2024). Held captive in “glorious uselessness,” these treasures are prevented from playing their role in the continuous renewal of Benin’s collective soul (Joachim, 1965: 7; Savoy, 2022: 7). This is the nature of epistualicide; possessing a country’s treasures against its will imprisons its cultural memory, identity, spirituality, and its connection to its ancestors—all that should be inalienable to a people, or as Shange says “alla my stuff” (1975: 20). It’s a form of cultural destruction, damaging the chain of “intergenerational transmission” referenced in Benin’s letter.
In the 2024 film Dahomey by Mati Diop, young people debate the relevance of the 26 treasures to their sense of identity in a town hall about the significance of repatriation (Dahomey, 2024). Some view it as a critical restoration of heritage. Others assert the performative aspect of the return. They seem torn between anger at discovering the extent of the artifactualicide, and incredulousness that someone could in-fact succeed at stealing their soul. Says one young woman, “When you say that 90% of our cultural heritage is overseas, I don’t think you’re right. Cultural heritage is composed of material heritage and immaterial heritage. Now, part of our material heritage is in other countries but our immaterial heritage, our dances, our traditions, and know-how are still in our country” (Dahomey, 2024). Her comment reflects the split sense of self that Shange’s lines point to: “Somebody almost walked off with alla my stuff/Not my poems or a dance I gave up in the street” (Shange, 1975: 20). They couldn’t take the ephemeral poems and dances—the spark of life within her, but they could disorient her by trying. Another young woman in the Dahomey film captures this strategy of epistualicide, “We don’t realize that the colonizers made us slaves to ourselves. Even our languages…I can’t even talk in my own language, for example, and say all…I want to say…Fon, Nago and other languages should be part of our education system” (Dahomey, 2024). The longing to express one’s identity in one’s native language, the separation of one’s poetry and dance from the material culture that is enlivened by these creative expressions, is summed up by a young man in the film who concludes, “What was looted more than a century ago is our soul—the people’s soul. It’s our ability to be proud, to identify with our own essence that was looted” (Dahomey, 2024). Another young man addresses a different dimension of loss—the objects’ loss of personhood, “The life was taken out of these works. Let’s give back the life that was taken. These represent our soul” (Dahomey, 2024).
Shange’s poetic stanza closes with a call for the return of her soul, “Now, why don’t you put me back and let me hang out in my own self?” (Shange, 1975: 20). While France applies legal epistemology to its repatriation discourses, Benin fights for its soul.
Fig 5: Man kneels in front of the statue of Béhanzin at the exhibition opening, Cotonou, Benin (Zachmann, 2021)
20th Century African Repatriation Discourse Timeline
hey man/ this is not your prerogative
i gotta have me in my pocket
(Shange, 1975: 20)
Since the 1960 liberation of African nations, former colonies have undertaken relentless advocacy to recover their “stuff.” Arguing on behalf of one’s soul is a strategy without Western legal basis, so they have had to pursue other measures. As Carsten Stahn observes in the book Confronting Colonial Objects, the “legal and social construct that defines the concept of cultural property and its relation to society may [not] be shared, or may [not] even be compatible, with the cultural understandings and legal traditions of the colonized people” (Stahn, 2023: ix). Still, newly liberated African nations found ways to use the West’s own legal constructs to challenge the West’s care claims. The following timeline has been adapted from a more in-depth version in Bénédicte Savoy’s book, Africa’s Struggle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat, (2022: 143-147), and it traces key moments in African legal discourses from 1960 to 1980:
1960: Newly independent African nations call for the return of their material culture. These countries join the United Nations, which they view as an effective channel for legal repatriation claims.
1966: On the heels of the Bingo magazine editorial, France loans works to the Art Negre exhibition in Dakar, Senegal but in exchange requires that the Senegalese cease participating in public repatriation discourses.
1970: UNESCO becomes the United Nations’ body specifically charged with mediating repatriation discourses. It adopts a non-retroactive convention legitimizing the return of cultural property.
1973: U.N. Resolution 3187 calls for the “prompt and free” restitution of expropriated artwork to colonized countries. 17 countries abstain from voting on the resolution— essentially neutering the resolution.
1978: Speaking in Paris, Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, Director-General of UNESCO asserts the legal legitimacy of "the return of an irreplaceable cultural heritage to those who created it..." (Savoy 2022, 69).
1980: Realizing the futility of advocating for repatriation within the European power structure, Nigeria shifts to challenging perceptions of ownership and authorship by mounting its own traveling exhibition. The landmark African-led traveling exhibition, “Treasures of Ancient Nigeria: Legacy of 2000 Years” opens at the Detroit Institute of Arts, curated by Nigerian archaeologist and anthropologist Ekpo Eyo. The Nigerian government also begins buying back works at auction to build its own collections.
The Moment and Momentum of Policy Change
now you can’t have me less i give me away
(Shange, 1975: 20)
By November 28, 2017, when Macron gave his historic speech at Ouagadougou University in Burkina Faso calling for the temporary or permanent return of African art within the next five years, the history of African discourse described above had been forgotten. The subtitle of Savoy’s book, “History of a Postcolonial Defeat,” refers to the erosion of momentum African nations built between the 1960s and the 1980s: it succumbed to the rhetoric of European care, which effectively repressed its existence. Indeed, when Sarr and Savoy began their research, they were shocked to find “...entire reams of documentation buried in administrative and press archives in Paris and Berlin confirming that a detailed debate about colonial contexts in European museums had already been held before…reaching its apex between 1978 and 1982” (Savoy, 2022: 1).
Savoy’s research led to the conclusion “that museum directors and culture officials of the 1970s and 1980s deliberately left [the work of repatriation] undone” (Savoy, 2022: 140). She argued that, “many protagonists in the museum administrations of the 1970s and ‘80s….knew perfectly well that the great majority of the African objects in their collections stemmed from the colonial era….Yet…painted a picture of impeccably acquired collections with clean bills of provenance, which of course they never had to evidence” (Savoy, 2022: 141). This insight shows how some Western museums obscured their artifactualicide, instead asserting the legality of their right to African works—their right to ignore, deny, and erase African claims to their own “stuff.” As Savoy says, “These men also knew, as they put in writing, that their strategy of denial would cause frustration and ‘desperation’ for the supplicants” (Savoy, 2022: 139). In other words, they wanted the former colonies to give up.
The reliance by Western institutions on legal discourses to validate their care of African colonial treasures was in fact a form of what Shange’s poem terms, “forgetting while stealing” (1975: 20). The Eurocentric epistemology of care involved suppressing the truth of problematic provenance, eschewing terms like “restitution,” which they considered “defamatory,” (Savoy, 2022: 83) and arguing that for reasons of expertise, finance, political stability, climate, geography, and various forms of paternalism, they were the rightful owners of former colonies’ “stuff.”
The Turning Point: The Sarr-Savoy Report of 2018
somebody almost run off wit alla my stuff/ and i waz standin
there/ lookin at myself/ the whole time
and it waznt a spirit took my stuff/ waz a man
(Shange, 1975: 20)
Macron’s 2017 speech was meant to announce a new era in the French - West African relationship. As part of the repatriation promise, Macron commissioned a scholarly report to investigate the French colonial history of artifactualicide and to recommend legal paths to return some, but not all of Benin’s “stuff.” This initiative resulted in the Sarr-Savoy Report, published in 2018.
The report was groundbreaking among Western institutions and the art world. One of its most important insights was the idea that if 90% of a continent’s cultural treasures are held on foreign continents, it is highly unlikely that the originating cultures parted with all of those objects willingly. Sarr and Savoy concluded that the acquisition of African objects by force was self-evident; and therefore, the legality of repatriation should be unquestionable (Sarr-Savoy, 2018: 56-57). They advocated for a full change in French heritage laws to align with a definition of looted works as any item that was attained through coercion or without consent (Sarr-Savoy, 2018: 78). Their logic was straightforward: neither length of time in a collection, nor eventual purchase(s) by legitimate means can launder an object’s unethical provenance.
Outcomes of the Sarr-Savoy Report
did you know somebody almost got away wit me/
me in a plastic bag under their arm
(Shange, 1975: 20)
In 2020, when the French legislature voted for a legal structure that would facilitate the first step: the return of the Dodds Collection to Benin, they ultimately chose a symbolic gesture, not a structural reform. The law was changed, but onlyregarding the specific 26 items; eliminating the legal precedent for returning other works. This was not stolen “stuff,” and according to Roselyn Bachelot, the French Minister of Culture, returning it was “not an act of repentance or reparation,” which would have implied wrong-doing on France’s part (Stahn, 2023: 483). The rhetoric surrounding the French legislature’s decision harkened to long-standing Western legal discourses: new laws should not be applied to colonial-era cases. Institutional stakeholders had lobbied effectively against repatriating “stuff” they now considered to be theirs.
While the French legislature avoided the kind of broad legal framework that would empower repatriation claims from its former colonies, the Sarr-Savoy Report’s recommendations established a new paradigm for evaluating repatriation claims. Unlike the period from the 1960s to 1980s, the history of artifactualicide has now been publicly documented by the government’s own report. It will be difficult to re-bury this history in administrative archives with hopes that it will be forgotten.
Ironically, progress was more immediately apparent in other European countries. Repatriations sparked by the report have already created a new context against which future claims will be assessed. Germany took active steps to return the Benin Bronzes to Nigeria; they were among more than 1,100 objects repatriated in 2022. Savoy notes that when her book was published in German in 2021, the management of the Berlin State Museums had previously claimed they had never received a request for repatriation from an African country. Four days after her publication date, the museum administration indicated that Germany would return the Benin Bronzes (conveyed through what Savoy describes as “a well-calculated leak” Savoy, 2022: viii). Similarly, leaders in the Netherlands, Belgium, the U.S. and the UK have fostered progress in repatriation discourses resulting in actual return of works or in new legal frameworks designed to further the process.4
Meanwhile, in France, scholars inspired by the Sarr-Savoy Report began inventorying French collections, recognizing that once these works are documented, an epistemic framework is created that addresses Western legal provenance and helps validate claims for repatriation. One such project is the website: “Le Monde en Musée,” or “The World In A Museum: Collections of Objects from Africa and Oceania,” implemented at the National Institute of Art History in Paris (https://monde-en-musee.inha.fr). Led by Claire Bosc-Tiessé, research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and professor at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, it problematizes and documents colonial-era French ethnographic and scientific expeditions.
Commenting on the scale of her research, Bosc-Tiessé said, "In 2021 we identified nearly 230 museums in France possessing African objects, and 129 objects from Oceania. There is cultural property from Benin at the Musée du Quai Branly, but also at sixty other French museums!" (Julienne, 2024). Her comment underlines the scope of artifactualicide: these collections are so vast, and spread across such a broad spectrum of institutions, that the full extent of items meriting repatriation will remain hidden—until it is inventoried. As the Sarr-Savoy Report says, “to speak of the restitution of African cultural heritage and works of art to Africa is to open merely one chapter in a much larger, and certainly much vaster, history….a system of appropriation and alienation—the colonial system—for which certain European Museums, unwillingly have become the public archives” (Sarr-Savoy, 2018: 2).
In the wake of Macron’s 2017 declaration that promised dramatic restitution and delivered 26 works, Benin has not given up the fight for all of its “stuff.” The 2022 exhibition, Benin: Art of Yesterday and Today. Restitution and Revelation,marked the first time the 26 treasures were unveiled in Benin. Held at the Presidential Palace in Cotonou, it was met with a range of emotions from grief to reverence, to anger, to elation. Speaking at the opening reception, President Patrice Talon said, “The French know that 26 works do not represent all our requests…We want what belongs to us to be displayed in other parts of the world, but we want the main objects here” (Dahomey, 2024). The main objects he refers to include the statue of Gou, god of war in the Beninese Vodún religion. One of the young people featured in the film Dahomey captures the sentiment thus, “It’s an insult. Out of 7,000 works, they bring back 26, and what hurts me the most, is the god Gou, god of iron, whom we asked for, but we were told to wait” (Dahomey, 2024). Gou, the deity who presides over war, “remain(s) a prisoner,” to use a phrase from Macron’s 2017 speech—a 134 year prisoner of war held at the Louvre (Julienne, 2024).
As pieces like the god Gou are documented in inventories by scholars at Western institutions, it becomes more difficult to cloak epistualicide in care claims or to delay justice for artifactualicide. Although Gou and hundreds, perhaps thousands of other Beninese pieces are still imprisoned in French institutions, the attempt to possess and control Benin’s cultural soul has now been documented and in ways that cannot easily been denied. In the words of Ntozake Shange:
...stealin my stuff from me don't make it yours; makes it stolen.
(1975: 20)
Conclusion
This case study argues that French care of colonial-era looted art and artifacts from Benin have historically amounted to epistualicide, an attempt to decontextualize the essence of the country’s socio-religious identity by controlling its material culture. For the West African nation, these works are part of the soul of its people. Passages from the choreopoem, For Colored Girls who Have Considered Suicide when the Rainbow was Enuf, have been a hermeneutical companion to this analysis. The poem’s emotional force, its symbolism of self-possession, and its emphasis on empowerment convey what is difficult to grasp solely as a theoretical concept— how it feels when someone attempts to steal your soul.
The tools of discourse analysis are used to contrast Western legal epistemologies that attest to the colonizer’s ownership of these works, with West African cultural epistemologies that view them not simply as objects, but as repositories of personhood, imbued with their own life force and spiritual significance. Western laws of object ownership are ill-equipped to deliver justice for theft of souls, but nevertheless, they have governed West Africa’s battle for decades. Even as African countries like Benin maintained a legislative battle—on unequal terms, European institutions obscured not only their own artifactualicide, but also the record of the struggle itself.
When French President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged West Africa’s discourses and epistemological perspectives in 2017, he seemed to promise the return of the most important works, raising expectations for sweeping change. He commissioned the Sarr-Savoy Report to document the French history of artifactualicide and epistualicide and to outline a process for restitution. The report sent powerful ripples throughout the Western museum world, resulting in dramatic examples of repatriation by countries like Germany and the United States. Ironically, the weight of long-standing institutional discourses overwhelmed the French legislature and shut down legal avenues for liberating Benin’s remaining treasures. The legislature both declined the Sarr-Savoy Report’s recommendation to create a legal framework for repatriation and denied the principle of repatriation itself. France concluded that it could not repatriate items that were never stolen; reasserting that looting and hegemonic coercion were not considered stealing in the colonial era.
Given the renewed momentum around repatriation discourses, there can be no doubt that the present times mark another crossroads in this complex and contested history. Among scholars who support West African discourses, the next chapter entails painstakingly inventorying objects, unearthing accurate stories of provenance or lack thereof, and documenting the discourse itself to counteract the practice of “forgettin while stealing” (Shange, 1975: 20). The Sarr-Savoy Report has already spurred more work in this area, and as depicted by the film, Dahomey, the next generation of Benin’s young people have been inspired to continue the struggle to repatriate these pieces of their country’s soul.
Acknowledgements
This essay was commissioned by the Director of the “Sensitive Material” research project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant no. 430-2024-01324)
Notes
1 I equate the usage of the word “stuff” in Ntozake Shange’s poem with the concept of self-possession described in this paragraph. Within this essay, I draw upon Shange’s metaphor of “stuff” to symbolize the ways in which certain pieces of material culture can be perceived by West African epistemologies not only as heritage objects, but also as repositories of a culture’s collective soul. I borrow passages from Shange’s anthem as hermeneutic devices to give emotional weight to ancestral ties, and to conjure the emotional, psychological, material, and spiritual connection to one’s own identity, one’s ethnic group, and one’s cultural heritage. I chose this poem for its relevance to Black feminist thought, and as a nod to the legacy of Dahomey’s Agoje female warriors. I also value its capacity to complicate Dahomey’s legacy as a slave-trading kingdom by referencing the struggle for identity and empowerment among African-American diasporic descendants of enslaved people. Lastly, I appreciate that Shange’s title was inspired by a real-life experience during which she witnessed a rainbow encircling the sky over Oakland, California. In a New York Times interview, she described the epiphany of empowerment that she gained in that moment: “We form the same stuff here that sunlight does. We are the same as the sky, we are here, breathing, living creatures and we have a right to everything” (Gussow 1976).
2 The Kingdom of Benin in the Edo State in Nigeria is associated with the Benin Bronzes, mentioned earlier in this essay. It is important to keep in mind that these are not tied to the country of Benin, nor to this case study except that both Nigeria (Benin Bronzes) and Benin (Dahomey treasures) have fought for the return of their cultural heritage, looted during colonial-era military campaigns and otherwise acquired through ethically tainted means.
3 Artifactualicide is distinguished from epistualicide in this essay as the difference between extracting objects, particularly en masse, versus the subversion, suppression, or manipulation of an object’s meaning. I especially draw on the term epistualicide to emphasize hegemonic intention behind the destruction or de-contextualization of objects.
4 As Classen and Howes observe,
According to the colonial model of the collection, once artifacts have been acquired or “conquered,” they must be integrated into a new social order and made to conform to a new set of values imposed by their governor – the collector or curator. The collection is an unruly mass of displaced natives that has to be disciplined and rendered subservient to its masters. This regulation of artifactual bodies by the regimen of the museum was presented by collectors and curators as being for their own good. Nineteenth-century collectors often justified their removal of native artifacts from their cultures of origin to be placed in Western collections by saying that they were rescuing them from obscurity and neglect. In the words of one collector, the indigenous artifacts he gathered would be “far more valuable amongst the records and treasures of a museum than in the dinginess and filth of their [native homes]” (cited by Thomas 1991: 181). Artifacts were better off in the clean, bright, protected environment of the museum under the aegis of knowledgeable Western scholars. Ironically, the implied conclusion was that indigenous artifacts were misused by their original owners and that it was only when they entered the Western museum that they were used properly. (Classen and Howes 2006: 209-210)
Scholars and activists may find this point debatable as some would perceive the pace and volume of repatriations to be negligible in comparison to the number of works that are held in Western collections. Capturing all sides of the debate and the many nuances of repatriation discourses is beyond the scope of this essay. In the case of the Benin Bronzes which I allude to in this note’s sentence, readers may find Dan Hicks’ 2020 book, The Brutish Museums of interest.
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