The last years have seen a resurgence of the debate about the presence of African objects in museums and collections in the Global North. While the demands for the return of African art are longstanding, dating back to the era of decolonization, protests from African diaspora communities and renovations and (attempted) reinventions of ethnographic and former colonial museums drew renewed attention to the subject. This attention increased with French President Macron’s commission of the report “Restituer le Patrimoine africain: vers une nouvelle éthique relationelle” completed by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy in 2018. Many initiatives in Europe followed: the Deutscher Museumsbund produced guidelines for the care of colonial collections in Germany, a similar report was published in the Netherlands, and the Belgian parliament will soon debate a law proposal for the restitution of colonial collections. At the same time, protests against restitution are also increasingly present in the media and in public debates. These often rely on arguments -about the ‘universal’ value of the objects, the importance of their conservation, etc. – that have deep colonial genealogies. Given the presence of anti-black and colonial tropes, how are we to understand today’s debates in relation to those that took place in the aftermath of independence?

Embedded in the broader debate about the decolonization of museums, these debates are multifaceted, with historical, ethical, political, economic, and practical aspects that reflect the various ‘identities’ of the object collections concerned.How do museum professionals today untangle the many layers of these debates in order to seek resolutions for the collections in their care? And how do museums, cultural organizations, and states on the African continent – far less visible in today’s debates- deal with the issue? In other words, what does writing the history of restitution debates as African history reveal?

In this roundtable, an interdisciplinary group of scholars and museum professionals will take both a historical and a practical look at the issue of colonial collections and the debates about their restitution. They will explore the long history behind the current developments and take a critical look at the way museums and states in the Global North seek to address these debates today. What role does historical understanding of the colonial past play in the potential solutions for these issues? What are the ethnical and practical issues restitution initiatives have to confront?