Although largely an examination of global restitution debates unfolding from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s, Africa’s Struggle for Its Art could very well serve as a chronicle of contemporary contestations over the fate of Africa’s plundered cultural property in Western museums. These debates have surged over the last few years, in part due to the publication of the author’s 2018 pathbreaking report on the issue (co-authored with Felwine Sarr). Tracing decades of largely unrealized efforts by African government and cultural leaders to secure the return of their sacred antiquities and the more successful repressive counter-efforts by European museum elites and their allies, Savoy takes the reader on a journey to understand how today’s restitution landscape is rooted in, shaped through and determined by these historical events. Through an intricate mapping of significant actors, institutions and centres of power that comprised the early postcolonial African and European cultural establishment, we learn of the wilful silencing, distortion, discrediting and relegation of individuals and organizations seeking the return of their heritage, a reaction to the unfounded anxieties of obsolescence that permeated the Western museum world during this period.
The study sheds light on the institutional cultures and practices of secrecy throughout European museums that, for decades, have formed a transnational wall of exclusionary solidarity and conservatism meant to subjugate indigenous claims to postcolonial cultural sovereignty. One of the book’s significant contributions is the geographic and demographic reorientation of how we understand the history of restitution. Far from being a struggle by Africans on the continent, these early efforts were largely Eurocentric in nature, characterized by internal contestations between government departments and cultural administrators working on both sides of the aisles of morality, legality and diplomacy.
The book’s primary material intervention is its apprehension of an immense array of archival sources – many of which had not been studied or available to the public until recently, such as a set of confidential papers from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Savoy places these documents in conversation with simultaneous debates on restitution taking place within disparate geographies across Europe.
Another one of the book’s key contributions is its shifting of the periodization of Europe’s restitution debates, dispelling the common contemporary myth that today’s efforts are the first real attempts to grapple with the fate of Africa’s cultural heritage. Yet the book could go further in this temporal reframing through perhaps a mention of restitution debates that both predated and followed these mid-century efforts, helping to contextualize these conversations within the longue durée of restitution claims. From Ethiopia’s Emperor Yohannes IV’s 1872 appeals to the British government for the return of the Kwer’ata re’esu and Kebra Nagast – a painting and manuscript looted from Maqdala in 1868 – to the political efforts of Bernie Grant, a British Member of Parliament, to secure the return of Benin bronzes from the British Museum and Kelvingrove in Glasgow in the 1990s, restitution struggles between Africa and Europe span at least three centuries. It would thus be productive to situate the mid-century debates examined in the book along a continuum of ongoing restitution efforts.
Contemporary discourse examining the imperial appropriation of African art tends to frame the problem and attempts to redress it within the logic of asymmetrical power relations between the global North and South, or between formerly colonized and colonial peoples, often failing to explicitly account for the centrality of racialized violence in the endurance of these embittered entanglements. While Savoy does, for example, nod to the possibility of the influence of German National Socialist-era racist thought on the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation’s denial of Nigeria’s restitution requests in the 1970s, there remains ample space for a nuanced discussion of the racial technologies employed during this period, which facilitated the maintenance of a global hierarchy of material dispossession.
Fears that the public disclosure of restitution debates might produce a ‘culture war’ (as discussed in a 1978 letter Savoy references) are evidence that the rhetoric and tactics employed to undermine restitution efforts a half-century ago do not simply remain with us but were formative in the production of today’s contentious cultural property landscape, an ongoing and enduring haunting. As such, Africa’s Struggle for Its Art is both a warning sign and a roadmap that helps clarify the mechanisms through which postcolonial defeat is reproduced across generations. While the book ostensibly examines the spectre of decades-old European restitution debates, its richness lies in its pertinence to the multiple intersecting ‘crises’ through which we are living and, perhaps optimistically, a parable for ways to navigate the pitfalls and failures of our forebears as we move through this current moment of institutional decolonization.
