Museums and universities around the world hold vast collections of cultural artefacts, artworks, objectified belongings and even ancestral remains. Many were not freely given but taken during colonial times, through force, manipulation, theft or violence. For decades, they have sat in storerooms and display cases, classified into categories like anthropology, natural history or ethnology, separated from the people and communities to whom they once belonged.
In recent years, there has been growing recognition that these collections carry painful legacies.
Calls for their return have become part of a global conversation about decolonisation, justice and healing. In 2018 French president Emmanuel Macron produced a report which called for a new ethics of humanity, setting off a new willingness to return African artworks and material culture. But African calls for restitution were made at least five decades earlier following former president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo Mobutu Sese Seko’s address to the UN.
