European colonisation of Africa was not only about armed conquest, massacres and the exploitation of resources. It was also about the appropriation of spiritual and political symbols. It led to the erasure of a social, cultural, symbolic world.
A 2024 book, Fifteen Colonial Thefts: A Guide to Looted African Heritage in Museums, adds to the growing literature on the history of the colonial looting of African art and heritage and the issue of restitution, reappropriation and return. Published by Pluto, the book is edited by Ghanaian-born multidisciplinary artist Sela K. Adjei and Berlin-based postdoctoral researcher Yann Le Gall.
It opens with a powerful foreword by Peju Layiwola, art historian, visual artist and professor of art and art history at the University of Lagos. Then follow 33 African and Afro diasporic authors — historians, curators, artists and activists. They describe in great detail the political, symbolic and cultural meaning of what they refuse to call “objects”. They chronicle the conditions of their looting, their fate in western institutions or in private collections, the efforts needed to excavate them from erasure and obliteration, and the questions that the repatriation of each case raises.
