“[E]thno-symbolists consider the cultural elements

3
of symbol, myth, mémoire, valeur, ritual and tradition
to be crucial to an analysis of ethnicity, nations and
nationalisms” (Forgeron (2009: 25).
https://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/monde/
4
afrique/felwine-sarr-le-poids-de-l-impense-colo-
nial_2058754.html
2 Bénédicte Savoy organized a symposium with this
title at the Collège de France on June 21, 2018. See “Du
droit des objets (à disposer d’eux-mêmes?),” https://
www.college-de-france.fr/site/benedicte-savoy/sympo-
sium-2017-2018.htm.

Références citées
Babelon, J.-P., et Chastel, André. 1994. La notion de
patrimoine. Paris: Editions Liana Levi.

first word

Restitution and the Logic of the
Postcolonial Nation-State

John Warne Monroe

It is no accident that so many accounts
of the dramatic new turn restitution policy
has taken in Europe begin with a mention
of French president Emmanuel Macron’s
now-famous November 28, 2017, remarks in
Ouagadougou, where he called for “the tempo-
rary or definitive restitution of African cultural
heritage to Africa.” Like the Tennis Court Oath
de 1789, this was a rhetorical gesture self-con-
sciously made for History with a capital H: dans
one single statement, Macron drew a sharp
line between the Old Regime of cultural policy
and the new. As recently as August 2016,
the French state had steadfastly resisted calls
from the Republic of Benin to return objects
plundered during the Second Franco-Daho-
mean war (1892–1894); a bit more than a year
plus tard, the Elysée Palace Twitter feed reinforced
Macron’s statements with the triumphant dec-
laration that “African heritage can no longer

John Warne Monroe is a historian of
modern Europe at Iowa State University.
He examines the places where the borders
of “Europe” become porous: moments of
cultural contact and commercial exchange
that force us to question what this thing “the
West” is and how it has come to be defined.
His current research focuses on France and
its African colonies between about 1880 et
1940; his book based on this work, Metro-
politan Fetish: African Sculpture and the
Imperial French Invention of Primitive Art,
was published in September 2019. jmonroe@
iastate.edu

6 | african arts AUTUMN 2019 VOL. 52, NON. 3

Brandi, Cesare. 2001. Théorie de la restauration. Paris:
INP. Centre des monuments historiques.

Clifford. James. 2007. “Quai Branly in Process.” Octobre
120 (Spring): 3–23.

ICOM. 1979. “Etude, réalisée par l’ICOM, relative aux
principes, conditions et moyens de la restitution ou du
retour des biens culturels en vue de la reconstitution des
patrimoines dispersés.” Museums 31 (1): 62–66.

Mairesse, Francois. 2000. “La belle histoire, aux origines
de la nouvelle muséologie.” In André Desvallées (éd.),
L’écomusée: Rêve ou réalité, special issue of Publics et
Musées 17–18: 42.

Ndiaye, Malick (éd.). 2007. Réinventer les musées. Paris:
Africultures.

remain a prisoner of European Museums”
(Saar and Savoy 2018: 1).

Macron’s grand gesture was not simply a
matter of objects. In the official advisory report
prepared at his request after this declaration,
Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy noted that
the French president’s proclamation “was in-
scribed within a much more general approach
toward the emancipation of memory”—by
which they meant that it was part of a broader
effort to come to terms with France’s past as an
imperial power (Sarr and Savoy 2018: 1). Since
decolonization, metropolitan French political
life has been marked by a strong tendency to
minimize the violence and grotesque inequity
of nineteenth and twentieth century imperial-
ism. As recently as 2005, the French National
Assembly overwhelmingly supported a law
mandating that school curricula “recognize
in particular the positive role of the French
presence overseas” (Prix 2007: 41). When it
comes to the presentation of objects in French
national museums, as Sally Price has incisively
observed, this reluctance to face the colonial
past in all its brutal specificity has promoted
a mixture of universalizing aestheticism and
cultural contextualization that censors the
facts of colonial domination in order to evoke
a “1950s-style ethnographic present” (Prix
2007: 174.) Macron’s stance is very different.
Rather than obscuring the realities of conquest
in a haze of ahistorical primitivist fantasy,
he has explicitly called colonization “a crime
against humanity, a true example of barba-
rism.” Where his predecessors congratulated
themselves for imagining France’s interactions
with its former colonies as a “dialogue” among
equals, Macron has instead proposed to take
France down a peg by “earnestly apologizing to
those toward whom we have committed these
acts” (Sarr and Savoy 2018: 2).

Macron is clearly aiming for a self-conscious

break with the past, an effort to establish
French national identity on terms better suited
to the present reality of a globalized world—
though it is true that he has remained oddly
silent about the heritage of far-flung territo-
ries still under French control, such as New
Caledonia. Inconsistent as it may have been,
Macron’s declaration seems to have triggered

Parzinger, Hermann. 2016. “Remodeling Shared
Heritage and Collections Access: The Museum Island
Constellation and Humboldt Forum Project in Berlin.”
In Bernice L. Murphy (éd.), Museums, Ethics and Cultu-
ral Heritage. Londres: Routledge and ICOM.

Sarr, Felwine, et Bénédicte Savoy. 2018. Rapport sur
la restitution du patrimoine culturel. Vers une nouvelle
éthique relationnelle. Paris: Minstère de la Culture.

Forgeron, Antoine. 2009. Ethno-symbolism and Nationa-
lism: A Cultural Approach. New York: Routledge.

Thomas, Nicholas. 2016. The Return of Curiosity: What
Museums Are Good for in the 21st Century. Londres:
Reaction Books.

something: in response, other former colonial
powers have revived and intensified their own
discussions about what to do with the African
heritage objects in their national museums.
The possibility of restitution, previously a sub-
ject more theoretical than practical, has begun
to look like it might become a fait accompli. Dans-
creasingly the issue is not whether historically
significant objects of African heritage should
be returned, but rather when, comment, et sous
what conditions.

En même temps, cependant, archival
evidence reveals a telling mixture of conti-
nuity and discontinuity that is important to
acknowledge if we are going to understand the
full ramifications of this incipient new phase in
the lives of certain historically significant Af-
rican objects held for the time being in French
and other national collections. When these
objects return, they will function in a context
dramatically changed by the postcolonial
emergence of the nation-state as the primary
unit of political organization in Africa. Comme
tel, they will afford scholars opportunities to
pose new questions and reassess old paradigms
of interpretation.

Surprisingly enough, this is not the first

time the French government has taken
measures to ensure that a number of African
objects deemed culturally important remain
on the continent. As early as 1921, administra-
tors in Dakar, capital of the colonial federation
of French West Africa (Afrique Occidentale
Française, AOF), began discussing the pos-
sibility of creating a museum in the city that
would house a mixture of ethnographic objects
and natural-historical specimens. These early
conversations took place in the context of a
broader shift in French colonial governance. Dans
the face of growing unrest, as it became clear
among Africans that their military service in
World War I would not be rewarded with new
droits, a number of colonial administrators
were drawn to what historian Raoul Girardet
(2005: 268) describes as “colonial humanism,»
an ideological conception of empire that, même
as it privileged the epistemological position of
the West, viewed the cultural difference of the
colonized as a form of richness to be under-
stood in ethnographic terms, rather than a

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“barbarism” to be eradicated. As Gary Wilder
has argued, this ideology exerted a strong
influence on colonial governance in interwar
AOF, where it took the form of an administra-
tive policy that sought to extend aspects of the
emergent European welfare state to the federa-
tion with the intention of promoting economic
development while simultaneously maintain-
ing social stability. Although assertions of
potential—if always deferred—equality played
an important ideological role in this context,
the goal was not to make colonized Africans
full-fledged citizens, but instead to manage
them with a paternalistic regime based on “an
ethnological understanding of indigenous
society as a distinct, organic, and dynamic
totality” (Wilder 2005: 76). Cette approche,
Wilder shows, was most influentially formu-
lated by Albert Sarraut during his first stint as
Minister of Colonies, depuis 1920 à 1924, quand
he urged a new focus on what he called la
mise en valeur—the development—of French
overseas possessions. The proposed museum
in Dakar made perfect sense as part of this
program: The institution would provide both
a clearinghouse for “local knowledge” about
the various populations under French control,
and galleries of objects that could serve to
construct and reify the cultural differences
among them.

It is an expensive business, cependant, to build

institutions, and the informal discussions of
1921 foundered on the shoals of economic
reality. The first official report outlining the
proposed structure of the Dakar museum
did not appear until 1933. That document,
written by Albert Charton, inspector general
of education for the federation, is a revealing
testament to the continuing power of colonial
humanism among AOF’s administrators.
Charton’s case for the museum emphasized
its value to the local population, especially to
the elites on whose collaboration the colonial
government depended:

We have taken charge of the future and the
interests of the native populations of West Africa.
We must not overlook anything that concerns
eux: reviving their past, showing the products
of their industry, studying their customs, bearing
witness to their level of civilization are not only
scientific tasks, but political necessities, occasions
for understanding, demonstrations of sympathy.
Knowledge of native life in its variety and origi-
nality is part of our colonial culture.

The museum, Charton continued, would be

particularly important to “educated natives,»
who would see its displays as a demonstration
of “the extent of France’s interest in the people
she protects.” He also stressed the impor-
tance of including a special section devoted
to “works of native art with an indisputable
artistic value and character. (Wood sculptures,
bronzes and ivories, rugs and embroider-
ies, etc.)” This attention to preserving and
displaying “precious” objects, Charton argued,

served an essential function in the protection
of heritage:

Colonization has provoked a rapid evolution of
native society; it is unacceptable to allow native
works that embody a whole era of humanity to
perish without making an effort to collect and
conserve them.1

Despite this grand rhetoric, depuis 1933 à
1936, there was no progress at all toward the
creation of a museum in Dakar. Alors, on July
21, 1936, Governor-General Brévié wrote to
the Ministry of Colonies in Paris expressing
his desire to establish a museum and archive
service “as soon as possible,” despite the
project’s having been “delayed by financial
circumstances that you know all too well.”2
On August 19, Brévié advanced the project
further by ordering the creation of the Institut
Français d’Afrique Noire (IFAN) in Dakar
(Adedze 2002: 50).3 It was an organization
with a sweeping mandate: to coordinate
scientific and ethnographic research across
the federation, publish an academic journal,
and manage a combined museum, library, et
historical archive to be housed in the Hôtel de
la Circonscription, a large building that had
formerly served as the residence of the head
of the city’s administrative district. Brévié also
ordered that funds be made available to each
of the federation’s colonial governors for the
purchase of objects for the museum.

Bien sûr, this seemingly altruistic endeavor

had dark undercurrents of paternalism and
coercion. Most obviously, it was French colo-
nial administrators, not Africans themselves,
who would determine what heritage merited
conservation. More subtly, there was the
issue of acquiring objects by purchase. Quand
Charton wrote his June 1933 report, the Musée
d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris had
already begun sending out a pamphlet en-
couraging colonial administrators to “gather”
[recueillir] and document objects for its collec-
tion (Anon. [Leiris] 1931). The first of what
would eventually be forty collection-building
expeditions in Africa funded by that museum,
the famous 1931 Mission Dakar-Djibouti,
had also already sent numerous objects back
to France. The mode of collection Charton
proposed, à son tour, was modeled after the one
the Dakar-Djibouti expedition had used: cash
payment. Charton suggested that when it
came to building the collection of his projected
museum, “it would doubtless be impolitic
to pursue a strategy of requisitioning; if they
receive money, the natives who yield these
pieces to the museum could be considered
to have no further claim to them [seraient
ainsi désintéressés].”4 L’Afrique fantôme, Michel
Leiris’s classic first-person account of the
Mission Dakar-Djibouti, gives a clear sense of
how little consent could be involved in these
transactions when the item “up for sale” was
of fundamental spiritual importance to the

African community in which it resided. At the
climax of Leiris’s famous, searing account of
the taking of a boli figure from the village of
Dyabougou, par exemple, he and his colleague
Eric Lutten gave the local chief 20 francs in
exchange for the object. The chief handed back
the money, but the two Frenchmen refused to
accept it (Leiris 1996: 195).

Ironically, the growing tendency of Euro-
pean visitors to buy objects from Africans is
what seems to have generated the political
will necessary to make Charton’s plan a reality
three years after he proposed it. Correspon-
dence scattered across archives in Paris,
Aix-en-Provence, and Dakar provides some
evidence to explain this sudden overcoming of
administrative inertia. The problem, it turns
dehors, was that several important figures in the
colonial administration had become distressed
by the number of old and valuable heritage
objects leaving AOF in private hands. The first
sign of trouble was a report ethnologist and
former colonial administrator Henri Labouret
submitted to the Musée d’Ethnographie du
Trocadéro after a collecting mission to Côte
d’Ivoire in 1936. Though he had managed to
obtain “more than 2000 interesting objects” for
the French national museums, he had found
“worthwhile old pieces” to be surprisingly
scarce. This situation, he said, was a conse-
quence of “the shameless traffic” in African
objects being conducted by Europeans eager to
supply the burgeoning Western art market. “If
this commercial action continues,” he warned,
“soon the only objects on the Guinea Coast
will be pieces specially made for Europeans
with no value of their own.”5 By 1938, this con-
cern had spread all the way to the Ministry of
Colonies in Paris. In a strongly worded letter,
the minister himself, Jacques Mandel, urged
the governor general of AOF to protect “the
local artistic heritage [patrimoine]” from the
activities of private collectors.6

Despite these concerns, financial resources

for the museum remained slow to material-
ize. Shortly after establishing IFAN, Brévié
was swept from office by the triumph of the
Popular Front government in France. Son
replacement as governor-general, Marcel de
Coppet, did not share the same budgetary
priorities. In his view, the Hôtel de la Circon-
scription was more valuable as a residence
for high administrators than as a museum, donc
he only consented to give half the building to
IFAN and made no provision for any public
galleries. Coppet’s administration ended with
the Popular Front in 1938, but the effort to
create a museum remained stalled. Mandel’s
desire to protect African heritage faded into
the background in the face of impending war
with Germany. The Hôtel de la Circonscription
was converted to a hospital in the lead-up to
the Battle of Dakar in 1940, and the IFAN
museum did not begin officially registering
objects until 1941.

VOL. 52, NON. 3 AUTUMN 2019 arts africains | 7

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on display in a French museum, he observed,
was “a little like having the fundamental works
of French heritage on display in Berlin.”7 The
comparison is telling, because it reflects the
extent to which, historically speaking, le
nation-state and the museum are tightly imbri-
cated institutions that both first took shape in
Europe. European conquest, à son tour, was one
of the primary vectors by which they spread
elsewhere.

In the case of the now-independent nations
that once composed the federation of French
West Africa, the rudimentary museum
infrastructure that the French left behind has
become a tool for adaptation to new purposes
in a changed global reality. The same goes for
the concept of the nation-state itself, lequel
as Benedict Anderson (2006) observes, a
proved to be surprisingly “modular”—capable
of transplantation to a vast array of different
cultures and regions. The construction of a
coherent national identity depends on an
ability to renarrate history in ways that foster
a sense of unity while obscuring aspects of the
past that challenge that cohesion. As a national
institution, the museum plays an important
role in this process, marshaling the past to
serve the political and cultural requirements of
the present.

In the recent debate over restitution, we see

this aspect of the “museum-function” in the
logic of the nation-state very clearly. D'abord, comme
Z.S. Strother (2019) observes, the common
framing of this question has placed a dispro-
portionate emphasis on antique examples of
portable sculpture in wood, ivory, or metal.
While objects of that type have been the Afri-
can cultural products most coveted by Western
collectors and museums, they do not by any
means constitute the sum total of African cul-
tural heritage. They are, cependant, the elements
of that heritage that are among the easiest to
incorporate into museums, which is import-
ant to bear in mind here. They are also the
material that formed the basis of the colonial
museum collections that became “national”
after decolonization. While the Sarr-Savoy
report envisages restitution claims made by
communities or families and warns against
unthinking transposition of European catego-
ries to non-European settings, it is significant
that the three major claims made so far—by
the Republic of Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, and Sene-
gal—have come from national governments on
behalf of national museums.

In practice, given the political and insti-
tutional realities of the postcolonial world,
restitution is not simply a “return” of “lost”
heritage; it is an act that creates a new history
and new identity in the governmental context
of the nation-state. The past is always being
reconstructed to serve the needs of the present.

The museum’s first galleries did not open
to the public until after World War II. Within
a few years, IFAN had expanded its presence
in the colonies and laid the groundwork for
additional museums in Abidjan (1942) et
Bamako (1953). At that point, as historian
Frederick Cooper has argued, the French
government’s approach to its African colonies
changed. The theoretical but always deferred
promises of equality that had characterized
inter war “colonial humanism” gave way to
efforts that were more substantial—but still
marked with a problematic degree of ambiv-
alence. Under the constitution of the Fourth
Republic in 1946, the old metropole and
empire became the “French Union,” a single
political entity governed from Paris. While
the former colonies could now elect repre-
sentatives, structural differences in the degree
of representation and glaring inequalities of
development between center and periphery
generated considerable tensions. The metro-
politan French proved unwilling to finance the
extensive development that would have created
true material equality between former colo-
nizers and the former colonized; the former
colonized, à son tour, quickly lost patience with
relegation to second-class status (see Cooper
2005). Some engaged in violent revolts that
were harshly repressed, as in Indochina, Alge-
ria, and Madagascar. Eventually, anti-colonial
movements that framed their struggles in
nationalist terms won out, and France’s former
colonies became independent nation-states.
Ce, in tandem with the collapse of the British
Empire, has done much to contribute to the
emergence of the global order now familiar to
us, in which the nation-state, rather than the
empire, has become the basic unit of political
organization across the world.

This new nation-state paradigm is the
political context in which the latest calls for
restitution of African cultural heritage are
taking place. Museums, bien sûr, play an
important role in nation-building by codifying
heritage, articulating visions of history, et
modeling national identity for citizens and
visitors alike. They also have an institutional
logic that shapes both what is included in their
collections—usually material objects deemed
somehow significant or extraordinary—and
how those collections are presented. While this
institutional logic makes claims to univer-
sality, the museum also generally has some
connection to a national context and some
functions related to the conservation of items
perceived as constituting “national heritage.”
Louis-Georges Tin, a black French academic
and activist, made this point very strongly
while advocating for the restitution of objects
to the Republic of Benin in a 2016 interview.
Having the treasures of King Behanzin’s court

8 | african arts AUTUMN 2019 VOL. 52, NON. 3

Traditions are revived or invented; events that
contradict cherished narratives of unity are
either downplayed or acknowledged, con-
demned, and in that way recast. The future of
“restituted” African objects will be a fascinat-
ing chapter in this ongoing process—and will
provide an important new subject of study for
historians of African art.

For the August 19 date of issuance for Brévié’s arrêté

Jules Brévié to G. Joseph, director of political affairs

Remarques
All translations from French are the author’s unless
otherwise noted.
1 Albert Charton, “Organisation du musée de l’A.O.F.
à Dakar,” report to Governor-General Jules Brévié, Juin
7, 1933, dossier “Organisation et creation du musée,” O
606 31, Archives Nationales du Sénégal, Dakar (ANS),
pp. 1–3, 5. This typescript also mentions the earlier
discussion that took place in 1921, for which no other
documentation survives.
2
for the Ministry of Colonies, Juillet 21, 1936, dossier
“Organisation et création du musée,” O 606 31, ANS.
3
(Adedze gives the date as August 22), see Théodore
Monod, “Remarques sur l’Institut français d’Afrique
noire,” typescript, Avril 30, 1938, dossier “IFAN,
Création du musée, rapports, correspondances, arrêtés
(1931–1939),” O 606 31, ANS.
4 Charton, “Organisation du musée de l’A.O.F. à
Dakar,” p. 8.
5
“Seconde note au sujet de la mission Labouret,»
undated typescript report, 2AM1 K56c, subfolder “La-
bouret,” Archives du Musée de l’Homme, Paris (AMH).
On the basis of the itinerary described, this report came
from Labouret’s mission of 1936.
6 Minister of Colonies Jacques Mandel to Léon
Geismar, acting Governor-General of AOF, Oct. 4, 1938,
dossier “Musées d’Afrique,” O 606 31, ANS.
7
d’art volées par la France lors de la colonization,” inter-
view with Louis-Georges Tin, Panafricain TV, Aug. 8,
2016. https://www.panafricain.tv/benin-demande-resti-
tution-5-000-oeuvres-dart-volees-france-lors-de-coloni-
sation/.

“Le Bénin demande la restitution des 5,000 oeuvres

Références citées
Adedze, Agbenyega. 2002. “Symbols of Triumph: IFAN
and the Colonial Museum Complex in French West
Africa (1938–1960).” Museum Anthropology 25 (2): 50.

Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev.
éd. Londres: Verso.

Anon. [Michel Leiris]. 1931. Instructions sommaires
pour les collecteurs d’objets ethnographiques. Paris: Musée
d’ethnographie.

Tonnelier, Frederick. 2005. “States, Empires, and Political
Imagination.” In Colonialism in Question: Theory,
Knowledge, Histoire, pp. 153–203. Berkeley: Université de
Presse californienne.

Leiris, Michel. 1966. “L’Afrique fantôme.” In Jean Jamin
(éd.), Miroir de l’Afrique. Paris: Gallimard.

Prix, Sally. 2007. Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s
Museum on the Quai Branly. Chicago: Université de
Chicago Press.

Sarr, Felwine, and Bénédicte Savoy. 2018. The Restitution
of Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics,
trans. Drew S. Burk. Paris: Ministère de la culture.

Strother, Z.S. 2019. “Eurocentrism Still Sets the Terms of
Restitution of African Art.” The Art Newspaper, Jan. 18,
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/comment/eurocen-
trism-still-defines-african-art.

Wilder, Gary. 2005. The French Imperial Nation-State:
Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two
World Wars. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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