Restitution of African heritage. Fictions and realities ; Restitutions du patrimoine africain. Fictions et réalités

Open Access

Abstract

In an unnamed museum, Killmonger, Black Panther rival, faces a mask looted during the Benin City bag in 1897. The young man fixes the mask in cages. It will continue to steal it with great reinforcements of special effects and rocambolous ruses that have made Hollywoodian films renowned. What is very welcome in the latest successful production of Studios Marvel is how the fiction industry becomes a vector of political utopia. What we see here, fugitively, is the 'return' of an object forcibly pushed away from its owners, it is the return of a lack of, a phantom. The film imagines the return of a phantom. The denunciation of the conditions for collecting African heritage held in major Western museums is not new. In this, it can be said that Black Panther descends straight from Michel Leiris. In his newspaper, on 6 September 1931, he described with shame the forced purchase for FRF 20, and against the will of the villagers of Dyabougou, one of the masterpieces of the Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac museum: "When I see that two mankind in fact never threatened me, I see with a colleague who, only some time after, turns into distaste, that you still feel happy with one's own when you are a Blanc and you hold a knife in his hands" 1. It will not prevent Leiris from taking possession of the object and fleeing with him. In November 2017, in Ouagadougou, Emmanuel Macron expressed his willingness to make 'temporary or permanent restitution of African heritage in Africa'. The plight of Burkinabé students was only equivalent to the outraged scepticism of some French conservatives. Commissioned by the Elysée, Senegalese economist and writer Felwine Sarr and the historian of art Béatrice Savoy submitted in November 2018 a report on the conditions for the restitution of sub-Saharan Africa's heritage, which was immediately made available online and published to be made available to the general public 2. The controversy immediately emerged, with some prophetising a future marked by 'colonial repentance' that would 'deprive' European ...