October 28, 2021 9:54 am
The ceremony that took place on October 27 at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris has a symbolically and politically strong dimension: 26 sculptures from the kingdom of Abomey, the result of a French military conquest in the nineteenth century, were returned to Benin an essential part of the historical heritage that the West African country was deprived of for 130 years.
When General Alfred-Amédée Dodds, in the name of the third French republic, conquered the kingdom by condemning King Behanzin to an exile from which he never returned, that kind of action was fully in the spirit of the time. The British behaved the same way in Nigeria, the Belgians in Congo and the Portuguese in Angola.
90-95 percent of Africa’s cultural heritage has been stolen and taken to Europe, where today it enriches the treasures of the Quai Branly, the British museum, the royal museum of Belgium or the Humboldt foundation in Germany. Now these prestigious institutions receive a more than legitimate request for the restitution of the artifacts. France was the first to take the initiative, with the report commissioned in 2018 by Emmanuel Macron to two experts, Senegalese Sénégalais Felwine Sarr and France’s Bénédicte Savoy, and with this first return to Benin. It is not a small gesture.
The gesture is the son of a world in which the West has stopped dictating the law
On the one hand, there is a dimension of justice and dignity that serves an evident diplomatic interest; on the other, a fundamental principle, the inalienable character of national collections in France, where any work that enters then never leaves.
In his newly published memoirs Daniel Jouanneau, former head of protocol of the French presidency under François Mitterrand, recounts an eloquent episode: in 1993 the president paid a visit to South Korea in hopes of selling the French high-speed train to the Seoul government. the Tgv. But the Koreans demanded the return of 287 royal manuscripts stolen from the French navy during the Second Empire (1852-1870) in retaliation after a massacre of Christian missionaries. No manuscripts, no Tgv.
Mitterrand devised a ruse: he brought with him a single manuscript to start the negotiation. But when the heads of the national library of France who accompanied him with the precious tome discovered, once they arrived, that they should have abandoned it, they refused a gesture that in their eyes violated the aforementioned inalienability.
The former head of the protocol says: “Two logics, both respectable, collided: the ethics of the archive curators against the law and the reason of state. Eventually the curators gave in, but with great regret. One of them burst into tears ”. It is worth pointing out that the 287 manuscripts are currently in Korea and that France has built the Korean Tgv.
The “reason of state” is still at work today, and Macron had to resort to a law introduced last year to return the works to Benin. The gesture of Paris is part of the attempt to establish new relations with the African continent, and the path also passes through these demonstrations of respect.
It is a universal process impossible to stop, which will hurt someone’s sensitivity but is the child of a world in which the West has stopped dictating the law and above all has to deal with its own past, even the darkest one.
The symbols of Abomey’s kingdom return home, and that’s right. We will go to admire them in Benin, this time without bringing war.
(Translation by Andrea Sparacino)
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