Afropolitanist Return and Circulation

Abstract

In June 2020, Congolese-born activist Mwazulu Diyabanza and five others attempted to remove a nineteenth-century Chadian funeral post from the Musée du Quai Branly—Jacques Chirac. Diyabanza would go on to enact this type of protest in two more European museums before the end of the year. He and his fellow protestors proclaimed a collective European and North American complicity and were tried by French courts for group theft of an object of cultural heritage. As the reader likely knows, the cultural heritage here in question was France's, whose appeal for the items in part mirrors Amanda M. Maples's Afropolitanist considerations in her First Word. These items have indeed been resocialized, but should at the very least be accessible to their communities of origin as they speak to different geographies in multiple languages (Maples 2020).The year 2020 and its deluge of surprises left us with small consolations: much of the African continent emerged from the COVID epidemic relatively unscathed. However, the virus' ramifications have already begun affecting sub-Saharan African countries, spurring legitimate concerns about vaccine equity. These dynamics undoubtedly mirror the stakes and discourse that affect sub-Saharan African countries and cultural institutions and only strengthen the case for financial support. Dr. Memel Kassi notes the disparity in the circulation of artwork among the United States, Europe, and the African continent in her contribution to this discussion, and I join her in a call for financial commitments from North American institutions. A model for comanagement, in the form of a fixed-term rental deposit, complements Maples's call for North American museums to properly investigate provenance and inform the placement of these works of art.However, this task cannot be completed unilaterally. Much of the cataloguing and provenance research, the investigations into cultural heritage and exercises that advance institutional capabilities in North American and European institutions, remains inaccessible to the majority of museum professionals on the African continent. Adopting a significant “role in a politics of cultural action” is an exercise that in and of itself demands boundless adaptability. Efforts such as the controversial Humboldt Museum's “Humboldt Lab Tanzania,” with support from TURN (The Fund for Artistic Cooperation between Germany and African Countries), engaged scholars in the sites of origin of selected pieces and the store rooms for the very sites where the artifacts are held. Such initiatives, though still insufficient, are essential to active cultural reengagement around these very artifacts.I also echo Christine Mullen Kreamer's reflection on the distinctions between process and outcome, and the manners in which both can be useful material exercises for developing new dynamics of equity between North American and African institutions. Given these histories of exclusion and the concerns around ensuring that artifact return follows and instills “sustainable development,” the hazards—legal, geopolitical, financial, emotional—demand novel modes of reasoning across institutions and geographies. Following Kreamer's question and reiterating Strother's own, we must ask how North American institutions can work toward outcomes that won't replicate the very imbalanced hierarchies of power that have produced the current complications around assessing the merits of return.North American institutional partnerships cannot be limited to North American peers. As Maples measuredly points out, the burden of devising best practice guidelines cannot be shouldered by one institution alone. The same logic extends continentally. Travel and knowledge-sharing must be made active and transparent and cannot exclude the very professionals who will themselves ensure conservation and curation for the objects that will be repatriated or circulated.We must not forget, ultimately, that properly accounting for the placement of African artwork is a mutually beneficial gesture in addition to an ethical obligation, one that will result in stronger relationships between African and North American museums. African institutions will hopefully only gain in prominence, agency, and influence in the future, bringing Amadou Mahtar M'Bow's 2000 appeal to fruition. Construction will soon begin for the Edo Museum of West African Art (EMOWAA) on the very site of the former Benin Palace. It is set to house the Benin Bronzes (on loan) after a fifty-year dream of restitution, embodying an Afropolitan repatriation of agency (Maples 2020). We are best served by cultivating a future where the most prominent bastions of African cultural heritage can be safely and conscientiously cherished from both sides of the Atlantic.