Who Owns the Past? Through the Lens of the Bird of Prophecy

Abstract

The colonial era saw the forced removal of thousands of objects of African cultural patrimony.  In the decades since the end of the colonial era on the African continent, innumerable calls have been made for the restitution of plundered and looted objects of cultural patrimony currently held by major western museums and private collectors. Through a case study of one such object, the Idiophone: Bird of Prophecy, this paper asks who should have jurisdiction in representing objects of cultural patrimony and the historical narratives in which they are rooted, and considers the role that the return of objects plays in the process of decolonization. This paper also presents an analysis of arguments against, and obstacles to, repatriation, in order to argue that museums today have a responsibility to repatriate objects acquired through looting or other exchanges which exploited colonial indigenous power dynamics.