Looting of African Heritage: Powerful new book explores damage done by colonial theft

European colonisation of Africa was not only about armed conquest, massacres and the exploitation of resources. It was also about the appropriation of spiritual and political symbols. It led to the erasure of a social, cultural, symbolic world.

A 2024 book, Fifteen Colonial Thefts: A Guide to Looted African Heritage in Museums, adds to the growing literature on the history of the colonial looting of African art and heritage and the issue of restitution, reappropriation and return. Published by Pluto, the book is edited by Ghanaian-born multidisciplinary artist Sela K. Adjei and Berlin-based postdoctoral researcher Yann Le Gall.

It opens with a powerful foreword by Peju Layiwola, art historian, visual artist and professor of art and art history at the University of Lagos. Then follow 33 African and Afro-diasporic authors — historians, curators, artists and activists. They describe in great detail the political, symbolic and cultural meaning of what they refuse to call “objects”. They chronicle the conditions of their looting, their fate in Western institutions or in private collections, the efforts needed to excavate them from erasure and obliteration, and the questions that the repatriation of each case raises.

Reading each chapter is to penetrate the perverse world of colonial collecting. It is to be made aware of the lies, the arrogant ignorance, and the imbecilic certainty of the colonial officer, the collector, and the explorer. Each demonstrates that colonisation was about the humiliation and degradation of the human spirit.

Looting art in times of wars was not new. What made European colonial looting distinctive, though, was that the loot-filled a specific institution, the museum.

Colonial plunder filled European museums. So much so that their staff are still unable to describe exactly what is in their collections. The diversity and the scale of looting attest to the greed of European colonisers who were not content with stealing ten sacred drums or one hundred bows but thousands of them. They grabbed everything — talismanic shirts, weapons, jewellery, statues, arrows, symbols of power.

Therefore, all the authors argue, time is needed to unpack what colonialism has obscured and what Eurocentrism has ignored.

Fifteen Colonial Thefts should be required reading for anyone who wishes to participate in any conversation about the looting of the African continent. It is a powerful argument for including African experts and communities in the process of re-appropriation. It is rigorously researched and does not focus on exemplary cases like the Benin Bronzes. More importantly, it conveys the perspectives of descendants of the dispossessed.

The idea of asking African artists to illustrate the book rather than using colonial imagery is brilliant. Integrating QR codes through the texts allows the reader to learn more about a personality or an event. This opens a space of conversation between different sources of knowledge.

The cover of the book Fifteen Colonial Thefts: A Guide to Looted African Heritage in Museums. (Photo: Pluto Press)

The book sets an example for publishing on systemic violence, looting, silencing and reparation.

Looting and collecting

The book is divided into three parts: The Battlefield, The Royal Palace and The Sacred. These parts are in turn divided into chapters. The 15 chapters present a great variety of cases to drive the point that looted African heritage was not only masks or carved doors torn from palaces. It was also, for example:

the “treasure of Samori Touré”, or crates containing his saddle, sabre, war bonnet, battle axe, necklaces, rings, amulets, skulls of his soldiers, and gold taken to Paris,

• a German cartridge upcycled as a snuff box, embodying Chagga resistance in Tanzania
• the fate of Sudanese Mahdi banners, which expressed adherence to a group and were evidence of a society that prized literacy
• the public hanging by Belgian colonials of the chief of the city of Boma in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The authors restore all the dimensions of the 15 colonial thefts, acknowledging that the term “object” strips collections of their humanity and spiritual essence.

The editors quote Heinrich Umlauff, director of Berlin Ethnographic Museum and German art dealership J.F.G. Umlauff, who wrote in 1914 that “Africans are very attached to their things and especially to old, inherited family pieces … Only in time of war or in the case of great expeditions are conditions more favourable when power exerts a certain pressure.” This further demonstrates that taking “things” from Africans not only required violence but also that Africans, contrary to colonial ideology, Africans gave great value to their heritage

By stealing and appropriating spiritual and political symbols, by burning palaces, libraries and temples and organising disgraceful public ceremonies of surrender, European colonising powers sought to erase any sign of cultural, social and spiritual life.

African cosmologies and knowledge were ignored.

Repatriation, returns, reappropriation

This guide is an invaluable addition to the conversation on the repatriation of African art and heritage that has been going on for decades. Its urgency was reaffirmed by the 2018 report commissioned by Emmanuel Macron, president of France, which details the systemic plunder of African art, the early demands for restitution and the defensive reflex of European museums. Its authors called for a “new relational ethics”.

Repatriation is no longer a marginalised topic, but it is still reaping few rewards. The obstacles are numerous: the museums’ reticence; the Africans’ difficulty in getting visas to visit Europe; the cost of research; the legal barriers (African heritage has become museum property); the conditions imposed for return.

To the authors of Fifteen Colonial Thefts, repatriation goes further than challenging Eurocentric narratives and rewriting African history. It is a long process that must be done with the communities who demand the return of their heritage.