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Colonial Heritage How to deal with the unequal distribution of ‘shared’ colonial heritage With the French and German recommendations as guidance Word count: 44, 472 Kato Declercq Student number: 01504409 Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Hugo DeBlock A dissertation submitted to Ghent University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in African Studies Academic year: 2019 – 2020 Table of Contents 1. Introduction 4 2. The Western way of collecting 8 2.1. Collecting before colonisation 8 2.2. Collecting during colonisation 10 2.3. The improper interest in ‘the other’ 16 2.4. A selection of disputed Belgian cases 20 2.4.1. The storm ‘Emile Storms’ rages through the Congo Free State 20 2.4.2. The secret of the buffalo mask of Luulu 21 2.4.3. The abduction by A. Delcommune of a famous Nkisi Nkonde 23 2.4.4. Léon Rom, the man who decorated his garden with human skulls 25 2.4.5. What is the story of the Ndop statues of the Kuba Kingdom 26 3. Restitution, source of loaded debate 28 3.1. Definition of restitution 30 3.2. Issues intertangled with restitution 33 3.2.1. First encounter with the French and German guidelines 35 3.2.2. Why should one consider restitution: proponents and opponents 41 3.2.3. Which objects are eligible for restitution 44 3.2.4. Who can claim and to whom should be restituted 50 3.2.4.1. About claimants and receivers 51 3.2.4.2. Who bears the burden of proof 55 3.2.4.3. Provenance research 57 3.2.4.4. Archives and access 60 3.2.5. When and how is restitution supposed to happen 64 3.2.6. The juridical aspect 70 4. Paving the way for restitution in the AfricaMuseum 77 4.1. Transparency and accessibility 79 4.2. Dialogue and collaborations 84 5. Conclusion 89 6. References 100 2 Ackowledgements I would like to thank a few people whose help was vital in writing my master dissertation. First and foremost I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Hugo DeBlock for his indispensable assistance in writing this dissertation. I could always contact him with questions or concerns and I am very grateful for our smooth collaboration. He helped me in adjusting to my subject. Without his clear and honest feedback, this thesis would not have been possible. Secondly, I would like to thank my parents for their advice and encouragement, their interest in my thesis subject, and our numerous thought-provoking discussions about restitution and decolonisation. Thirdly, I would like to thank Marieke Olson for correcting my spelling mistakes and especially for her flexibility and dedication. Lastly, I would like to thank my friends whom I could always turn to for support and who were there for me when I needed a break from writing. 3 1. Introduction Macron's notorious speech in Ouagadougou on November 28th 2017 sparked international and intercontinental debate on how to deal with the colonial collections, often acquired under dubious circumstances and still housed in Western institutions today. The corresponding complex and sensitive restitution questions have resurfaced. Macron ordered a report to pave the way to effective restitution. Around the same time, the Deutscher Museums Bund drew up guidelines as well to address the hot topic. The debate is important and inevitable because, after all, restitution can be a starting point or part of a larger whole to create new, equitable relationships between former colonisers and colonised. Together, a new more assertive African generation, morally responsible feeling European descendants, and the African international community stand up to raise awareness for past wrongdoings. The West can no longer escape its historical, psychological, political, and economic responsibility for a traumatic past that still influences the present. In this thesis, I examine the following research question: How are we, collectively, to deal with the unequal distribution of ‘shared’ colonial heritage, with French and German recommendations as guidance? Yet, whose heritage is actually being preserved in Western museums? Are the collections African or Belgian? From a purely legal point of view they are for the time being Belgian property, but are they also Belgian from a moral point of view? The well-established term ‘shared heritage’ is used for collections created by Africans and appropriated by Europeans. How are we to understand this ‘sharing’, knowing that the vast majority of the objects are housed in Western institutions, completely unequally distributed, and often acquired under dubious circumstances? I endorse the statement of Hein Vanhee, a Belgian curator and historian at the AfricaMuseum, who stated that the “only meaningful interpretation of what a shared heritage may be, is when the common study and presentation of museum objects can forge a shared understanding of specific episodes or moments of the (colonial) past” (Vanhee 2016: 7, emphasis in original). Sarah Van Beurden, a Belgian historian and an associate professor of history at the Ohio State University, points out that the concept of ‘shared heritage’ implies equality and a certain justification for keeping the objects in Western institutions and that this ignores the unequal balance of power in which the collecting took place. “After all, the reality is that the possession of this material is currently not shared” (Blog University of Cologne s.d.). Yet, I still use the term in my discourse, 4 always placed between quotation marks, to remind and draw attention to this inaccurate notion and to decolonise this mindset. How to deal with the presence of looted colonial objects is quite a challenge for the museums involved, for the governments of both the former coloniser and colonised countries, and for the society as a whole. After all, the colonial past can still be felt today in discriminatory and stereotyping practices, as current events make painfully clear. I divide my dissertation into four chapters. In order to know how to deal with colonial collections, I investigate in the next chapter, placed in their respective colonial history, how objects ended up in Western institutions and, specifically, in Belgium, France, and Germany. I focus briefly on the colonial history of France and Germany to better place their guidelines on how to deal with colonial objects, but I go more in-depth into the Belgian past. From this, the following questions arise: Who did the gathering and for what purpose? Is there a difference between the way of collecting before and during the colonial period? Did the museums know, when a specific object came into their possession, under what circumstances the acquisition took place or from whom it came? I devote a separate section to the collecting of human remains due to its sensitive nature. In the last section, I unravel five Belgian cases illustrating the colonial violence that often accompanied the acquisition of objects to find out whether these looted items belong in Western institutions. The question then arises, how are we, collectively, to deal with these disputed objects? For me, their restitution is an important and necessary step to take in the decolonisation process. Nevertheless, the restitution debate often provokes many reactions. I aim to explore this controversial dispute in-depth. I investigate in the third chapter issues intertangled with restitution, without striving for completeness, and address the following questions from different perspectives: Why should one consider restitution? Which objects are eligible for restitution? Who can claim restitution, and to whom should objects be restituted? When and how is restitution supposed to happen? I, then, end this chapter with the biggest barrier to overcome, namely, the juridical aspect of the debate. In elaborating on these factors which play a role in discussions on restitution, I make, at the same time, a critical comparative study between the French report ‘The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics’ and the German guidelines ‘Care of Collections from Colonial Contexts’, which also address these concerns. I try 5 to approach each issue from as many angles as possible by means of international criticism. In addition, I attempt to include at each time Belgium’s state of affairs regarding the concern. In the fourth chapter, I examine to what extent the AfricaMuseum in Belgium has decolonised its collections and exhibition management and has made restitution negotiable. I limit my research on the AfricaMuseum to a few parameters which are important in the decolonisation process. In this analysis, I confine myself to a number of observations without striving for completeness. First, I investigate whether the AfricaMuseum provides transparent information about disputed colonial objects and to what extent the available information is made accessible. Does the museum tell the right historical narrative and can it release its merely Western point of view? Next, I take a closer look at how the institution cooperates with diaspora and source communities. I determine whether Belgian guidelines would have been valuable for the museum to deal with the objects when they reorganised the permanent exhibition and whether instructions could be useful now to make certain adjustments. I touch very briefly, in view of the recent events that I cannot and will not disregard, on the relationship between the historical suppression of the colonised and the ongoing fight against structural racism and discrimination in our present society, to illustrate that the need for decolonisation goes far beyond the mere restitution of objects,
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