Read more  In 2018, the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, following his speech in Ouagoudougou in the fall of 2017, commissioned two academics, Bénédicte Savoy, professor of art history at the Technical University of Berlin, and Felwin Sarr, Senegalese writer and economist, to conduct a report on the conditions for temporary or permanent restitution of African heritage in Africa.
The Sarr-Savoy report highlighted the uniqueness of the African case as well as recommendations tailored to this specific case. The two authors insisted on the need to implement restitutions in all cases, unfortunately frequent, of violent or belligerent obtaining of these works of art. They also insisted on the need to work on the history of these works, to reconstruct their memory, to bring them back to life in a context, often, now disappeared or forgotten. The effective restitution in 2021 by the French State to Benin, at the request of the African country, of 26 works from the royal treasure of Abomey followed this report.
Anne-Solène Rolland "This was the first restitution of objects following the speech by the President of the Republic in Ouagadougou. […] Parliament was approached by the government since French law protects public heritage: it was therefore necessary to pass a law to remove these assets from the national collections. This restitution was carried out within a framework of constant dialogue, both at the level of political dialogue and at the level of heritage professionals."
Malick Ndiaye: "In view of everything that has been pillaged and plundered over many years, the 26 pieces seem like a drop in the ocean. But we must welcome that and we must also welcome the desire to see things in a positive light, namely that this restitution is the pretext for collaboration at the level of the museum institution."
To discuss these requests for restitution, the responses provided, but also more broadly the links between French museums and African museums, Dominique de Font-Réaulx, general curator at the Louvre Museum, producer of the series "Art is the Museum", receives, for this second episode, Anne-Solène Rolland, director of collections at the Musée du Quai-Branly Jacques Chirac, former head of department of the museums of France, and El Hadji Malick N'Diaye, director of the Théodore Monod Museum in Dakar, curator of the Dakar Biennale.
Malick Ndiaye "The first effect [of the dispossession] is this strong feeling of dispossession of a rich and ancient heritage. Because when a heritage is gone, in its place, there are ghosts, even a total void that can be moral, intellectual, but physical above all*. Because this heritage was used for cults, rites and to make the social, natural and spiritual balance of the communities work."
Malick Ndiaye: "Today, in our universities, we have students and researchers who could have benefited from the presence of these objects if they were on the continent. And this would have allowed many disciplines, including art history, to develop better."
41 min

Anne-Solène Rolland "We are making our history and must therefore be able to tell the origins of our collections, but more broadly the biography of the objects, the intellectual, political and societal contexts in which the different stages of our institutions have been inscribed. And it is very important not to do it alone, to do it with academics, but also to do it with the countries with which we work."
Malick Ndiaye “It is important to look back at history to connect these fragments with the world in motion […]. And that is why, at the Théodore Monod Museum, we established a program in 2016 called Création patrimoine. […] The idea is that heritage is not a thing of the past. And promoting it therefore also involves showing the permanence of the materials used to give substance to this heritage: fabric, wood, iron… [Materials] still used by contemporary artists who produce new works based on what the elders have already done.”
“The Wrestlers”: exhibition by artist Louis Barthelemy at the Théodore Monod Museum – Louis Barthelemy
Malick Ndiaye: “For us, telling the history of museums is a little bit about subverting this history, unpacking it and making it transparent. Exhibiting objects alongside archives and telling new stories, but above all – and this is why we collaborate with contemporary art – creating new archives.”
Anne-Solène Rolland "When Senghor speaks of the civilization of the universal, it is indeed this idea of ​​a lateral universal in the sense of a universal that is not a universal seen from the West. This is also the reason why we gave this subtitle Reinventing the Universal to the exhibition that we are dedicating to Senghor. And it is the profound vocation of the exhibition to remind us that several universals are possible."
To go furtherWatch the beautiful documentary by Nora Philippe, broadcast on Arte Tv (October 2021), Restituer? L'Afrique en quête de ses chefs-d'œuvres. (available via the You tube channel of RTS – Radio Télévision Suisse). Read the article in reference to this documentary, by Harry Bellet, published on the website Le Monde.fr, on October 28, 2021. And also, the one published on Télérama.fr, by François Ekchajzer. And also, the Museotopia conference (videos of all the presentations available via this link), at the Collège de France, on June 11, 2019, a day organized by Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr, with, in particular, their concluding conference, Reflections on the future of museums in Africa (7) (You Tube channel of the Collège de France). Also watch two videos, Restitution of African art objects: where are we? – August 2022 (You Tube channel AJ+ French) and Felwine Sarr: “The restitution of African works is not a gesture of the prince” – November 2019 (You Tube channel, Le Monde Afrique). ➢ About Anne-Solène Rolland
➢ About Malick Ndiaye
Some references citedMusical extracts 

"This post is a summary of information from our information monitoring"