Press review Germany:Germany will return the bronzes of Benin, emblematic pieces of looted African colonial art, to Nigeria from 2022. This decision, described as "historic", is the first result of a vast debate around the restitution of objects brought back to Germany in the context of colonization. However, as we learn from the latest works of Bénédicte Savoy and Götz Aly, this debate actually has an older history, and above all, it was carefully avoided by the German museum authorities. The question now arises as to how to continue to exhibit colonial art with full knowledge of the facts.
Sculptures looted by British soldiers in Benin in 1897, on display at the Linden Museum in Stuttgart as part of the "Where is Africa" exhibition.
Summary-
The Benin Bronzes will be returned from 2022
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A fight that dates back to the 1960s
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Rewriting the story of Luf's boat
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The city of Stuttgart exposes its colonial past
Benin bronzes will be returned from 2022
"Uncovering and coming to terms with Germany's colonial past ", this is the responsibility that the German museum authorities are facing today. Culture Minister Monika Grütters (CDU) concluded with these words the decisive meeting organized on April 29, 2021 between a group of German museum curators and their Nigerian counterparts. Even if the negotiations are far from over, the process of returning works of colonial art present in German collections has started, with two requirements:the greatest possible transparency and the return of a substantial number of objects A first timetable has been set, focusing on the most emblematic works:by June 15, a list of all the “Benin bronzes” present in Germany must indeed be published.
These sculptures, reliefs and objects in bronze, brass and ivory come from the royal palace of the former kingdom of Benin, looted by British troops in 1897; Germany acquired more than a thousand. Interviewed by the radio channel Deutsche Welle , the curator of the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne, Nanette Snoep, welcomes this unanimous decision and speaks of a “real need to decolonize museums ”. She also contextualizes its meaning:“Restitution is the right to write one's own story. ” This reappropriation is accomplished in the material sense as well as in the symbolic sense of the decision, because Nigerian curators will be able to choose the objects they wish to see exhibited in their country, those which will remain in Germany and the way in which they will be shown.
The Benin bronzes will be returned from 2022
"Uncovering and coming to terms with Germany's colonial past ", this is the responsibility that the German museum authorities are facing today. Culture Minister Monika Grütters (CDU) concluded with these words the decisive meeting organized on April 29, 2021 between a group of German museum curators and their Nigerian counterparts. Even if the negotiations are far from over, the process of returning works of colonial art present in German collections has started, with two requirements:the greatest possible transparency and the return of a substantial number of objects A first timetable has been set, focusing on the most emblematic works:by June 15, a list of all the “Benin bronzes” present in Germany must indeed be published.
These sculptures, reliefs and objects in bronze, brass and ivory come from the royal palace of the former kingdom of Benin, looted by British troops in 1897; Germany acquired more than a thousand. Interviewed by the radio channel Deutsche Welle , the curator of the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne, Nanette Snoep, welcomes this unanimous decision and speaks of a “real need to decolonize museums ”. She also contextualizes its meaning:“Restitution is the right to write one's own story. ” This reappropriation is accomplished in the material sense as well as in the symbolic sense of the decision, because Nigerian curators will be able to choose the objects they wish to see exhibited in their country, those which will remain in Germany and the way in which they will be shown. The debate on colonial art ignited on the occasion of the opening of the Humboldt Forum at the end of 2020. This museum which is to house the “extra-European” collections of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK) is built in the site of the old Berlin castle, of which it reproduces the facade. For the Berlin senator in charge of culture, Klaus Lederer, restitution has become a prerequisite for any exhibition. The objects shown will now be on loan, while waiting to join the collections of the new museum in Benin City, which is scheduled to open in 2024.
A fight that goes back to the 1960s
In reality, the debate on the restitution of colonial art does not date from this century, it dates back to the 1960s, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung tells us. , in a review of the latest book by Bénédicte Savoy, a French art historian based in Berlin. This book* published in March in Germany retraces through archival documents the battle in which several African states (including Nigeria and Zaire) fought to recover their cultural heritage. Writer and journalist Paulin Joachim, editor-in-chief of the Senegalese monthly Bingo , signed an editorial in January 1965 entitled “Rendez-nous l’art nègre”, which urges the return of “material proof of the soul of black Africa ” in order to bring the continent a boost of pride, even if he is perfectly aware of the condescension of Western museums, justifying a posteriori the looting and possession of colonial works of art by the will and the need to protect them against destruction. African claims will fail for several reasons. The German museum authorities, still marked by a colonialist conception of legitimizing Western cultural guardianship over countries “politically or economically inferior ” (in the words of Werner Knopp, president of the SPK from 1977 to 1998), will agree to resist this assault which could jeopardize entire collections of ethnological and archaeological museums. Restitution was therefore knowingly prevented, as evidenced by the failure to carry out inventories of these collections. The economic and political crises have also silenced the cultural elites who were at the origin of the discourse of restitution; it died out at the same time as they disappeared, exiled or murdered. This is an aspect that Bénédicte Savoy's book does not highlight enough, regrets the FAZ , even though it was she who showed by her denunciation of the Humboldt Forum how important it was, in order to make it effective, to take the debate on restitution out of its purely militant context in order to have it accepted within political discourse.
* Bénédicte Savoy, Afrikas Kampf um seine Kunst. Geschichte einer postkolonialen NIederlage . C.H. Beck, 2021.
Rewrite the history of the Luf-boat
Another stone in the pond:the latest book by historian specializing in Nazism Götz Aly*, which reveals a “dark chapter ” of German colonial history more buried in memory:the presence of Germany in Oceania at the end of the 19 e century. In an interview with Spiegel , Aly details the massacres and enslavement of the population of the Hermit Islands, and in particular of the island of Luf, in present-day Papua New Guinea, forced to supply mother-of-pearl and copra to German merchants. Ironically, the last boat built on this island, in 1890-1895, was brought back to Germany in 1903 and is the highlight of the “extra-European” collections of the Humboldt Forum. The historian has reconstructed its provenance, which differs from the official history established by the SPK, evoking an acquisition which could pass for legal, when in reality it results from a punitive expedition. The Berlin museums hold 65,000 objects from the South Seas. For Götz Aly, a minimum of honesty would require “telling the respective colonial history ” of these pieces, so that visitors do not consider them only from the point of view of their exotic nature, but understand how they have before their eyes “the remains of an advanced civilization ”, systematically destroyed by European settlers. Museums must stop concealing the dubious origins of the objects they exhibit, asks the historian. His latest book should thus be read as a tribute to the populations of these once paradisiacal South Sea islands, and to Luf's boat, “blind spot in the debate on colonial history ”, which he considers “the last testimony of a great culture ”. There were hundreds of such boats on the Hermit Islands before Europeans arrived. These outrigger boats, over 15 meters long, were made without nails and richly painted. Accommodating 50 people on board, they could navigate the high seas over very long distances. Luf's boat is the last example of this art, the Germans destroyed all the others during their punitive expeditions.
* Götz Aly, Das Prachtboot. Wie Deutsche die Kunstschätze der Südsee raubten . Fischer, 2021.
The Linden Museum in Stuttgart exhibits the city's colonial past
The city of Stuttgart is part of this movement of rewriting by questioning its own colonial past within an exhibition-workshop installed in the Linden Museum. Entitled “Heavy heritage”, it proceeds to the systematic explanation of the exhibits. A commentary device that seems to overwhelm the visitor at first sight, when in reality it acts in a perfectly illuminating way, notes the tageszeitung . The museum was created in 1911 from the collections of the Württemberg Association for Commercial Geography and the Promotion of German Interests Abroad, chaired by Karl von Linden. It is no longer possible to show his portrait without accompanying it with a panel retracing his career. Legitimizing his zeal as a collector through the practice of “rescue ethnology”, he personified the ambiguity of the German elite at the turn of the 20 e . century, steeped in Bismarck's colonial policy. Another part of the museum's collection comes from the collection of another “looter”, leader of an expedition during the Boxer War (1890-1901) in China. Finally, the museum also tries to put into perspective the “ethnological shows” that served as popular entertainment between 1857 and 1930; German onlookers coming to visit sorts of “human zoos” exhibiting people from distant lands (Lapland, India or North America). The exhibition ends with an invitation to discussion, since visitors are encouraged to express themselves on the colonial past of the museum and the city, and on the possible persistence of colonialism today. For the curators of the museum, it is the critical distance and the multiplication of points of view that will make it possible to no longer consider history from a purely nostalgic point of view, but above all scientific.