Museums don’t seem to be linked to political and ethical issues At first sight. We visit them out of curiosity, because we want to enjoy museum objects, increase our knowledge or refine our aesthetic senses and historical knowledge. As we gaze at museum objects we enjoy a moment of freedom from the busyness of our daily lives, and we tend to focus primarily on the objects’ aesthetic qualities.
A closer look reveals that this aestheticisation of museum objects brings certain risks. This is certainly true when it comes to stolen colonial art: artworks that were looted during the colonial era and exhibited in Western museums. We are often unaware of the fact that stolen colonial art has a long history of conflict, violence, abuse, money, ambition and greed.
In this context, we are often insufficiently sensitive to the manner in which stolen colonial art ended up in a museum in the first place. However, the presence of these objects in museums also raises a number of philosophical questions.
Exhibiting stolen colonial art in a museum damages these objects’ original social, political, cultural and religious significance. As such, it represents a violent decontextualising of such objects that goes beyond any material damage.
Achille Mbembe developed an informative, nuanced and compelling analysis of this problem at the award ceremony of the Gerda Henkel Prize (see ‘Further reading’). Although Mbembe focuses on African objects in Western museums, he makes some points that are also relevant in the context of the recent debate on the restitution of stolen colonial art. I will limit myself to mentioning two aspects that come to the fore in Mbembe’s analysis.
Mbembe’s approach
The first point concerns the actual background behind the presence of African objects in Western museums. Mbembe explains how colonial powers have caused material damage in the process of looting of African objects.
In this context he underlines that the loss of the African cultural heritage goes hand in hand with a loss of meaning: after all, these objects have their own significance in their original living contexts where social, cultural, political and religious practices give shape to individual and collective life forms. In other words: the violent misappropriation of these objects led to the destruction of the meaning or significance of African living worlds. In Mbembe’s words:
“Such is the world that we lost, that African objects bore and whose epiphany they celebrated through the plurality of their forms. This world is one that no one will ever be able to restitute to us”
The second point concerns the political, ethical and legal philosophical issues surrounding the restitution of African objects. If the looting these objects went beyond any material damage impaired the meaning-making of African living worlds, then a discussion of restitution cannot be limited to legal terms alone.
Capacity for truth
In other words: this is not only about material restitution but also about a radical change in how we look at colonial history. In this context, Europe must take political and ethical responsibility by adhering to what Mbembe calls ‘the capacity for truth’:
Mbembe’s arguments are important starting points in taking the discussion about stolen colonial to a deeper philosophical level, and in this context we should beware of approaching restitution as a purely technical (that is: legal or economic) problem.
“The truth is that Europe took things from us that it will never be able to restitute. […] Europe, for its part, will have to take responsibility for its acts, for that shady part of our shared history of which it has sought to relieve itself. The risk is that by failing to give an account of itself while restituting our objects, it concludes that, with the restitution complete, our right to remind it of the truth is removed. But for new ties to be woven, it must honour the truth, as truth is the teacher of responsibility. This debt of truth cannot be erased as a matter of principle.”
In this context we can and must address a great many issues that require further philosophical investigation such as the relation between history and responsibility, the relationship between ethics, politics and aesthetics where stolen colonial art is concerned, and the restitution of stolen colonial art as a crucial aspect of a new European self-understanding.
These are urgent issues that require both an interdisciplinary approach and a new specific philosophical terminology in which core principles such as truth, responsibility, guilt and history must be re-imagined and re-defined.
Further reading
Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Of African Objects in Western Museums/Über afrikanische Objekte in westlichen Museen. Edited by Gerda Henkel Stiftung. Münster: RHEMA.
Text: Antonio Cimino. This article previously appeared on Bij Nader Inzien. Photography: Monica Volpin via Pixabay.