Though they are crucial to the movement, advocating for the restitution of stolen African artefacts cannot be left to sympathetic actors of the West, Chika Okeke-Agulu argues. He says, ‘It is no surprise that most of the important scholarly publication on royal Benin art have been by researchers overseas who have better access to museums and collections that benefitted, directly or indirectly, from colonial-era looting.’
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In 2018, Senegalese economist, Felwine Sarr, and French art historian, Bénédicte Savoy, published a restitution report. Commissioned by French president, Emmanuel Macron, if anything, the report formally kickstarted the Macron government’s ambition to return artefacts looted by the French army in 1892 to Benin Republic. ‘It provided segments of the pro-restitution camp good material, as well as some convenient, though questionable soundbites, like the claim in the report that 90—95 per cent of Africa’s cultural heritage are held in museum collections overseas,’ Chika Okeke-Agulu, who is a professor of African and African Diaspora Art at Princeton University, wrote via email. According to Okeke-Agulu, a prominent voice in academia and the art world pushing for the return of African artefacts, ‘provenance research is vital to restitution claims, especially where the origins and ownership of given artefacts are not properly and reliably documented.’
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