This lecture, cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, was recorded in Berlin by Prof. Bénédicte Savoy with the help of cameraman and editor Timur El Rafie.
On its cover of August 25 1960, L'Express magazine spoke of " l'Afrique en miettes " ( Africa in crumbs) to describe the situation on the continent following independence, but the organization of a Pan-African festival in Algiers in 1969 testifies to the willingness of these countries to work together, beyond the new nation-states. By the end of the 1960s, a pan-African discourse on heritage claims was making itself heard, relayed in particular on the international scene by the voices of Ekpo Eyo, the famous Nigerian archaeologist, and Amadou Mahtar M'bow, then Director-General of Unesco.
These requests for restitution, of which there are numerous traces in the administrative archives of France, Germany and elsewhere, gave rise to major debates in Europe on what should be done with these collections. In the early 1980s, for example, a report by the French Museums Inspectorate expressed support for the return of cultural property to the African continent, while German Minister Hildegard Hamm-Brücher announced that she wanted restitutions to take place in 1984 to mark the centenary of the Berlin Conference.
Despite these political signals, strong resistance from both the art market and the museum world, for whom the dismantling of skilfully assembled series would be tantamount to a scientific catastrophe, was a lasting obstacle to the success of this legitimate process of memorial recovery.
