The event will take place at the Museum of the Quai Branly in the presence of the French President, Emmanuel Macron, and the Beninese Minister of Foreign Affairs, Aurélien AGBENONCI.
Le Monde with AFP.
It is a very symbolic ceremony that stands Wednesday, October 27 in Paris: France acts the restitution in Benin of 26 works of the Royal Treasures of Abomey preserved so far at the Museum of the Quai Branly.
Emmanuel Macron will preside over the ceremony, which will be held at 4 pm in this Parisian museum housing thousands of African works partly looted during colonization. Benin will be represented by his Foreign Minister, Aurélien Agbenonci, before a visit to President Patrice Talon, in November. The ceremony will be an opportunity to detail the conditions of restitution of the works and the timetable, according to a government source.
Of the 26 works of art include Totems statues of the former Kingdom of Abomey as well as the throne of King Behanzin, looted when the Palace of Abomey’s Palace by the colonial troops in 1892. They are exhibited until Sunday at the Museum of Quai Branly. “The return of these objects is an important act in the history of the collections,” said his director on Wednesday, Emmanuel Kasarhérou. “It is important that the heritage of each country is sufficiently represented in each country,” he added on RFI, evoking his “great joy” to put these pieces back “to expert hands”.
A building on construction in Abomey
The head of the French state had committed during a speech at the University of Ouagadougou, in November 2017, to make possible at a time of five years temporary or definitive refunds of the African heritage in France. On the basis of a report given by the academics Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, who will intervene on Wednesday, he had decided to make 26 works claimed by the authorities of Benin, as well as the sword and the sheath of El Hadj Omar Tall, requested by Senegal.
This report had drawn up a restitution schedule and an inventory of tens of thousands of objects that settlers have brought back from Africa. He had been hailed but also criticized by some Museum directors concerned with the “circulation of works” to the “universal character”. Finally, a law had been passed in December 2020, allowing derogations to the principle of “inalienability” of works in public collections, because they had been the subject of looting characterized, making these refunds possible.
Two Conservatives of Benin have been in France for more than a week to organize the return of works “asked by Benin,” said AFP last week Mr. Kasarhérou. In Benin, they will first go “in a place of storage, then they will be presented in other places in a perennial way: the old Portuguese of Ouidah and the governor’s house, historic places of slavery and the European colonization, located on the coast, pending the construction of a new museum in Abomey “, in the former royal palace of the Dahomey kings, in the lands.
More than 90,000 African works in France
According to experts, between 85 and 90% of African heritage would be out of the continent. Since 2019, in addition to Benin, six countries (Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Chad, Mali and Madagascar) have submitted requests for refunds. At least 90,000 objects of art in sub-Saharan Africa are in French public collections. Some 70,000 of them are kept at Quai Branly, of which 46,000 arrived during the colonial period.
The Quai Branly started a long “almost comprehensive work on the museum’s 300,000 works, which do not only concern Africa, to identify those that would have been violently taken without the consent of the owners, by catches. War or by coercions of the colonial administration, “says Kasarhérou. But “all the objects that are in the collections in Europe have not been stolen,” he says, “It may be the right idea now, but it is not just from the point of historical view. In what proportion? This is all the object of our work. “
Many objects are indeed passed between several hands: administrators, doctors, soldiers or their descendants donated to museums. Other works were offered to religious, acquired by African art collectors at the beginning of the XX e century or returned during scientific shipments.