On a continent where 60% of the population is under the age of 20, what is first and foremost of great importance is for young people to have access to their own culture, creativity, and spirituality … To fall under the spell of an object, to be touched by it, moved emotionally by a piece of art in a museum … to admire its forms of ingenuity … to let oneself be transformed by it: all these experiences—which are also forms of access to knowledge—cannot simply be reserved to the inheritors of an asymmetrical history, to the benefactors of an excess of privilege and mobility. —Sarr and Savoy (2019: 4)
In November 2018, a blockbuster report entitled The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage by Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr2 called for the return of thousands of African artworks from French museum storerooms to the continent. Commissioned by France's president,...