The Thinkers

In my research on Buganda art disseminated throughout the Global North, I excavated museums in the United Kingdom and expanded my scope worldwide (Nabakooza 2020). In early 2020, I was following up virtually on museum visits, with concerns similar to those of Amanda Maples's First Word essay “African Restitution in a North American Context,” in which she calls for the “repatriation, restitution, return, and reparations” of African art in American museum collections (Maples 2020). Last November, upon the 150th anniversary of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote: “It needs to be said that recent scholarship has cast shade on the robber-baron and colonialist provenance of many Met treasures—a problem shared by other formerly piratical museums worldwide” (Schjeldahl 2020). As curator of a smaller museum than the Metropolitan Museum of Art, described by Schjeldahl (2020) as “a battleship,” Maples (2020) explained...