Today's widespread global discourse on restitution and repatriation of African arts is not new, but rather a continuation of over a century of requests, negotiations, and debates. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many African kingdoms began requesting the return of recently looted objects. In 1950, the writer and politician Aimé Césaire suggested that
Soon after Césaire's critical assessment, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Ghislain Cloquet's haunting film Les Statues Meurent Aussi (1953) explicitly tied colonial violence to the European museums’ collections of African art. Perhaps building from previous requests and a broader growing momentum, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed newly independent nation-states calling for the repatriation of artworks from former colonial powers —or at the very least inventories of what artworks were being held in European museums (Savoy 2022). However, despite increased interest in repatriation, neither the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and...