This article originally ran in the PAS Newsletter, Spring 2020, Volume 30, Number 3
by Moussa Seck, graduate student, French and Italian, Northwestern University
Murals depicting Amazons—fierce female fighters of the 19th-century kingdom of Dahomey—have appeared in a few cities south of Dakar, Senegal, as part of the “Amazone” series by French street artist YZ Yseult (photos ©YZ, www.brooklynstreetart .com/2015/01/14/yz-and-her-amazone-women-on-senegalese-walls).
In their 2018 report “Restitution of African Cultural Heritage,” Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy raise an important question about the reappropriation of African cultural heritage to its rightful owners. For the authors, the decision to return “stolen cultural artifacts” should result in their reintroduction into the community or to the initial owner in question. The report’s recommendations highlight the role African states and cultural institutions should play in the process, from requesting restitution to elaborating on these objects’ necessary conditioning.
Senegalese scholar Amadou Makhtar Mbow pioneered similar concerns in his 1978 UNESCO speech “A Plea for the Return of an Irreplaceable Cultural Heritage to Those Who Created It” (www.unesco.org /culture/laws/pdf/PealforReturn_DG_1978.pdf). Identifying the importance of this plundered heritage to the African collective memory and the role it must play in the reconstitution of an African identity, he declared, “The people who have been victims of this plunder have not [only] been despoiled of irreplaceable masterpieces but also robbed of a memory which would have helped them to greater self-knowledge. . . . The men and women of these countries have the right to recover these cultural assets, which are part of their being.”
While the case for the necessity of return is important, my concern—one that is as complicated as the return’s logistics—is the place of the so-called returned heritage in the African community, its rightful owner. This raises questions of ownership and the need to redefine the relationship that we Africans should have with our artistic and cultural inheritance. I contend that part of the problem is the symptomatic obsession of artistic and cultural experts with maintaining and retaining Western structuration of works of art.
African cultural legacies are part of our identity because they include the trajectories, histories, and intellectual achievements of our ancestors. They should no longer be subject to Western museological ideologies nor considered the private luxury of a certain European elite with the prerogative to grant access. What I advocate is an approach to universalize access to arts in Africa. Although restitution efforts focus on colonial African artistic heritages, I am convinced that they can be an opportunity to redefine our relationship with the concepts of both the museum and art in general. Beyond the clear obligation to return these master-pieces to their rightful heirs, there is a need to decolonize the museological ideologies that alienate African intellectual and artistic property for the profit of Western outsiders.
This is what local artists understood when they initiated an “open sky museum” in a street of Médina, a working-class neighborhood in Dakar—bringing color to “usually drab cement walls and adding to the international art scene in Dakar,” as described by Anemona Hartocollis in the New York Times (“Who needs canvas?” November 23, 2019). Spearheaded by Médina-born Mamadou Boye Diallo, who is passionate about street art and fashion, the initiative transformed these depressing, unpainted walls to protest against the inaccessibility of art. He and his collaborators have turned the walls near downtown Dakar into canvases adorned with images that tell stories about the population, their occupations, and their religious and traditional leaders. Diallo began the movement in 2010 when he launched Yataal Art, a collective that takes its name from the Wolof expression meaning “expanding art.” Its mission is to provide a platform for neighborhood youths to express their talent and to erase the distance between the community and the arts.
Another artist with a similar conception of art is the famous graffitist and slam poet Amadou Lamine Ngom, popularly known as Docta, one of the pioneers of West Africa’s urban art movement. His works reflect an engaged and socially conscious artistry devoted to promoting unity, diversity, and equality. Like Diallo, he also believes in expanding art to the less privileged part of the community.
These artists, intellectuals, and activists show us that if restitution is an obligation, it should also be an occasion to redefine our relationship with the community’s artistic creations, a decolonized turn from the museum and its ideology.