PARIS — The sprawling Quai Branly Museum in Paris is stuffed with treasure. It has some 70,000 objects from sub-Saharan Africa in its collection, including magnificent statues from present-day Benin and delicate paintings that once decorated church walls in Ethiopia. But a long-awaited report coming out this week could have a dramatic impact on what visitors see there, with repercussions for other international museums.
The report could have far-reaching consequences for the international museum world. It says that 90 to 95 percent of Africa’s cultural heritage is held outside Africa by major museums. France alone has at least 90,000 objects from sub-Saharan Africa in its national collections, of which 70,000 are inside the Quai Branly Museum. The rest are elsewhere in Paris, in port cities like Cherbourg and Le Havre, and in large centers like Lyon and Grenoble.
There is no question, either for us or for our African counterparts, of emptying French or European museums to fill up African ones,” Ms. Savoy, an art historian and professor at the Technical University of Berlin and a professor at the Collège de France, said in an interview this month. “This is obviously not a case of transferring back the 70,000 objects from sub-Saharan Africa that are today in the collections of the Quai Branly Museum and that arrived in France over a period of 150 years.”
Instead, Ms. Savoy said, the aim is to arrive at “a rebalancing of the geography of African heritage in the world, which is currently extremely imbalanced, as European museums have almost everything, and African museums have almost nothing.”
To help achieve that rebalancing, the report recommends the restitution of “any objects taken by force or presumed to be acquired through inequitable conditions” by the army, scientific explorers or administrators during the French colonial period in Africa, which lasted from the late 19th century until 1960.
Museums in France Should Return African Treasures, Report Says
