Public collections in France and elsewhere in Europe are generally held to be “inalienable”. They belong to the state
Museum of Black Civilisations in Dakar, two vitrines display a French-made sword, a Koran and a pair of scruffy leather sandals. They were taken from Hadj Omar Tall, a Sufi military commander who briefly formed an empire that stretched across Guinea, Mali and Senegal. Hadj Omar gained a heroic reputation fighting the French in west Africa until he was killed in 1864. His personal effects were seized as war booty and eventually bequeathed to various French museums.
It is not the first time that Western museums have been asked to hand over treasures. One of the oldest disputes is between Britain and Greece over the marble statuary that was removed from the Parthenon in Athens by Lord Elgin and sold to the British government in 1816 to become the centrepiece of the British Museum. During the second world war, when Britain needed Greece’s help, the Foreign Office drafted a scheme for their return. The plan was shelved when the danger passed.
Ms Savoy and Mr Sarr’s report for the French government has a German flavour. Long-term museum-to-museum loans, as Mr Macron had suggested, were not the solution, the authors argued. Nor was it sufficient to assume that a gap in the provenance of an object might mean that the object had been acquired in good faith.
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