For some decades, the Conseil représentatif des associations noires de France (CRAN), Representative Council of France's Black Associations, has championed the memory of, and acted the collective organic intellectual, for a movement of French people of African heritage to return to Africa pieces of the material patrimoine held in French museums. Several African states have been demanding the same for some years. For at least three-quarters of a century, many of these pieces had represented to visitors to metropolitan museums the identity and the breadth of Greater France. Displayed mostly in the Musée de l'Homme, in 2006 they were removed to the new museum built by Jacques Chirac, himself a collector of pieces of colonial heritages. When Emmanuel Macron took office in 2017, of the estimated 90,000 African cultural items in state possession, about 70,000 had come to the Musée du Quai Branly-Chirac. There, the aesthetically-most-prized items were installed in the darkened main exhibition space on pedestals or in glass cases and beautifully lit. Behind each piece, and running the length of the Seine side of the building, visitors saw a floor to ceiling silkscreen of a dense jungle, presumably their original African home. Even before he was elected, Macron announced his intention to return these objects to where they were made.
The French government acted both in reaction to this internal pressure and to launch a new initiative of French soft power towards Africa. Speaking to a university audience in Burkina Faso the President expressed his agreement to the right of the peoples in Africa to regain these treasures of their pasts as fundaments for building their futures, for which he was warmly applauded. But also-a new discourse-he emphasized how important it was for the young people of the Africa diaspora in France to see these objects of their dual heritage returned to the lands of their ancestors. Immediately on his return to Paris, the President named a commission to report to him the why, the how, and the when of the African restitutions. this report strongly urged, in detail, the course of action Macron had only outlined. And it went beyond the President's language by referring to these objects of the African patrimoine collectively as also in a diaspora. These cultural objects, if and when repatriated, will serve as sites of memory for further construction of modern Africa societies, as they had for people of the last three French Republics. The debate continues. Setting in motion Frederic Jameson's idea of cultural objects being "wrapped" in layers of meaning, my contribution will discuss what are still the beginnings of this complex and moving-in all senses-memory process.
With images.
Herman Lebovics
Distinguished Professor Emeritus
Stony Brook University
herman.lebovics@stonybrook.edu
