Senegal’s Museum of Black Civilizations Welcomes Some Treasures Home

Pan-nationalist movements are cancer. This museum seeks to subsume all of Africa under an artificial West African identity.

I don't care at all that there would be empty French museum halls if African art were returned to Africa. Keeping French museums filled with African art that's not rightfully France's is a far worse kind of emptiness - it's draining pride, history, beauty, and rich complexity from the cradle of humankind that has already suffered too many grave losses.

Many major US museums (Smithsonian, Metropolitan Museum of Art et al.) hold thousands of items taken from African and other cultures under colonial, criminal or other questionable circumstances. Would it be a good idea to return the items in the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian to the hundreds of tribes from which they were obtained (taken, stolen, purchased for pennies, whatever)? Legal/ethical issues aside, do the tribes have the ability to store, exhibit and preserve the objects for future generations? And how about the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Museum History and Culture? Send its thousands of items back to the hundreds of African tribes from which they came? Do these tribes have the ability to store, exhibit and preserve the objects? Perhaps the reasonable answer is for US and European museums to establish cooperative relationships with Indian tribes and African (and other) nations under which their people can be trained in the preservation and display of historically/culturally significant items. And, of course, temporary or rotating loans or permanent repatriation of very important items must be considered. Repatriation is hardly a new thing: in the late 1960s I arranged for an Ivy university museum to repatriate a chief's blanket to a Navajo community college, and 20 years later arranged to return a private museum's Native American skeleton to its tribe for burial. Lots of opportunities here for people of good will.

I’m thinking museums of history ranks pretty low in the priority list of issues to be solved in West Africa but if you think that will lift people out of extreme poverty, go for it. But it does remind me of the effort in areas of poverty in Chicago in the 1930’s when some thought if we just played classical music, it will lift people out of poverty. Sounds crazy but it really was done. But, hey people thought showing pictures of art on the internet would somehow inspire students to do whatever it was meant to inspire them to do. If the goal of bringing West African art and historic items back home is not to eliminate poverty then I guess it will have limited impact. Sounds like a project only the wealthy art dealers would be interested in.

>It is a peculiar twist that the museum finally came to fruition with the contribution of a $34 million gift from China, which is making new inroads into West Africa with donations and loans to governments eager for new infrastructure. A reminder that China foots much of the bill is noticeable in firefighting equipment spaced throughout the exhibit halls and labeled in Chinese characters. The new colonizers... using debt consented to by the leaders of African nations and large amounts of donations to spread influence.

We visited this museum last Friday with a group of American students. The contrasts between archeological displays and avant-garde art made the place feel exciting and rich. I hope it becomes a resource for Senegalese students.

I hope the French officials have assurance that these objects will be safe. I'm thinking of what happened to the ancient manuscripts of Timbuktu and the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

Why should New York get to have the best of all art artifacts of the world? I am looking at these pictures, and I absolutely would LOVE to go and see in person. Magnificent!

On the surface, it seems morally right to return art and artifacts to a place or origin from which it has been taken through an exercise of power. But the deeper you dive in, the more complex that judgment becomes. Why should Dakar, a relatively stable and prosperous part of West Africa, get to take and maintain art and artifacts from poorer and less stable parts of Africa? Why is it right for the new museum to define an entire continent as its domain? How locally should this principle of originism be interpreted?