The dual control of Africa’s cultural heritage

Theophilus Khumomotse is a second year Master of Philosophy in Justice and Transformation. European private institutions were and still are involved and embedded in the possession, retention and strategic return of Africa’s heritage back to Africa. These private institutions operate and live in the private domain, are not funded by governments, nor operated or controlled by the same on a day to day basis.

These entities in the private sphere, worked hand in hand with the European colonial governments that undertook colonialism in Africa from 1885 such as the German, Belgian, French and English governments. The private actors in question are the museums, medical institutions, research institutions, private families as well as the universities that collected and retained Africa’s cultural and human heritage, such as The Charite in Berlin, Germany amongst others. These private actors are often overlooked in research, as regards their involvement in shaping the fate of the African cultural and human heritage.

These private actors in the recent years since 2000 and particularly since 2010 have been involved in selectively and strategically curating justice by releasing certain portions of Africa’s heritage at certain intervals, which is precisely “control by opening” and “control by closing” the archive of atrocities. Museums are often viewed as innocuous, uninvolved and neutral repositories of African human remains, that perhaps received such by chance. There is often a sense, a narrative that museums are neutral storers of human remains, and are merely displaying such to the public, just as agents of history.

[paywall]

A deep dive into the origins of human remains, in European countries reveals otherwise. The cultural artefacts and human remains in German museums are not merely there by chance, they are there by design, by the deliberate involvement of such museums in the collection of human remains, for scientific, political and exhibitionist purposes, which is all central to colonialism and its justification from a “scientific” perspective.

[/paywall]