Curators and trustees of the world’s great museums are in a state of some agitation. Emmanuel Macron wants to return plundered treasures to France’s former African colonies. The French president, declaring the crimes of European colonisation a “past that needs to pass”, has caught a tide of public feeling. And where France goes, others may be obliged to follow.
This is not a new argument. The vast collections assembled at the British Museum, the Louvre, Berlin’s Museum island, and, further afield, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, have long been a source of controversy as well as knowledge. The Greek government has battled for decades for the return of the Parthenon frieze and Egypt for Nefertiti’s bust. The ground though is shifting. As history’s perspective on Europe’s empires loses some of the rose tint, demands for the repatriation of cultural artefacts seized by the colonial marauders look harder to resist.
This month the Victoria and Albert Museum in London put on a display of items appropriated by British forces after the 1868 Battle of Maqdala, in what was then Abyssinia. The Ethiopian government wants to recover the exquisite items taken from the defeated Emperor Tewodros II — among them a stunning gold crown and chalice, royal jewellery and religious vestments.