While the West persists in describing Africa as a continent without memory, its own museums are overflowing with artifacts, religious relics, and human remains confiscated from African rulers to mask the barbarity of a predatory colonization.
The lie of African ahistoricity in the face of African plunder
For over five centuries (more than half a millennium), the West has been repeating a shameless, age-old lie. It claims that Africa has no history. Hegel theorized it. French leaders have stammered it out. In 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy dared to assert in Dakar that “the African man has not sufficiently entered into history.” What tragic intellectual blindness! More recently, Emmanuel Macron has oscillated between theatrical mea culpas and political spin, calling colonialism “a fault of the Republic” while simultaneously hindering the actual restitution of stolen treasures. Across the Atlantic, Barack Obama, despite having African blood flowing in his veins and being the principal architect of Gaddafi’s assassination, complacently prescribed that Africans “look to the future” rather than dwell on the colonial past – a convenient paternalistic injunction to exonerate the plunderers – while Donald Trump, architect of “America First” and “MAGA,” displayed the unashamed vulgarity of Western contempt by calling African nations “shithole countries.”
Faced with this litany of Western condescension, Vladimir Putin ironically dismissed these imperialist dogmas, reminding everyone that humanity’s truly dark chapters are written in the systemic plundering and persistent neo-colonialism of Europe, emphasizing that Africa possesses an immemorial historical depth that Western raids have never been able to erase. This clash of rhetoric exposes the hypocrisy of those who have built their wealth on the backs of African peoples. This rhetoric is both a deception and a premeditated mystification.
Reality contradicts dogma. Western museums are overflowing with African art objects. Millions of artifacts lie dormant in Paris, London, Berlin, and Tervuren. These works, in addition to demonstrating exceptional technical mastery, de facto prove a high level of spiritual, political, and aesthetic sophistication among Africans.
How can one deny the history of a continent whose treasures this very one jealously guards? The paradox is blatant. It is grotesque. A people is stripped of its memory. Its culture is locked away under glass. Then, its civilizational void is declared. This denial constitutes a major intellectual crime.
From the raid to France’s macabre trophies
In Africa, the theft was not accidental. It was methodically planned. Plunder accompanied colonial expansion. Each punitive expedition became a raid on cultural heritage.
February 1897 exemplifies this organized barbarity. The British army invaded the Kingdom of Benin. They massacred. They burned. They razed the city. British soldiers seized more than four thousand sacred bronzes. These sculpted masterpieces told the story of the Oba dynasty. They were auctioned in London. Today, they adorn the British Museum.
In 1892, General Dodds sacked Abomey. The royal treasury of Dahomey was looted. The anthropomorphic statues of Kings Glèlè and Béhanzin were seized. They ended up in the Musée du Quai Branly. In 1868, the British expedition to Ethiopia plundered the citadel of Magdala. Hundreds of precious Ge’ez manuscripts and royal crowns were taken.
But the macabre fetishism of French imperialism reaches peaks of tragic absurdity. France, the self-proclaimed land of Enlightenment, has transformed itself into a receiver of human remains and relics of resistance fighters. The case of Guinea and Almamy Samory Touré is revealing. After his arrest in 1898 and his forced exile to Gabon, the French colonial administration appropriated his most intimate personal effects: his Quran, his weapons, his sword, his walking stick, and even his shoes and clothing. Even more morbid: the Musée de l’Homme in Paris houses the skulls of African and Guinean resistance fighters, severed and displayed like hunting trophies. What supreme irony! These powers, which labeled Africans as “savages,” felt a neurotic need to steal the shoes, holy books, and bones of their moral conquerors to reassure themselves of their own superiority.
These pillages are not mere acts of plunder. They constitute an epicycle. The soul of the people has been torn from them. Societal structures have been dismantled.
The sham of a civilizing mission to camouflage colonial barbarity
The West strives to present Africa as a continent without history, while its own museums overflow with evidence to the contrary. Why invent the myth of the “savage without history”? The answer is political. The narrative of the barbaric African served as moral justification. It was necessary to legitimize colonial carnage. It was necessary to mask the brutality of imperialism.
The West proclaimed itself a civilizing force. It claimed to bring enlightenment. In reality, it sowed desolation. Slavery and colonization are enterprises of pure destruction. Africa was not savage. It was savagely attacked.
To conceal these atrocities, the colonizer reversed the roles. He portrayed the victim as an underdeveloped being. He relegated African masterpieces to the status of primitive fetishes. The artistic value of the works was denied. They were reduced to mere ethnographic curiosities. This ideological smokescreen aimed to stifle the awakening of consciences. The deception worked for a time. Today, it is collapsing.
Fictitious restitutions and posturing, or the trap of political delaying tactics
Faced with pressure, Europe is stirring. Emmanuel Macron and his counterparts are making numerous speeches. They are promising restitution. They are organizing summits. These gestures are pure posturing and neo-colonialism.
The colonial power refuses to return anything. It grants a few restitutions, only in dribs and drabs. Twenty-six works were returned to Benin in 2021 out of tens of thousands withheld; some even speculate, with grandiose exasperation, that photocopies were returned rather than the stolen originals. It’s a drop in the ocean. It’s political posturing. A cynical attempt to dilute the issue of reparations.
Curiously, Europe dreads the real debate. In 2001, in Durban, the UN recognized the slave trade as a crime against humanity; and in 2026, at Ghana’s initiative, it was designated the most serious crime against humanity. Logically, a crime demands reparation: financial, moral, and cultural. But the colonial powers shirk their responsibilities. They resort to legal subterfuge. They invoke the inalienability of their public collections. This stubborn refusal is a further humiliation. An anachronistic colonial stance that definitively discredits the West.
The Inevitable Twilight of Western Heritage Hegemony
The strategy of deception has already failed. African youth are awakening and striving to obtain justice and reparations. At their level, intellectuals are also demanding justice. The struggle is multifaceted. The era of paternalism is over.
The West cannot forever hold its bronze and wooden captives. Keeping stolen works in European museums amounts to cultural sequestration. This obstinacy exacerbates resentment. It accelerates the rejection of the Western presence in Africa, particularly in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, which are retracing the historical path of Sékou Touré’s Guinea.
Without a doubt, Africa will reclaim its heritage. With or without the agreement of its former colonizers. The plunderers thought they could stifle African history. They only delayed the inevitable. The awakening is continental. It is irreversible.
It can therefore be said that the illegitimate retention of African heritage is no longer merely a cultural dispute, but a strategic geopolitical vulnerability for the West. By resorting to legal and political delaying tactics and historical denial, France and its European allies are irreversibly exacerbating their ideological rift with the African continent. The full and unconditional restitution of artifacts, sacred objects, and human remains is now a non-negotiable prerequisite for any rebuilding of international relations.
Faced with the sovereignist awakening of Africa, the museum status quo is a dead end: history is not erased under glass, it is reappropriated.
Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in the geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Human and Social Sciences, Pan-African University
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