Reparations / Restitution / Artefacts

Eight years after the 2018 publication of the Report on the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage – commissioned by French President Macron and authored by Senegalese academic Felwine Sarr and French art historian Bénédicte Savoy – only a few works have been returned. Various types of obstacles, particularly legal and technical ones, are regularly cited to explain this situation. It is important to also examine the structural and psychological drivers behind this. While for African countries, recovering their looted works amounts to reclaiming a part of their heritage and memory, it appears that for European countries, the act of restitution amounts to confronting their colonial past and rewriting the historical narrative surrounding it to acknowledge its true nature: a crime against humanity.

Speaker: Dr Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux is a philosopher and Associate Researcher at the Laboratory for Studies and Research on Contemporary Logic and Philosophy (LLCP), Paris 8 University, and a teacher at Sciences Po Paris. Author of African Philosophies, published by Polity in 2025 and recipient of the Louis Marin Overseas Sciences Prize, Devenir vivants, published in 2022, and co-editor of Law and Colonisation. Kodjo-Grandvaux is the scientific curator of the Fabrique de Souza in Cameroon, a space of investigation and experimentation which brings together scientists, artists, and farmers for the purpose of designing and putting into practice an active utopia, where the human is thought of in terms of its relationship with other living beings.

Discussant: Duane Jethro is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of African Studies and Linguistics (ASL) at the University of Cape Town (UCT). He specialises in the analysis of the cultural construction of heritage, contested public cultures and material religion in South Africa and Berlin, Germany. Currently, he serves as an editor of the journal Material Religion and on the editorial boards of the journals Museums and Social Issues and Public Art Dialogue. He is an executive board member of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies and edits the association platform Currents in Critical Heritage Studies. His book Heritage Formation and the Senses in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Aesthetics of Power is published by Bloomsbury Academic.