MPHUTHUMI NTABENI

It is a grimly poetic coincidence that Fifteen Colonial Thefts arrived in August 2023, just as the British Museum was reeling from revelations that one of its own senior curators had stolen and sold off between 1,500 and 2,000 artefacts, on eBay, nogal. Here was a museum long denounced for being “the world’s largest receiver of stolen property” suddenly caught stealing from itself. The irony would be almost comic, were it not such a perfect encapsulation of imperial amnesia. For me, it feels like poetic justice for the institutional thief, built on false prestige of plunder, to be robbed by one of its own.

In this volume, editors Sela K. Adjei and Yann LeGall gather fifteen essays that revisit Africa’s “asymmetrical wars” of conquest and the cultural dispossession that followed them. Unlike the technocratic restitution reports and academic studies that have proliferated since the Sarr-Savoy commission of 2018 (a French commission led by scholars Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr, tasked by President Emmanuel Macron to recommend a framework for the restitution of African cultural heritage held in French museums), this book speaks in voices that are resolutely African, who are curators, historians, artists, and philosophers from across the continent and diaspora. Hence the results are just not another polite appeal to Western conscience, but a searing, intelligent reckoning with the moral and metaphysical violence of western museum culture.

Adjei and LeGall’s project rests on a stark premise that the ethnographic museum is not merely colonial in origin but in essence also. That every glass case, every climate-controlled vault, conceals an act of confiscation. The book’s chapters read like dispatches from a war whose aftershocks still reverberate through the global art market. We move from the cold storage rooms of Berlin and Brussels to the dust-choked storerooms of London, where objects once imbued with ancestral power are now catalogued under the chilling euphemism “contested means.” The authors remind us that these were not “gifts” or “acquisitions,” but trophies seized amid the razing of towns and the execution of African leaders like Lusinga, Mbuya Nehanda, Hassan bin Omari, whose remains are sometimes displayed as curiosities.

What makes Fifteen Colonial Thefts especially powerful is its rejection of the voyeuristic tone that often accompanies Western treatments of restitution.

Here, restitution is not simply about returning stolen goods, but about confronting the ontology of theft itself, what it means to live with absence, and how communities metabolise loss.

In one of the most arresting chapters, Godfrey Tangwa and Fogha MC Cornilius Refem, describe how the colonial “punitive expedition” has been replaced by the modern “punitive exhibition”. They call this a form of aesthetic violence that continues the humiliation of conquest through curatorial display. The chapter is beautifully argued with mordant wit and controlled anger.

The editors situate this volume within the long history of what the French historian Bénédicte Savoy called “the blood in the museum” by tracing how the European scramble for Africa went beyond the economic architecture of empire into an epistemology of possession (the idea that to know an object is to own it and to catalogue it to cleanse it of context). The book makes it clear that knowledge without moral relation is merely inventory. The authors call instead for a “relational ethics,” one that honours both the expertise and the custodianship of the descendants from whom these artefacts were seized.

It is telling that so few prior works on colonial provenance were written by Africans themselves. Open Restitution Africa reported in 2022 that only one in twenty-four such studies have an African author. This asymmetry of voice mirrors the asymmetry of war that the book chronicles. Fifteen Colonial Thefts seeeks to corrects that imbalance by turning the museum’s gaze back upon itself.

If European ethnographers once dissected African cultures under the guise of science, these essays dissect the ethnographers in return through lived culture and history.

What emerges is a new moral grammar of not only art and museums but how we tell postcolonial history also. The contributors refuse to let restitution be reduced to the logistics of transport or the diplomacy of cultural property law. They insist that restitution must also be spiritual and become an act of reparation that acknowledges the theft of African memory, meaning, and cosmology.

To return a mask, for instance, is not to give back wood and pigment; it is to restore a relationship between the living and the dead.

I found the precision and controlled anger that is the overwhelming tone of the book exhilarating. I also like that the book doesn’t read like an academic anthology. For me it is more of a tribunal convened to correct past wrongs. Several chapters describe successful returns of objects that have made their way home to Nigeria, Cameroon, or Tanzania, where they were received as prodigal children rather than relics of curiosity. The tone, in these moments, turns almost liturgical, which reminds us that restitution is not merely about righting the past but the spiritual healing of the future also.

In the wake of the British Museum scandal, it has become impossible to sustain the argument that looted artefacts are “safer” in Europe. But Fifteen Colonial Thefts goes deeper by exposing the deeper lie beneath the claim that these objects ever needed saving from their makers in the first case. In truth, it was Europe that needed them, to sanctify its own self-image in turning bloody conquest into cultural imperialism. This book is, in the best sense, both accusation and prophecy. It indicts the museums as mausoleums of empire in order to imagine afresh with clarity what might come after. It tries to plough the ground for furrows of possibility of real meaningful roles these institutions, built on violent plunder, might play towards cultural reciprocity and restitution. Its pages hum with the urgency of a continent reclaiming its treasures with native narrative authority.