Why Restitution Won’t Happen If Europe Controls the Terms

Eric Otieno, Why Restitution Won’t Happen If Europe Controls the Terms, Frieze, Nov. 25, 2020.

“The conceptual import of Diyabanza’s actions is severely limited by our propensity to equate legal with right and illegal with wrong. Yet, given that the unjust and asymmetric nature of the colonial encounter is largely undisputed today, the legal status of cultural assets acquired under colonialism must also be reset. The fact that, as a matter of course, French law upholds the state’s ownership of conspicuously African items can be attributed to the ways in which colonial dispossession was itself enshrined in law.”