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and the crude and uncouth forest rangers, the quasi
slave-driving plantation managers, and the pathetic
employees portrayed by Joseph Conrad in
his An Outpost of Progress. And the real-life Doctor
Eugène Jamot and his disciples might also have
been fair game. They would be doubly dishonorable
for having been both administrators and military
men —but they were also the eradicators of the
trypanosome, the cause of the deadly sleeping sickness.
While in Yaoundé, our experts might have
liked to visit the hospital that still bears Jamot’s
name and have a look at the monument erected in
his honor. One might equally draw their attention
to the statue in the middle of the Louis neighborhood
in Libreville of Father Raponda-Walker, who
wrote encyclopedically about Gabon and who is
beloved and venerated in his homeland to this day,
despite the gifts he made to the Musée d’Ethnographie
du Trocadéro. But that would be a waste
of time—our experts vilify all representatives of
churches and paint them all with a single brush.
They seem to regret that, as non-governmental
entities, missionary museums are not within the
purview of their inquisition. The objectives of missionary
collections are caricatured in a few terse
lines, effectively reduced to the hackneyed and reductive
cliché of the priest dressed in a cassock and
colonial headgear exchanging “bloody idols” for
statues of Saint Bernadette.
Ethnographic missions and expeditions constitute
another thorny category. Apparently they are
henceforth to be thought of as “scientifi c raids”
and are all judged by the yardstick of the atypical
example of the 1931 Dakar-Djibouti Expedition.
Comparing the prices paid by Marcel Griaule
and Michel Leiris in villages under the approval
of local authorities against the results obtained at
Parisian auctions for pieces that had since entered
famous collections makes no sense whatsoever.
The argument demonstrates complete ignorance
of how the art market functions, of the chains of
intermediaries involved in it, and of the battles of
egos in sale rooms that infl uence it. Perhaps how
these mechanisms work could have been explained
if the two “experts” had consulted a competent
member of the profession. Characterizing every
commercial transaction between the colonizers and
the colonized as invalid by virtue of a supposed
duress to which the latter were always subjected
merely unveils a deeply condescending view of
Africans. Not surprisingly, they were long accustomed
to trading and commerce, adapted quickly
to demand by Western buyers, and even predicted
and manipulated the interactions. Denying that
they were capable of skillful negotiation displays a
failure to understand the history of cultural contact
and collecting. Of the 435 objects brought back in
1936 by Henri Labouret’s “scientifi c raid” in Côte
d’Ivoire, the Abidjan museum will fi nd it diffi cult
to fi nd, among the many hastily fashioned sculptures
and outright copies, the wealth of “masterpieces”
that the country now claims to be there.
In conclusion, we are instructed that demands
for restitution are to be favorably received “unless
there is explicit testimony or evidence of the
owners’ consent, or the consent of the guardians
of the object at the time that they were taken.”
The directive is so hypocritical that it would be ridiculous
were the matter not so serious. Must we
believe that Louis Desplagnes should have asked
for receipts when he purchased objects from the
chief of the village of Sangha on the Bandiagara Escarpment
in 1905? And in the absence of properly
fi lled out forms, are we now enjoined from trusting
that the abandoned krinjabo statuettes received by
Doctor Lheureux in 1927 indeed came from grateful
patients in remuneration for circumcisions he
performed there—with anesthetic?
The objects that entered French museum collections
after independence are spared from threat
of restitution, but only on the condition that curators
are able to provide some kind of evidence
establishing that they were not acquired “under
conditions known to be illegal.” Producing such
proof (and the requirement for it constitutes a clear
inversion of the principle of actori incombit probatio,
or “the burden of proof is on the plaintiff”) is
impossible in most cases. The instructions further
require verifying that any recently gifted or otherwise
acquired objects in public collections were not
collected during the colonial period by a donor’s
ancestor—a sailor or squadron offi cer, for example.
A few objects might miraculously escape this
draconian censure, but some of those should be
added to the pot anyway, just in case they might be
of some scientifi c interest to the petitioning country.
In summary, our African friends are invited to
an all-you-can-eat banquet and are being cordially
but fi rmly exhorted to serve themselves at will!
They are being encouraged to take the recipes and
ART + LAW