‘We’re Coming Late to the Matter Here’: Belgian Museums Continue to Struggle with a Flurry of Restitution Claims

New Zealand and Congo have asked the Belgian government to
restitute specific cultural artifacts currently held at the Art &
History Museum in Brussels. New Zealand has requested that the
remains of indigenous Maori people be returned, and Congo is
appealing for the return of archives recording mixed-race
populations in their country, kept during early 20th century
Belgian colonial rule.

Restitution requests are nothing new for Belgium. In March of
this year Belgian minister David Clarinval founded a committee to
address the questionable origins of a number of objects currently
held in national Belgian institutions. The committee’s
establishment came just three months after the reopening of Belgium’s controversial Africa
Museum (following a five-year restoration process that cost $84
million).

The rebranded Africa Museum, located on the
outskirts of Brussels, prompted renewed requests from the
Democratic Republic of Congo that objects taken without consent
during Belgian colonial rule be repatriated. The museum has a dark
history, originally built by King Leopold II as a propaganda tool
to convince the Belgian people to establish a colony in Congo.
(Leopold II established his own personal colony there in 1885,
which became a Belgian colony in 1908 that was active until Congo
won its independence in 1960.)

“We’re coming late to the matter here in Belgium,” Clarinval
told The Brussels Times. “The debate on restitution
started already in America at the end of the 1980s.”

Belgium may be accustomed to restitution requests, but they
appear to be unusual for the Art & History Museum, whose website
carefully states that: “The Museum houses an incredible collection
of works belonging to all four corners of the world (with the
exception of Sub-Saharan Africa).”

Restitution of African art objects taken without consent during
European colonial presence has been a hot issue in recent years.
Museum collections in the UK, France, and Germany all have African
artifacts with problematic provenance.

French president Emmanuel Macron announced in 2017 that France
would attempt to return objects looted from Africa. (Two years
after this dramatic declaration in Burkina Faso, however, only
one of around 900,000 objects of sub-Saharan origin
in French national collections has been returned, and that
restitution took place last month.)

“I fully agree with President Macron that it is not normal that
80% of African art is in Europe,” Guido Gryseels, the director
general at Belgium’s Africa Museum, said at the press preview of
the museum’s reopening last year. “We are open to constructive
dialogue. We are willing to consider requests for restitution.”
Time will tell how this—and future restitution requests—will be
handled in Belgium.

The post ‘We’re Coming Late to the Matter Here’: Belgian
Museums Continue to Struggle with a Flurry of Restitution
Claims appeared first on artnet News.