A few days ago, I listened on RFI to Madame Bénédicte Savoy, this French academic who had been charged, with the Senegalese Felwine Sarr, also an academic and writer, with writing a report on the restitution of African cultural heritage stolen by the powers European. What I learned from his words is that tens of thousands of African objects have been stolen from Africa. These objects are cultural or religious heritage or are attributes of power such as thrones, scepters, canes, means of communication such as drums, flutes, etc. She estimates that there are around 50,000 objects in public museums in Europe. Not counting what is found in private collections and in the United States. Sometimes these are the bodies of deceased men or women, which were taken away, because certain peoples worshiped them. His conclusion is that in fact Africa has been emptied of all its creations, of all its objects which gave it its identity, of everything it adored, of all its substance, in a word, of its soul. Africa has been robbed of its soul. When Islam arrived on the continent, it took nothing with it, but it set about burning everything that related to ancestral African religions. He burned the African soul to replace it with his own.
All of these objects which are found today in the cellars of European museums and in private homes were the vast majority stolen, acquired by force, terror, murder. And among the great plunderers of the African soul, there are of course the colonial powers of the time, but also the Vatican. Eh yes ! The Vatican has one of the most important collections of African cultural and religious objects. Thus, a good part of everything that allowed the African to find himself, to practice his religions, to communicate with the invisible is found in the basements of the Holy See, who knows that this has inestimable value. We told our parents, “hide these savage fetishes from me” and we were going to store them in the Vatican. In fact, everything happened as if it was a matter of making Africa lose its soul in order to create a new one for it. When the work of demonizing ourselves was successful, we took it upon ourselves to destroy or sell off everything that others had not been able to take away or destroy. When you lose your soul, you become a kind of zombie who can no longer think for himself and you obey the one who has taken possession of your substance. The Europeans know why they do not want to return these works to us which, for the most part, are just stored in museum basements, far from the eyes of the general public.
So, where the Europeans and their priests arrived first, people rejected their ancestral religion and became Christians. And we totally appropriated this new soul. Today, Christian Africans are among the most fundamentalist. And where the Arabs and their imams arrived first, we became Muslims, jealous guardians of this religion that we also completely appropriated. And it is especially on our continent that we are massacred, in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, Mozambique, Kenya, Uganda, in the name of Allah.
Those who most vehemently reject traditional African worship are Africans. When the debate on the restitution of African cultural property was launched, many Africans did not see the usefulness of this restitution since they themselves had rejected them as being demonic, or at least not part of civilization, thus that we had told them. Others wondered where these works would be stored, since museum culture is not really ours.
When France deigned to return 26 works out of the thousands it had stolen from Benin Republic, these works were exhibited at the presidential palace in Cotonou where I had the opportunity to see them too. Above all, I noticed the joy of thousands of Beninese people, of all ages, at the idea of reconnecting with their roots. And I understood that there is indeed a real need among many Africans to find their stolen soul, to be at peace with themselves. Yes, we can always hope.
By Venance Konan
