Restitution and Protection of Cultural Property: Felwine Sarr Calls for “Reimagining the African Museum”

The Museum of Black Civilisations (MCN) in Dakar hosted, on Thursday 4 December, several cultural actors and experts, including the Senegalese economist and thinker Felwine Sarr. At the heart of the discussions was a panel on “Restitution and Protection of Cultural Property”, organised as part of the Professional Meetings of the inaugural edition of the West African Festival of Arts and Culture (ECOFEST 2025).
Addressing a large audience, the author of Afrotopia called for a deep reconsideration of the museum, its history, its functions, and the narratives it upholds as African artworks dispersed across Western museums gradually return to the continent.
From the outset, Felwine Sarr stressed that restitution cannot be treated as a simple “transfer of objects from one place to another.” This return, he explained, “opens a far more profound question: the resocialisation of the objects, the meaning attributed to them, the spaces in which they are placed, and what this implies for the social body.”
According to him, “understanding the contemporary issues surrounding restitution requires returning to the origins of the Western museum, which emerged in the 19th century as a site of identity-affirmation, mandated to conserve the inalienable heritage of emerging nations”.
However, with colonisation, this model was distorted. He noted that “European expansion was accompanied by a massive expropriation of the cultural property of colonised peoples.”
Ethnographic museums then became, in his words, “museums of others”, housing objects that were interpreted and displayed in the absence of their creators. This displacement was accompanied by a process of “re-signification”: ritual objects were turned into ethnographic specimens or works of art, thereby losing part of their original meaning and social function.
“Their significance is altered; the scope of these objects is reduced,” he lamented, raising a fundamental question: “Has the object become something else? Can its original significance be restored, or must a new one be constructed?”
Sarr emphasised that the decolonisation of the museum requires the “pluralisation of narratives “He pointed to North American experiences where First Nations communities co-curate exhibitions.
However, he insisted that the most pressing challenge lies within Africa itself: to rethink museum institutions, their ecosystems, and their modes of display. The museum imported from the colonial model, he argued, is not a neutral framework.
“We must reimagine our own heritage systems and the spaces themselves,” he argued.
This involves drawing from precolonial traditions of royal, ritual, and contextual forms of display, in order to invent museum models suited to contemporary African societies.
Felwine Sarr also reflected on the notion of the universal, often invoked by major museums such as the Louvre to justify the possession of artworks originating elsewhere. The universal, he explained, is “performed” declared by those who claim custodianship of it.
Conversely, restitution and diversification of cultural spaces would help build a “pluriversal” approach—an understanding of the universal rooted in a plurality of cultural centres and voices.
“Objects in Dakar or Cotonou are just as universal as those in Paris,” he affirmed.
In conclusion, he praised the Museum of Black Civilisations, describing it as a “non-subaltern museum”, dynamic, open to transformation and creativity. It is, in his view, “an ideal model capable of restoring meaning to returned objects and, more broadly, renewing the narratives that African societies tell about themselves”.