In September 2023, taking advantage of the visit of Molemo Moiloa – co-founder of the Open Restitution Africa (ORA) project – to Lisbon, I invited her to participate in a discussion as part of the Restitution and Reparation Working Group, an initiative led by some members of the Practices and Policies of Culture Research Group. The event included a public presentation held at the Passa Sabi association, involving African student groups from NOVA and ISCTE, who assisted us with translations between English and Portuguese, and vice versa. Moiloa presented part of the findings from the ORA Report. The report covers three case studies (The Benin Bronzes, Hawass’ request, and the Tendaguru dinosaurs) and examines the use of the word restitution across three online platforms (Twitter, Google News, and Google Scholar) between January 2016 and June 2021. The collected data confirms the already well-known power imbalance implicit in knowledge production, to which most scholars from the South are subjected. While these findings surprised no one, the question remains: what can we – academics in and from the North – do to influence changes in this dynamic?

The dossier is divided into two parts: the first focuses on the African continent's context, and the second addresses the case of the restitution of the Tupinambá Cloak in Brazil.

Although the topic of restitution and reparation has been more prominent in Africa, the visibility – and success – of this case could potentially open the door for new restitution claims in Brazil. As early as 2000, during the loan of the mantle for the “Brasil+500 Rediscovery Exhibition” in São Paulo, Tupinambá community leaders attempted, unsuccessfully, to prevent its return to Europe. At that time, according to Haertel and Moraes, there was “no evidence that any Brazilian authority that could properly present a claim to the State of Denmark or directly to the Nationalmuseet ever did so”. Twenty years later, we are witnessing some promising changes.

Regarding the African context, the dossier includes two texts. The first is a transcript of Molemo Moiloa’s public presentation and the debate between her and the students. The second is a contribution by Ikenna Emmanuel Onwuegbuna, from the Department of Music at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Onwuegbuna presents the “Musical Returns and Revivals” project, an initiative he coordinates within the Re-Entanglements online platform. This project revisits the ethnographic archive of British anthropologist N. W. Thomas in southern Nigeria and Sierra Leone between 1909 and 1915. Both interpretations reflect the demand for greater recognition of the work, and greater participation of academics, from and within the continent. While Moiloa’s talk underscores the erasure of African voices that “acts as an erasure a second time, in some sense mimicking the erasure that occurred when so much history was taken”, Onwuegbuna emphasizes the necessity of establishing protocols to ensure respect for the cultural sensitivity of local communities. According to Onwuegbuna, African scholars emerge as key players in fostering mutually respectful collaborations, functioning as translators of worlds and ensuring that communities retain their “right to control how their cultural heritage is accessed, used, and shared.”

The second part of the dossier is dedicated to the Tupinambá Cloak and the diplomatic negotiation process that led to the agreement for its repatriation to the National Museum, located in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. At the time of the submission of the contribution by Letícia Machado Haertel and Luan Matheus Emiliano Moraes, the return of the cloak had already been announced, but had not yet taken place. The cloak finally returned to Brazil in July 2024, not without sparking a series of rumours and questions. Although there are legitimate criticisms regarding the premises of the negotiation, the issue of historical truth, and, in particular, what occurred after the restitution, it was not possible to address them, both for chronological reasons and because it was not the purpose of the contribution.

In their article, Haertel and Moraes present a detailed analysis of the diplomatic negotiations involving members of the Tupinambá community, the leadership of the two museums involved (the Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen and the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro), and the diplomatic representatives of both countries. The authors also address the international legal framework, which often requires adopting alternative dispute resolution (ADR) mechanisms when discussing the restitution of artefacts to their countries of origin. Although less prominent in the public debate, legal aspects are central to the discussion on restitution. Despite the specificity of each case, they can be understood as part of the “common” framework of international law, albeit with increasingly evident challenges to its consistent application. Some aspects raised by Onwuegbuna are reflected in Haertel and Moraes’ description of the negotiations between key stakeholders, including the Tupinambá community, the Brazilian ambassador, museum directors, and diplomatic representatives. These negotiations underscored the need for “significant moments that contribute to the building of understanding and mutual respect” as well as the knowledge exchange required by the restitution process. For instance, “Glicéria’s engagement illustrated the cultural and spiritual significance of the cloak”. Also included in this second part is a brief interview conducted by the organizer with Monsignor Alberto Rocca, director of the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan, where one of the ten remaining cloaks – still preserved, or seized, depending on one’s perspective – can be found in Europe. The interview was conducted during the visit of Glicéria Tupinambá and film director Robson Dias to the Pinacoteca, as part of their trip to explore the cloaks found in various European cultural institutions. Some moments of these visits are documented in the video I Heard the Call: Return of the Tupinambá Cloaks, directed by Robson Dias and Myrza Muniz.

The dossier concludes with a visual essay by the organizer, which takes the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2024) and Documenta 15 in Kassel (2022) as sites of observation. The essay visually analyzes how these dynamics, although seemingly decolonial, often transform into privileged stages for revealing the coloniality perversions of power that operate in the art world.

When addressing the issue of restitution outside Europe and North America, it becomes evident that there is an inversion of the agent subjects and that the problems need to be addressed. As Moiloa points out, the central theme of the Western debate remains the museum, a colonial institution that does not hold the same centrality in the South. In this region, the fundamental issue is the recognition of the “total devastation” caused to people by the history of white oppression and the urgent need to re-humanize this history. “Giving back a thing is the easiest part,” says Moiloa. On the other hand, Onwuegbuna asserts how Western institutions continue to dictate the terms of the repatriation process, and he calls for a paradigm shift: “‘from a paradigm of 'giving back’ to one of shared ownership, collaborative interpretation, and ongoing dialogue”. As Ciraj Rassool affirms, “restitution is a process of claims-making and not be thought of merely as a project of European gift making” (2022) in which Indigenous communities, that were violently deprived of what is theirs, continue to be kept in a receptive and subordinate position, while the former coloniser continues its benevolent and authoritarian actions. As Moiloa reminds us: “It's like a competition. And this [contemporary] competition [between European governments] for who is the most civilised [restitute], in a way, mirrors their [past] competition for collecting [steal]”. Restitution in the African context is an act of reclaiming what is rightfully theirs, of (re)appropriating. Through this process/act, communities reaffirm themselves as active subjects of their own history. This act of retrieval also means rebalancing unequal positions, where, for instance, the high visibility of the 2018 Savoy and Sar Report, as well as Macron's 2017 Ouagadougou speech, seem to diminish the previous work done by many African men and women – politicians, academics, educators, and freedom fighters – during the period of Africa's independence struggles. It is important to remember that the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Manifesto in Algiers was the first Pan-African declaration demanding restitution. The fact that it was not heard by Europeans does not mean that it never existed.

Another important aspect is the claim for the accuracy of knowledge, which is so dear to the Eurocentric knowledge system. Nathan Sentance from the Indigenous Archives Network, in his blog, states that “the archive of settler colonialism is full of misremembered stories, partial truths, and falsifications. They are also a propaganda machine for the settler fantasy”. Similarly, Kimberley Moulton, assistant curator of indigenous art at the Tate Gallery in London, during the curator-talk with Melanie Sarantou and Laura Burocco, organized by the Sámi Center for Contemporary Art, Karasjok (Norway), and held online in February 2023, reveals how she frequently had to face the lack of knowledge among many collectors and archivists from prominent European institutions. The film Dahomey, by Mati Diop, partly fiction and partly documentary, tells the story of the return of 26 pieces, part of the real artefacts from the Kingdom of Dahomey (1600-1904), present-day Benin, from the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac back to its homeland, including King Ghézo. When being moved by French museum technicians, the king wonders why they call him No. 26: “Do these people know my name?”. Upon arriving in Cotonou, the technicians responsible for opening the boxes, immediately addressed him by his name. As he affirms: “I am not 26, I am infinite”. This highlights the need for the West to recognise its epistemic ignorance, as defined by Rauna Koukkanen (2008: 60), and to open ourselves to what Onwuegbuna defines as a watershed moment that would allow the correction of knowledge resulting from incomplete understanding, often distorted by prejudices that relegated other knowledge to fantasies: “the collaboration with African experts has been a game-changer, allowing the West to leverage the knowledge of the Africans and delve into the treasure trove of cultural heritage hidden in the archive”.

The three contributions, without the pretension of exhausting the extensive range of experiences and perspectives that constitute the South, demonstrate that, when speaking of restitution in contexts where material transfer occurs, this never represents the conclusion of the process, but rather the beginning, whose ultimate purpose is to stimulate change both at the local and international levels. We are talking about a discussion not limited to abstract theoretical academic discourse, but to an active and vibrant experience in the present. The constitutive limits of the museum, although still seen in Europe as the natural recipient of this restitution, are overcome in its function as a collector of histories, immovable and untouchable. This view also denounces the Western obsession with conserving everything and keeping everything in stasis to ensure the unquestionability of the “zero point” Eurocentric logic that has long protected Western knowledge.  In the opposite direction, in an interview conducted  by the organizer with Glicéria and the curators of the Hãhãwpuá pavilion for the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto, the artist emphasizes the importance of the cloak “being in motion so people can understand another logic. The cloak is a provocative body"”. The archives are no longer untouchable and take on “the potential to inspire new interpretations, compositions, and even the revival of forgotten musical elements, ultimately informing contemporary music-making” – not only in music but also “can inspire diverse creative expressions. Music, dance, theatre, visual arts, and literature”.

The element of “revitalizing musical practices based on this archival material” can be similarly found in Glicéria’s act of recreating the cloak with her community. It is also interesting to reflect on concepts such as “originality,” which, in the arts, was also functional to maintaining an evolutionary perspective, reducing African production to an origin-centered aesthetic and placing African artists in a different temporality, thereby leading to the denial of their contributions to global artistic production (Burocco 2020). The important thing is not just to bring back the mantle – which will never be an object but a being, “an ancestor long silenced” – but, as for the previous mentioned interview, to bring the knowledge it carries with it. “We call this an ‘agent object’ ”. As with the sound archives, nothing is dead, nothing belongs only to the past. The dead are with the living, as the present is in the past. According to Fanon (1961), “The colonial world is a compartmentalised world”. Here, instead, everything is interconnected and in this way – as it seems to me – a process of re-humanising stories dehumanised by colonial violence is being enacted.

The cases presented in this dossier call for a complex task, one that goes beyond merely unlearning, seeking also to correct structural errors within the Western episteme. In this regard, the issue of restitution, often associated with reparation, offers a unique opportunity to implement the necessary inversion of the centrality of agentive subjects and the issues to be addressed. This paradigm shift will open the door to knowledge until now ignored by Europeans, whose ignorance limits the understanding of the world we share. It thus becomes central not only to establish protocols that ensure “respect for the cultural sensibilities of all”, but also to recognize, as claimed by Onwuegbuna: “the right of each people to control how their cultural heritage is accessed, used, and shared” If such assertions might seem obvious when applied to any European country, it is striking that they are not considered so when it comes to non-European countries.

Ultimately, this is about rehumanising history – not only for those whose histories were taken from them, but also for those who took them. It is an immense task that must be undertaken by both sides. It is therefore worth returning to Césaire (1971) and his conviction that European intervention should not aim to save the colonised, but to offer Europe the possibility of saving itself. “It is Europe that is sick”, recalls Bever Donker (2025) in reading Césaire.

Laura Burocco

Laura Burocco is an integrated researcher at the Network of Research in Anthropology Center (CRIA-ISCTE) at the University Institute of Lisbon, a member of the Research Group on Practices and Politics of Culture, and co-coordinator of the CRIA Working Group on Restitution and Reparation. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7767-4941

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