Despoilers of others must beware of the loss of dignity and respect attending the willful acts of human abuse they perpetrated. All Africans of goodwill, and those who love and stand by Africa, reject the ongoing attempt to change the subject of the massive and disgraceful destruction of Africa by greedy and inhuman Western powers.
To divert and confuse issues, the West is using diversionary tactics of tossing bananas to the apes, by talking about returning the art objects they stole from Africa, the continent they already damaged. Attempting to dump the detritus on the looted continent is tantamount to stealing an orange and after enjoying the fruit, asking to return the peel to the original owner of the delicious fruit. What is Africa going to do with orange peels?
Is the West also prepared to return to Africa the priceless and beautiful children they kidnapped from the continent? Did the West not pick and choose the best of Africa?
Did they not inspect their teeth, genitalia, test their backs and peer into their eyes and nostrils—and select the choicest of the Black bodies and cart them out in millions upon millions with their massive ships built solely for the pilfering of young Africans, the beautiful women and infants, the athletic men, Africa’s most precious treasures?
If the West now desires to return African children, where will Africa locate them in a continent that Western imperialism has despoiled ecologically, psychologically, politically and economically for the past five hundred years?
With what will Africa feed them, house them, heal them?
Saidiya Hartman, in her book, “Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Slave Route,” says they, the Africans in the diasporas, are now “fungible.” I thought of fungi, and wept.
Will the orange peelings the West wants to return to Africa wipe off the tears that a mother continent has shed for five centuries of ceaseless rape?
The West lost its claim to beauty when it forfeited its good character and championed human kidnapping, commodified Africa and psychologically damaged the inhabitants, by orchestrating unmitigated and ignoble violence on largely defenseless indigenous peoples.
The West, therefore, cannot meet the indigenous African standards of Iwa Lewa. What is the meaning of Iwa lewa? It is your priceless character that makes you beautiful, but not the outward appearances that money can buy.
In his classic book, “Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art,” the Nigerian art historian, Rowland Abiodun, writes extensively about the concept of “iwa lewa,” conveying the impression that it is the character that one exhibits that determines one’s beauty.
The destructive character that the West has exhibited in Africa for hundreds of years is not only ugly, but it is also repulsive, heartless and cold, even as it preaches the humanism that it is unable to convey in its obnoxious behavior, in which human life is meaningless as long as material pursuits are involved.
Is the West embarrassed by the few Africans now moving from one museum to another staging protest performances in galleries in Europe and America, galleries where the West locks up the pilfered African objects inside reinforced glass cases?
In June 2020, Mwazulu Diyabanza, a forty-one-year-old born in the Congo bought a ticket and entered the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, with four other members of the Yanka Nku (Unity Dignity and Courage). Diyabanza moved from one object to another in the museum, as other members of the Yanka Nku made a video of him and streamed it live online. When Diyabanza reached the cage holding a 19th century Bari sculpture, he grabbed it and attempted to leave the museum with it. The security arrested him. Diyabanza was prosecuted in a French court with his “accomplices,” found guilty, and convicted. They repeated the performance in other museums in Europe and suffered prosecutions and convictions at these Western courts of “justice.”
He remains undeterred, and has placed the British Museum on notice, condemning these Western museums as deplorable depositories of stolen African treasures. Diyanbanza is the future of Africa. Younger Africans are increasingly bound to see through the insincerity, bigotry, double standards, and double talk of the West. Hungry, angry and desperate, they ask:
Is the current attempt by the West to return stolen African objects motivated by a sudden feeling of magnanimity? Or is it out of remorse and repentance, an act of penitence atoning for all the wrongs perpetrated on the magnificent and dark continent?
Is Africa supposed to be happy that the West has now discovered its humanity, and is now ready to give back what they stole? Does the thief get to dictate the conditions of “returning” or “handing back” what they raided? Are there no consequences, no penalties, no recompenses for invading other people, destroying their land, their languages, their cultures, their civilization and heritages—beyond assuring them that their plundered art will be returned when it is convenient?
Stolen goods get hot: it’s just a matter of time. Rapists lose their conscience with their rights to mutual admiration. Those who despoil others can no longer deserve an iota of dignity or respect from those they so wantonly abused, and continue to oppress.
“When a burglar stole the king’s trumpet, where will he blow it?”
This Yoruba proverb applies not only to the Benin objects looted from Africa by European colonial enterprises, but also to all the objects that Europe pillaged and removed from the continent as part of the European expansionist agenda in Africa from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century.
Huge collections of these objects have accumulated in Europe, including treasures in metal, ivory, wood, stones and mixed media sculptures, numbering hundreds of thousands.
Recently, the media has been awash with viral news of urgent plans to “return” these objects to Africa with particular emphasis on the ones looted from Benin City. Some individual collectors of the objects have made ceremonial and publicized gestures as they arranged to return the loots. The ones in museum collections have raised complicated issues for several reasons.
One of these issues is the poor conditions in many African countries without suitable museums and galleries for housing and displaying these objects. A country such as Nigeria suffers from a lack of electricity and is not in a position to adequately house the objects without damage.
Secondly, Europeans did not steal the objects from Nigeria, or other African “countries.”
Benin art was stolen from the indigenous people of Benin. How does the art now belong to Nigeria, a country created by Britain? The indigenous Benin people appreciate the objects because they are meaningful and fundamental to the health of their culture. Within Nigeria, which consists of large Islamic populations committed to the destruction of “kaffir” objects, the Benin works are regarded as “Haram,” or satanic.
The countries that Europe created, including Nigeria, are in dire economic, political, cultural and security crises. As Islamic fundamentalists run over Nigeria, systematically advancing from the north to the capital city of Abuja, what the indigenous people trapped within Nigeria need to survive is not the return of these images. The indigenous people trapped within Nigeria desire security of life, economic stability and ecological recovery.
The people of Africa, as a whole, need the continent to be reconfigured to sustainable units, different from the enclaves that the West created to exploit and suppress Africans.
Africans are producing new art objects now. They want relief from the West in the form of compensation for the historic cruelty and damage done to their people and land.
They want geographical, economic and ecological reconfigurations that would make their indigenous cultures flourish once again. The last thing on their minds is the problem of building museums to hold objects systematically and strategically dumped on them by the West.
Prof. Okediji is of University of Texas, in Austin, USA.
The Nation