Emmanuel Macron's 2017 call for the restitution of African artefacts was significant yet overlooked decades of African advocacy for their heritage. African voices, particularly those of historians like Chao Tayiana Maina, argue that reporting on the subject often fails to recognize ongoing restitution efforts led by Africans themselves. In response, Maina and artist Molemo Moiloa co-founded Open Restitution Africa (ORA) and launched a data platform to centralize information about restitution. This initiative, built on three years of research, seeks to empower African communities by providing resources and expert insights into the restitution of looted artefacts.
Even the language and the reporting, a lot of it was not mirroring the reality that, one, African countries have been demanding and requesting for decades and, two, that there's a [lot of] hard work going on.
If France decides to give ten objects out of 50,000, it is positioned as a remarkable thing when essentially there's still a lot of injustice going on.
The platform, the fruit of three years' research, mostly on the ground at the local level, has case studies, analyses and a resource library—to highlight efforts to restitute belongings looted from the continent, and now located around the world.
The main need is for Africans to be able to share information with one another.
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