Ex-colonial nations open to returning more looted Africa items

France and Germany have set wheels in motion to return more items plundered from former African colonies.

The nations will jointly invest 2.1 million euros ($2.3 million) over the next three years on analyzing items from Africa in their national museums to build up a picture of how they were acquired.

"This is an experimental fund," Julie Sissia, a researcher at the Marc Bloch Franco-German Social Science Research Center in Berlin, Germany, which will administer the funds, told The Guardian newspaper. "We are launching it with the widest possible criteria, so that both small and the biggest projects can apply."

The fund, which was unveiled on Friday, will distribute money to state-owned collections with items from sub-Saharan Africa, with priority going to those with items from Togo and Cameroon, which were colonized by both France and Germany.

Sissia said the research teams seeking to clarify the provenance of the African items will need to be led by mixed French and German members from academia and the nations' museums but must also have partnerships with African nations and collaborate closely with African professionals.

The establishment of the fund followed France's President Emmanuel Macron promising in 2017 to "do everything possible" to return items to African nations that had been looted by colonial France. Paris followed that up by returning 26 items to the West African nation of Benin in 2021.

Germany has also made moves to return plundered items and set up a database in 2022 of artifacts known as the Benin bronzes, which were returned to Nigeria a year later.

Claudia Roth, Germany's federal commissioner for culture and media, said at the launch of the new Franco-German fund that the nations want to ensure they do not have items that were acquired improperly.

"The start of the program shows that cooperation — across borders and between science and culture — makes important projects like this one possible and is much needed in challenging times like these," The Guardian quoted her as saying.

Eric-Andre Martin, secretary-general of the study committee on French-German relations at the French Institute of International Relations, told the French newspaper Le Monde that Paris and Berlin often struggle to cooperate but that both realize they must in this case.

"France and Germany have understood that this issue is essential for today's dialogue with African countries," he said. "And despite their differences, France and Germany have a lot to learn from each other's experiences and mistakes."

Historian Benedicte Savoy, a member of the fund's scientific committee, told Le Monde that Germany had not even fully acknowledged its colonial past until around 2016/17, but that Berlin now wants to do the right thing.