Restitution, Repair, and the Decolonial Turn in Contemporary Museums

Abstract

Between June 2025 and June 2026 the Netherlands handed back 119 Benin Bronzes, the University of Cambridge transferred legal title to 116 more, and three Swiss institutions returned 18. Taken together these movements represent the largest concentrated transfer of contested African material since the objects were seized in the British punitive expedition of 1897. This article treats the current restitution wave as a test of whether the museum can be reformed or whether its founding logic makes reform impossible. It works through four positions: the universal museum defence articulated in the 2002 declaration signed by eighteen major institutions, the relational ethics proposed in the Sarr and Savoy report of 2018, the argument from colonial violence developed by Hicks, and the practice of source community curation that has developed largely outside the debate. The article argues that restitution has been misdescribed on both sides. It is not the emptying of museums, since the numbers involved are small against total holdings. Nor is it a settlement, since transferring title while retaining custody, as several recent agreements do, reproduces the asymmetry it claims to end. What restitution actually forces is a change in who narrates, and that change has barely begun.