'Eloquent and powerful' - Francoise Verges

Debates around restitution and decolonising museums continue to rage across the world. Artefacts, effigies and ancestral remains are finally being accurately contextualised and repatriated to their homelands.

Fifteen Colonial Thefts amplifies these discussions, exploring the history of colonial violence in Africa through the prism of fifteen African belongings - all looted at the height of the imperial era and brought to European museums.

Structured around three arenas - the battlefield, the royal palace, and the realm of the sacred - the book displays how colonial officers violently plundered Africa. It explores the meaning of those cultural artefacts at the time of their appropriation and today in an era of restitution.

With writers from Europe and Africa, including scientists, museum professionals, artists and activists, the book illuminates the collective trauma and loss of cultural, historical and spiritual knowledge that colonial theft engendered.

About the Author
Sela K. Adjei is a multidisciplinary artist with degrees in Communication Design, and African Art and Culture from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana. He received his PhD in African Studies from the University of Ghana, Legon. He is a lecturer at the University of Media, Arts and Communication (NAFTI). Yann LeGall is a postdoctoral researcher on the project 'The Restitution of Knowledge: Artefacts as Archives in the (Post)Colonial Museum' at the Institute for Art History of the Technical University in Berlin. He was previously a fellow at the Research Training Group Minor Cosmopolitanisms at the University of Potsdam. As a member of the initiatives Berlin Postkolonial and Postcolonial Potsdam, he leads guided tours for university seminars and conferences in both cities and developed a digital audio guide on traces of colonial history in Potsdam. Peju Layiwola is an art historian and visual artist from Nigeria. She is Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Lagos. Her works can be found in Yemisi Shyllon Museum, Lagos, and in the homes of many private collectors. Her maternal grandfather was Oba Akenzua II, King of Benin, who reigned from 1933 until 1978. Layiwola has led public advocacy for the return of art works stolen from Benin during the Punitive Expedition of 1897.

Reviews

'An eloquent and powerful book! The editors, Sela K. Adjei and Yann LeGall, have brought together an invaluable collection of forgotten histories around fifteen colonial thefts. The authors show with rigour and depth that colonial conquest was not only about erasing, expropriating, dispossessing, extracting, exploiting, but also looting and trafficking. They make the case for unconditional restitutions and returns.'

-- Francoise Verges, author of A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum

'This book brings much needed diversity to a debate that has for too long focused on a very few cases often mainly seen from a European perspective. It is a great introduction to the history behind the restitution process and the confrontation of different perspectives that it engenders.'

-- Felicity Bodenstein, lecturer in Contemporary Art History and Heritage, Sorbonne Universite

'By focussing on colonial violence in such a straightforward way, this volume not only reminds us of the nature of colonialism itself, but also of the unabated necessity to continue scrutinising museum collections and work towards restitution.'

-- Larissa Foerster, Department of European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin



Book Information
ISBN 9780745349527
Author Sela K. Adjei
Format Hardback
Page Count 304
Imprint Pluto Press
Publisher Pluto Press