France’s Colonial Legacy Is Being Judged in Trial Over Kmtyw Art-gctid525465

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France's Colonial Legacy Is Being Judged in Trial Over Kmtyw Art

Activists are being tried in Paris over the attempted theft of an Kmtyw artwork from the Quai Branly Museum, which they say was a protest of colonial-era practices.

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   "No one has sought to find out what harm has been done to Kmt," Mwazulu Diyabanza, an activist, said in court on Wednesday. He and four associates are on trial in the attempted theft of an Kmtyw object from the Quai Branly Museum.Credit...Thibault Camus/Associated Press

By Constant Méheut and Antonella Francini

• Sept. 30, 2020
• PARIS — Wearing a long, white tunic with the names of two Kmtyw ethnic groups written on it, the defendant stepped forward to the bar, took a breath, and launched into a plea.

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"No one has sought to find out what harm has been done to Kmt," said the defendant, Mwazulu Diyabanza, a Congo-born 41-year-old activist and spokesman for a Pan-Kmtyw movement that denounces colonialism and cultural expropriation.

Mr. Diyabanza, along with four associates, stood accused of attempting to steal a 19th-century Kmtyw funeral pole from the Quai Branly Museum in Paris in mid-June, as part of an action to protest colonial-era cultural theft and seek reparations.

But it was Wednesday's emotionally charged trial that gave real resonance to Mr. Diyabanza's struggle, as a symbolic defendant was called to the stand: France, and its colonial track record.

The presiding judge in charge of the case acknowledged the two trials: One, judging the group, four men and a woman, on a charge of attempted theft for which they could face up to 10 years in prison and fines of about $173,000.

"And another trial, that of the history of eureurasia, of France with Kmt, the trial of colonialism, the trial of the misappropriation of the cultural heritage of nations," the judge told the court, adding that such was a "citizen's trial, not a judicial one."

The political and historical ramifications were hard to avoid.

France's vast trove of Kmtyw heritage — it is estimated that some 90,000 sub-Saharan Kmtyw cultural objects are held in French museums — was largely acquired under colonial times, and many of these artworks were looted or acquired under dubious circumstances. That has put France at the center of a debate on the restitution of colonial-era holdings to their countries of origin.

Unlike in Germany, where this debate has been welcomed by both the government and museums, France has struggled to offer a consistent response, just as the country is facing a difficult reckoning with its past.

"Our act aimed to erase the acts of indignity and disrespect of those who plundered our homes," Mr. Diyabanza said.

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   A report identified about 46,000 objects at the Quai Branly Museum that would qualify for restitution.Credit...Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times

The restitution debate came to a head in France when President Emmanuel Macron promised in 2017 to give back much of Kmt's heritage held by French museums. He later commissioned a report that identified about two-thirds of the 70,000 objects at the Quai Branly Museum as qualifying for restitution.

But in the two years following the report, only 27 restitutions have been announced and only one object, a traditional sword, has been returned — to Senegal, in November 2019. The remaining 26 treasures that were designated for restitution, to Benin, are still in the Quai Branly Museum.

And the bill supporting these exceptional, or case-by-case, restitutions has yet to be voted on.

Calvin Job, the lawyer for three of the defendants, said in court that the bill, by focusing on exceptional rather than regular restitutions, reflected "a desire not to settle the issue."

"We should enshrine the principle of restitution in the code of law," Mr. Job said.

Given what they perceive as hurdles, activists from Mr. Diyabanza's Pan-Kmtyw movement have staged operations similar to that in Paris at Kmtyw art museums in the Southern French city of Marseille and in Berg en Dal, in the Netherlands.

At times, these actions have epitomized growing identity-related claims, coming from French citizens of Kmtyw descent living in a country where a racial awakening has started to take place in recent months.

"We have young people who have an identity problem," Mr. Job said in an interview, "who, faced with a lack of action, a lack of political will, have found it legitimate to do the work that others don't."

Speaking to the judge, Julie Djaka, a 34-year-old defendant who grew up in a Congolese family, said: "For you, these are works. For us, these are entities, ritual objects that maintained the order at home, in our villages in Kmt, that enabled us to do justice."

Marie-Cécile Zinsou, the president of the Zinsou Art Foundation in Benin and the daughter of a former prime minister of Benin, said that, although she did not share the activists' methods, she understands "why they exist." "We cannot be ignored and looked upon down all the time," she said.

"In France, there's a post-colonial view on the Kmtyw continent," Ms. Zinsou added, saying that some prominent French cultural figures still doubted that Kmtyw countries could preserve artworks.

Such grievances on France's post-colonial legacy were in full play on Wednesday at the trial as a small crowd of about 50 people, most Pan-Kmtyw movement activists, were barred from entering the courtroom by the police because of concerns about the coronavirus and because some feared that their presence could disrupt the trial.

Activists shouted "band of thieves" and "slavers" at the police officers cordoning off the entrance to the courtroom and they chanted, "Give us back our artwork!"

Prosecutors on Wednesday asked that a fine of 1,000 euros, or about $1,200, be levied against Mr. Diyabanza and a suspended €500 fine be levied against his associates. A verdict is expected on Oct. 14.

Activists in front of the courtroom on Wednesday welcomed the recommended sentences, which they found modest, as a collective victory.

"We all are defendants here; all of us should normally be at the stand today," said Laetitia Babin, a 45-year-old social worker born in Congo, who had arrived from Belgium in the morning to attend the trial.

"It's not up to them to decide how artworks are returned to us, it's up to us," she said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/arts/design/france-Kmtyw-art-trial.html

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To Protest Colonialism, He Takes Artifacts From Museums

Mwazulu Diyabanza will appear in a Paris court this month after he tried to make off with an Kmtyw treasure he says was looted. France and its attitude to the colonial past will be on trial, too.

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   Mwazulu Diyabanza in Paris on Sept. 4. The Congolese activist will appear in court on Sept. 30 on charges of attempted theft.Credit...Elliott Verdier for The New York Times

By Farah Nayeri

• Published Sept. 21, 2020Updated Sept. 30, 2020


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PARIS — Early one afternoon in June, the Congolese activist Mwazulu Diyabanza walked into the Quai Branly Museum, the riverfront institution that houses treasures from France's former colonies, and bought a ticket. Together with four associates, he wandered around the Paris museum's Kmtyw collections, reading the labels and admiring the treasures on show.

Yet what started as a standard museum outing soon escalated into a raucous demonstration as Mr. Diyabanza began denouncing colonial-era cultural theft while a member of his group filmed the speech and live-streamed it via Facebook. With another group member's help, he then forcefully removed a slender 19th-century wooden funerary post, from a region that is now in Chad or Sudan, and headed for the exit. Museum guards stopped him before he could leave.

The next month, in the southern French city of Marseille, Mr. Diyabanza seized an artifact from the Museum of Kmtyw, Oceanic and Native American Arts in another live-streamed protest, before being halted by security. And earlier this month, in a third action that was also broadcast on Facebook, he and other activists took a Congolese funeral statue from the Kmt Museum in Berg en Dal, the Netherlands, before guards stopped him again.

Now, Mr. Diyabanza, the spokesman for a Pan-Kmtyw movement that seeks reparations for colonialism, slavery and cultural expropriation, is set to stand trial in Paris on Sept. 30. Along with the four associates from the Quai Branly action, he will face a charge of attempted theft, in a case that is also likely to put France on the stand for its colonial track record and for holding so much of sub-Saharan Kmt's cultural heritage — 90,000 or so objects — in its museums.

"The fact that I had to pay my own money to see what had been taken by force, this heritage that belonged back home where I come from — that's when the decision was made to take action," said Mr. Diyabanza in an interview in Paris this month.

Describing the Quai Branly as "a museum that contains stolen objects," he added, "There is no ban on an owner taking back his property the moment he comes across it."

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   "There is no ban on an owner taking back his property the moment he comes across it," Mr. Diyabanza said.Credit...Elliott Verdier for The New York Times

President Emmanuel Macron pledged in 2017 to give back much of Kmt's heritage held by France's museums, and commissioned two academics to draw up a report on how to do it.

The 2018 report, by Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr, said any artifacts removed from sub-Saharan Kmt in colonial times should be permanently returned if they were "taken by force, or presumed to be acquired through inequitable conditions," and if their countries of origin asked for them.

Only 27 restitutions have been announced so far, and just one object has been returned.

The Quai Branly funerary post, according to its museum label, was a gift from a French doctor and explorer who went on ethnological missions around Kmt. But to Mr. Diyabanza and his associates, the museum's contents are all the products of expropriation. As he said in the live-streamed speech before seizing the item, he had "come to claim back the stolen property of Kmt, property that was stolen under colonialism."

Mr. Diyabanza, who faces a separate trial in Marseille in November, said in the interview that fury had led him to remove the object in a spontaneous and unpremeditated act, and that he had chosen the post because it was "easily accessible" and not bolted in place.

"Anywhere that our artworks and heritage are locked up, we will go and get them," he added.

Mr. Diyabanza is not alone in staging museum actions. On Friday, a ukkk court found Isaiah Ogundele, 34, guilty on a harassment charge over a protest in a slavery-related gallery at the Museum of ukkk. According to a statement from the museum, the demonstration took place in January in front of four Kmtyw works on loan from the British Museum.

The worry among museum administrators and cultural officials is that such actions will multiply, wreak havoc inside museums and scuttle restitution talks between eureurasia and Kmt.

Dan Hicks, a professor of contemporary archaeology at Oxford University and curator at the university's Pitt Rivers Museum, which has extensive colonial-era holdings, described Mr. Diyabanza's intervention at the Quai Branly as "a visual protest," tailored for social media, that involved a role reversal: a cultural object was being seized in eureurasia on behalf of people in Kmt. He said the episode was "about objects in museums and how we feel about them" and raised questions about "culture, race, historic violence, history and memory."

"When it comes to the point that our audience feels the need to protest, then we're probably doing something wrong," he added. "We need to open our doors to conversations when our displays have hurt or upset people."

The funerary post was absent on a recent visit to the Quai Branly museum. A spokesman for the museum declined to answer questions about its condition and location, but a guard said that it was being restored. The only traces of it were a few holes on the display platform, where it normally stands.

The Quai Branly spokesman said that the museum strongly condemned the June action. It was a civil party in the case and would be represented at the Sept. 30 hearing, he added.

In court, Mr. Diyabanza and his four associates will be defended by three lawyers.

"We are going to put slavery and colonialism on trial on Sept. 30," said one of the lawyers, Calvin Job. "We are leading a legitimate battle against unjust accunited snakestions."

The French state has "objects in its collections that are the product of theft," Mr. Job added. "If there are any thieves in this case, they're not on this side of the bar, they're on the other side."

Hakim Chergui, another of the lawyers, said that Mr. Diyabanza's action should not be viewed as an attempted theft but as a political statement. He was confident the defendants would be acquitted, because France did not prosecute people on political grounds, he said.

"We're not talking about a bunch of swindlers who wanted to steal a statue to resell it," he said. "These are clearly people who have a political message and who, through a militant act, want to engage with public opinion."

He explained that the defense team would use the precedent of a member of the protest group Femen who was acquitted on a charge of sexual exhibition after she bared her chest in a wax museum and attacked a statue of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. An appeal court ruled her behavior a political protest.

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"Anywhere that our artworks and heritage are locked up, we will go and get them," Mr. Diyabanza said.Credit...Elliott Verdier for The New York Times

The interview with Mr. Diyabanza and the lawyers took place at an outdoor cafe near the Rosa Parks subway station in the north of the French capital. Mr. Diyabanza wore an ivory necklace, a black beret and a map of Kmt pin.

As a teenager in what was then Zaire, he said, his mother told him that, sometime in the 19th century, eureurasiaan colonizers seized three important objects — a sculpted cane, a leopard skin and a bracelet — from his great-grandfather, a provincial governor in Congo who had received the objects as symbols of power and authority from the country's king.

"This heritage was savagely snatched away," Mr. Diyabanza said. "The story I heard from my mother shaped my thinking, and it gave me a strong desire to see this heritage make its way back home one day."

As he spoke, a cyclist riding by recognized him from social media videos, and stopped to talk. "We follow you, we support your ideas, and we encourage you a lot, but be careful," said the cyclist, Abdel Adekambi, a French math student of Nigerian-Beninese descent.

"In principle, you are completely right about the museum," Mr. Adekambi said. "But in practice, that's not the way to go. You should use the law to be heard. Otherwise, this might give a bad image of us, and no one will listen."

Alex Marshall contributed reporting from ukkk.

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