European museums have learnt to discuss African restitution in language so smooth that the theft almost disappears. They speak of custodianship, shared heritage and cultural partnerships, while continuing to decide whether African countries and communities may own, borrow or even see their own heritage.

The clearest example is the museum loan, which allows an object to travel while ownership remains exactly where colonialism placed it.

The loan that keeps ownership in Britain

In January 2024, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum agreed to send 32 pieces of Asante royal gold and silver to the Manhyia Palace Museum in Kumasi. Their arrival mattered because some had not been seen in Ghana for 150 years, but the objects came under three-year loan agreements rather than through a transfer of ownership.

Many had been taken during Britain’s nineteenth-century wars against the Asante Kingdom. Ghana could display its royal heritage, provided it accepted that the British museums legally owned it.

British institutions often point to laws restricting what they can permanently remove from their collections. Those laws may create a genuine problem for museum directors, but they also reveal whose rules continue to govern the conversation. Britain took the objects, placed them in British institutions and later wrote laws protecting those collections, leaving African claimants trapped inside a system they had no part in creating.

Ethiopia’s sacred Tabots make the contradiction even clearer. British troops seized them at Maqdala in 1868, and their religious importance means that even museum staff are not permitted to see them. The British Museum nevertheless proposes lending them to an Ethiopian church in Britain, which preserves British ownership while avoiding the more obvious solution of returning them to Ethiopia.

The Bangwa Queen and the making of value

The Bangwa Queen shows what can happen after African heritage leaves the continent. The carved royal figure came from Fontem in Cameroon, where it carried spiritual and political meaning long before Europe decided it was art.

German colonial agent Gustav Conrau took it out of the Bangwa region around 1898 or 1899, after which it passed through a Berlin museum and the collections of European and American dealers. Man Ray photographed it in Paris during the 1930s, placing it beside a nude model and turning Bangwa heritage into an image of European modernism.

In 1990, the figure sold at Sotheby’s for $3.4 million, setting a world record for African art at the time. It is now owned by the Dapper Foundation in France, while the people of Fontem remain far from decisions about where it belongs and what happens to it.

Europe first treated the Bangwa Queen as an ethnographic object, then as artistic inspiration and finally as a multimillion-dollar masterpiece. Its value kept rising as its original community lost control of both the object and its story.

Who gets trusted and who gets access

Preservation remains one of the favourite arguments against restitution, with African institutions expected to prove that they have reliable funding, perfect security and professional conservation systems before objects can return.

The British Museum applied a looser standard to itself. In 2023, it revealed that an estimated 2,000 items from its collection had been stolen, lost or damaged, a failure discovered only after an outside whistleblower raised concerns.

African museums need investment and public oversight, just as museums everywhere do. European institutions, however, cannot lose thousands of objects and continue presenting themselves as the only trustworthy guardians of African heritage.

Their claim to provide universal access is equally weak. A European tourist can walk into the British Museum freely, while an African researcher may pay for a visa application, submit private financial records and still be refused. The European Commission has acknowledged refusal rates of 30 percent or more at some consulates in African and Asian countries.

A collection is hardly universal when the people most closely connected to its objects face the highest barriers to seeing them.

Ownership must come with accountability

Returning objects will not settle every argument. Nigeria’s experience with the Benin Bronzes has already raised difficult questions about whether governments, museums or royal authorities should control what comes home.

African citizens are entitled to ask where returned heritage will be kept, who will manage it and whether the public will have access. Their concern about corruption and political interference does not justify European ownership; it shows why accountability must continue after restitution.

Europe must surrender legal title, while African governments, museums, royal authorities and religious custodians must protect what returns and keep it accessible. Restitution begins by correcting ownership, but it succeeds only when people can reconnect with what was taken from them.