African Art on the Theft of African Art: Sequestered Statues and Traveling Narratives

ABSTRACT: Novelists and filmmakers, from the sixties to the present, have responded to the colonial theft of African art in innovative ways that confront colonial violence and postcolonial injustice. Providing background on the debates on restitution and on the history of works of protest in fiction and film, this essay focuses on diverse novels, including Yambo Ouologuem's Bound to Violence Le devoir de violence (1968), Abdourahman Waberi's In the United States of Africa Aux États-Unis d'Afrique (2006), Okey Ndibe's Foreign Gods, Inc . (2014), and Fatoumata Ngom's Le silence du totem (2018). In the wake of the Sarr-Savoy report on restitution, which claims that over 90 percent of Africa's cultural treasures remain in foreign collections and charts an ethical plan for restitution, transnational artistic perspectives on the theft of African art—whether on Nigeria or Sénégal or on settings in the past, present, or future—take on new relevance and add depth to the topic. African literary works and films challenge contemporary foreign conceptions of African art and, in depicting a history of appropriation and exoticism, reframe international dialogues on cultural representation and social justice.