Inventories of collections within African museums and cultural institutions are essential for collections management, preservation, and cultural heritage development. Our focus in this brief is not internal inventories within countries or institutions rather we explore the feasibility of exhaustive external inventories that attempt to catalog all objects from a country that are held abroad.
This policy brief responds to an emerging challenge in the restitution landscape, African governments and decision-makers are increasingly considering such external inventory programs as a starting point in restitution. While this kind of inventory work serves important purposes, we argue that these large-scale cataloging initiatives are resource-intensive and often unviable given the constraints African governments face.
Instead, we advocate for a strategic reallocation of limited government resources toward supporting community-led restitution projects that are already active or seeking to begin- efforts that require immediate attention and are already achieving results despite operating in challenging circumstances.
Our recommendations target African decision-makers weighing resource allocation decisions, offering an alternative approach that prioritizes urgent, grassroots restitution work over exhaustive national cataloging projects.
Key Findings
Inventories don’t guarantee returns. Our research found no direct link between publishing inventories and the actual return of heritage items. Instead, most successful restitution efforts are driven by communities who discover their belongings through chance encounters or grassroots mobilisation.
The costs are enormous. One project cost €3.9 million to document, build knowledge and make accessible around 5246 items from a single kingdom while another identified over 40,000 Cameroonian items in German museums alone—a scale that makes comprehensive inventories financially unrealistic for most African countries.
Colonial distortions persist. Museum records created during colonial rule use labels like “fetish” or “amulet” that obscure true meaning, while most Western institutions still tightly control access to their collections.
A Different Approach
The evidence points towards community-driven, demands-based inventories that start with what communities have lost, rather than what museums hold. This approach:
- Supports existing community mobilisations rather than creating comprehensive catalogues
- Respects cultural protocols around sacred knowledge
- Works within varying levels of digital access across Africa
- Prioritises sustainability and local ownership
Why This Research Matters
When pursued, inventories are most effective when anchored in national institutions, tied to public programming, and used to reconnect communities with the histories—and futures—of their stolen heritage.
But visibility alone is not justice.
Restitution is not only about return—it’s about repair. African governments must choose where to invest for long-term cultural renewal and social cohesion. Download the policy brief (available in French and English) to access detailed case studies, strategic recommendations and practical frameworks for community-centred restitution efforts.
ERRATUM
Date of revision: October 2025
This report and accompanying website materials have been revised to provide additional clarity regarding the scope and context of our recommendations. The core findings and recommendations of the report remain unchanged. These revisions were made to ensure our work is not misinterpreted as a critique of existing projects, but rather as guidance specifically for African decision-makers weighing large-scale national cataloging initiatives against other restitution priorities.
Changes made:
- Clarified that our recommendations address resource allocation decisions facing African governments considering inventory programs of national collections held abroad, rather than inventory approaches generally.
- Clarified that these recommendations are not intended as critiques of existing projects
- Revised references to Digital Benin project to better reflect the project’s broader scope of work, including knowledge creation and accessibility initiatives beyond inventorying, and corrected the budget reference to accurately represent the full range of activities this funding supports.
- Corrected an editing error that incorrectly conflated Atlas of Absence project with broader arguments about colonial logics in restitution research; revised this section to clarify that Atlas of Absence is part of a larger research initiative with multiple components beyond inventorying
- Updated the acknowledgements section to ensure accurate representation of consultation processes
We remain committed to supporting African-led approaches to restitution and to ensuring our research serves the needs of communities and governments navigating these complex decisions.
