There is a particular cruelty to silencing an instrument built to speak. The Djidji Ayôkwé, a carved wooden drum belonging to the Ebrié people of coastal Côte d'Ivoire, was never meant to sit still. Its beats once summoned villages, announced royal messages and carried news across distances no human voice could reach. Then, in 1916, French colonial forces seized it as punishment after Ebrié communities refused forced labor on a road project, and for the next eleven decades it sat in Paris, first as confiscated property, later as a museum object behind glass at the Quai Branly.
This spring, that silence ended. Culture ministers from France and Côte d'Ivoire presided over a formal handover ceremony in Paris on February 20, and by mid-March the drum — nearly twelve feet tall, carved from iroko wood, weighing close to 950 pounds — had arrived home in Abidjan. It will eventually be installed at the Musée des Civilisations de Côte d'Ivoire, which has spent years preparing for its return.
The path here was long even by the standards of restitution cases. Côte d'Ivoire first formally requested the drum in 2018, one item among 148 objects on a list of colonial-era artifacts it wanted returned. The request gained real traction after President Emmanuel Macron's 2021 pledge to accelerate the return of looted African heritage, and the French parliament eventually passed unanimous legislation authorizing the transfer. Before any of that paperwork mattered, though, there was a quieter act: in 2022, a delegation of Atchan elders traveled to Paris for a desacralization ceremony, a ritual release that had to happen before conservators could even begin restoration work. Bureaucracy moved on its own schedule. The spiritual clearance moved on another one entirely, and both had to conclude before the drum could travel.
What makes this case resonate beyond Côte d'Ivoire's borders is the argument now being made about what the drum can do once it arrives. Writing for The Conversation, one researcher drew a direct line to Kenya's "Journeys of Peace" exhibition, which used everyday heritage objects — stools, gourds, women's belts — to help communities process the aftermath of ethnic conflict. Côte d'Ivoire has its own wounds to reckon with: a civil war from 2002 to 2007 that split the country along regional and ethnic lines, and a second conflict in 2010 and 2011, after a disputed election, that left more than 3,000 people dead and hardened divisions among groups including the Ebrié, Baoulé and Dioula. The argument isn't that a single drum can undo that history. It's that a shared object, handled through community-led ceremony rather than a sealed exhibit case, gives people a reason to gather in the same room again.
That is also where the comparison to Nigeria's Benin Bronzes becomes useful, and not just as a rhetorical parallel. Both cases involve objects taken as instruments of colonial control — the Bronzes looted during the British punitive expedition of 1897, the drum confiscated as retribution for resistance to forced labor. Both involve years of diplomatic back-and-forth before a return actually happened. And both raise the same unresolved question once the object is back: restitution is not simply a matter of shipping a crate across an ocean. It is a matter of who gets to decide how the object is displayed, who is allowed to speak for its meaning, and whether a museum can hold something sacred without flattening it into a curiosity.
The Djidji Ayôkwé's return doesn't answer that question so much as it reopens it, on Ivorian terms this time. A drum that once called people together under threat of punishment for gathering at all is now being asked to call people together again — this time by choice, and for a country still learning what it means to listen to itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment