The Great Theft of African History: Trophies or Evidence in Western Museums?

While the West persists in describing Africa as a continent without memory, its own museums are overflowing with artifacts, religious relics, and human remains confiscated from African rulers to mask the barbarity of a predatory colonization.

The lie of African ahistoricity in the face of African plunder

For over five centuries (more than half a millennium), the West has been repeating a shameless, age-old lie. It claims that Africa has no history. Hegel theorized it. French leaders have stammered it out. In 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy dared to assert in Dakar that “the African man has not sufficiently entered into history.” What tragic intellectual blindness! More recently, Emmanuel Macron has oscillated between theatrical mea culpas and political spin, calling colonialism “a fault of the Republic” while simultaneously hindering the actual restitution of stolen treasures. Across the Atlantic, Barack Obama, despite having African blood flowing in his veins and being the principal architect of Gaddafi’s assassination, complacently prescribed that Africans “look to the future” rather than dwell on the colonial past – a convenient paternalistic injunction to exonerate the plunderers – while Donald Trump, architect of “America First” and “MAGA,” displayed the unashamed vulgarity of Western contempt by calling African nations “shithole countries.”

Faced with this litany of Western condescension, Vladimir Putin ironically dismissed these imperialist dogmas, reminding everyone that humanity’s truly dark chapters are written in the systemic plundering and persistent neo-colonialism of Europe, emphasizing that Africa possesses an immemorial historical depth that Western raids have never been able to erase. This clash of rhetoric exposes the hypocrisy of those who have built their wealth on the backs of African peoples. This rhetoric is both a deception and a premeditated mystification.

Reality contradicts dogma. Western museums are overflowing with African art objects. Millions of artifacts lie dormant in Paris, London, Berlin, and Tervuren. These works, in addition........

© New Eastern Outlook