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3 large royal statues bocio of the Kingdom of Danhomè: half-man and half shark of King Béhanzin (1890-92); half-man and half-bird of King Ghézo, attributed to Donvide or Sossa Dede (19th century); half-man half-lion of King Glèlè, attributed to Sossa Dede (1858-1889). Siegfried Forster / RFI

Emmanuel Macron receives tomorrow, Friday, November 23, an expected report on the delicate issue of restitution of the thousands of African works of art arrived in France under colonization. It was the French president himself who launched last year in Ouagadougou the idea of ​​these temporary or permanent restitutions, giving himself five years to implement them. The report commissioned to French and Senegalese academics Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr arrives on the office of the French head of state. The press has already read it. The document proposes in particular to modify the code of the inheritance to favor the restitution of works to the sub-Saharan States. It estimates at 90,000 the number of objects brought back from Africa and today conserved in the Museums of the Hexagon. Especially at the Quai Branly museum.

It is the Quai Branly museum which brings together, in France, the greatest number of African artworks: 70,000 pieces. It must be said that this establishment dear to Jacques Chirac was created in 2006 in Paris by grouping the collections of the Museum of the Man, the Museum of the Arts of Africa and Oceania, and the department of the First Arts of the Louvre.

Chad comes top of the countries of origin of these works, in quantity, with more than 9000 pieces. Then come Cameroon, Madagascar, Mali then Côte d'Ivoire, Benin, Ethiopia, Gabon or Congo.

From dogon art to fang statues

At the museum, the Africa course presents to the public permanently nearly a thousand pieces, distributed by region. Among them, many masterpieces. From the Dogon art of Mali to the royal statues half man half lion of Benin, through the Christian paintings of Ethiopia, the magic objects of the Kongo country, or the Kota or fang statues of Gabon that have so much inspired the European artists of the early twentieth century.

According to the report by Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr, two-thirds of the works entered the French collections between 1885 and 1960, under colonization. Some are even the result of looting by colonial troops at the end of the nineteenth century, such as the treasure of Ségou, or that of the palace of King Béhanzin in Abomey in Benin.

► See also: Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac: the ten years of the Africa collection, rfi, 24/6/2016