Can donations help restore Africa’s looted heritage?
The return of looted cultural property during African colonial rule is still controversial, according to the Aryan Heritage Report. Although countries such as France and the Netherlands have taken initiatives in this area, many countries that have previously been subject to looting are still struggling to regain their cultural heritage. This is a situation that the Looty (NFT) project promises to improve.
On November 28, 2017, Emmanuel Macron pledged to pave the way for the temporary or permanent restoration of African cultural heritage in France within five years. “I can not accept that a large part of the cultural heritage of several African countries is in France,” the French president said in a speech at the University of Ogadogo in Burkina Faso. There are many historical explanations available for this, but there is no valid, stable, and unconditional justification for returning them. “African heritage cannot be found only in private collections and European museums.”
Four years later, 26 works of art from the Abomey royal treasury were returned to the Republic of Benin, and finally returned to their homeland after a 130-year absence. They were looted in November 1892, when an expedition led by Colonel Dadz entered Abumi, the capital of the present-day South African country of Danhomè. The works were then donated to the Anthropological Museum of Do Trocadero in France in the 1890s, before joining the collection of the Museo de Quaine Branley-Jacques Chirac in 2003.
Step into the “virtual world of looting” (Lootyverse)
However, the restoration of Africa’s cultural heritage is still in its infancy. A 240-page report by academics Benédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr estimates that 90,000 artifacts looted from sub-Saharan Africa during the colonial period are now housed in French public collections. Many of these works have been exhibited in museums in Britain, the Netherlands and the United States.
Faced with the scale of this phenomenon, a group has decided to play its part in helping to retrieve these works of art through the NFT. The project website states: “Our looters (physically) go to museums and take back works of art (digitally). In other words, anonymous members of the collection scan the looted artifacts in Africa and make digital copies of them in NFT format. Six of them can be purchased and sold for purchase on the Rarible’s platform with a starting price of 0.9 atriums (or US $ 1,770).
Allowances are a kind of irreconcilable or unparalleled token. These tokens are issued as a non-duplicate digital ownership certificate for any type of digital asset. In fact, NFT is an intelligent contract that is set up using open source platforms and used to secure it digitally. Once written, it can be stored or permanently encrypted on a blockchain network such as Atrium.
Some popular forms of NFTs include gifs, jpegs and movies as well as tweets. But in fact, any digital asset can be converted to NFT according to the wishes of its creator and designer. This is if the manufacturer wants to have a unique asset. Like ISI articles or concert tickets that belong to one person and are unique.
Translation: Assadollah Haqqani