Paper short abstract:

The proposed paper discusses questions of law, ethics, questions of ownership, and practices of digital restitution of historical voice recordings from the Berlin Lautarchiv.

Paper long abstract:

Currently, the Berlin Lautarchiv at the Humboldt University holds hundreds of historical voice recordings that were produced with prisoners of World War I in German camps (1915-1918). Despite the fact that no documents of consent by these speakers exist, the archive is in the position of having the legal rights to administer the recordings and grant access to for their use. This also means that even relatives of these speakers have to ask for permission for using these acoustic recordings and their documentation and sign a user agreement.

Ethically, this situation begs the question of who owns, or, in this case, inherits the human voice that was recorded in a project of colonial knowledge production?

Our paper speaks to a project of digital “restitution”, initiated by Anette Hoffmann, Fatou Cissé Kane and Christopher Lee, which aims to hand over the historical recordings with African speakers to the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar. On the basis of our research on voice recordings, we discuss legal and ethical issues, around the ownership, colonial production, and current geographical location of these historical sound documents. This entails legal gaps and ethical issues which arise in the process of making accessible the sound documents in a process of “digital restitution“, which seeks to grant free access to the documents in institutions of the speaker’s country of origin.

Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that the pillaging of African judicial objects and the creation of ethnographic museums in Angola was the culmination of a long and deliberate process of colonial legal unification. It focuses on BaKongo 'minkisi' sculptures, highlighting their diverse judicial roles.

Paper long abstract:

In 2015, Wyatt McGaffey published a brief article about some of the minkisi (BaKongo wooden sculptures) that the Portuguese violently collected during the ‘pacification campaigns’ (1885 – 1910) they fought against the remnants of the Kingdom of Loango, in Cabinda (West Central Africa). These African pieces are now held in Portuguese, German, and Belgium museums. According to McGaffey, the minkisi that were then pillaged were central to the ‘maintenance of a degree of law and order’, guaranteed ‘treaties and reconciliations’, and played a role in the administration of the ‘nkasa poison ordeal’ (2015, 149-150). This judicial ordeal was like dozens of others that the Portuguese had encountered in the ‘kingdoms’ of Angola and Benguela since the sixteenth century. Building on McGaffey’s art-historical analysis of these minkisi, this paper will situate their pillaging in the wider context of the legal history of Angola, arguing that the removal of these judicial objects was the culmination of a long process of colonial legal unification. To do so, it will begin by introducing the first systematic efforts made by Governor Generals of Angola to dismantle the shadow judiciary system that persisted in conquered African kingdoms and provinces (c. 1765 – 1810). It will then focus on the criminalization of African ordeals as ‘poison’ ordeals (c. 1860s), and finally turn its attention to the creation of ethnographic museums and institutions (1860s onwards), arguing that these institutions were designed to hold and neutralize the judicial objects that were central to this ‘shadow judiciary’.

Paper short abstract:

This paper introduces the current restitution debate in Austria. It discusses the legal situation of African cultural objects acquired in colonial contexts and the instruments available to organize restitutions and formulate general rules.

Paper long abstract:

In January 2022 the Austrian government established an expert committee to study the colonial heritage in its federal museums. Although Austria is a country not considered to have an extensive colonial past, Austrian museums hold large collections of ethnographic objects and human remains from Africa and the rest of the world that they acquired during the heydays of colonialism. The federal museums are also involved in the Benin Dialogue Group.

This paper introduces the current restitution debate in Austria through a legal lens. It discusses the legal situation of African cultural objects acquired in colonial contexts and the instruments available to museums and the federal government to organize restitutions and formulate rules. From a comparative law perspective, the specific history of Austria might turn the currently-evolving Austrian approach into an interesting example for other countries with public holdings of cultural objects from colonial contexts but without a history of direct colonialism.