Africa: Looted African Belongings Must Be Returned – Is It Repatriation or Restitution? the Words We Use Matter

[The Conversation Africa] Museums and universities around the world hold vast collections of cultural artefacts, artworks, objectified belongings and even ancestral remains. Many were not freely given but taken during colonial times, through force, manipulation, theft or violence. For decades, they have sat in storerooms and display cases, classified into categories like anthropology, natural history or ethnology, separated from the people and communities to whom they once belonged.