Most are weapons, taken as souvenirs of colonial wars, said Olusegun Morakinyo, Africologist and former visiting scholar at the TCD.
On the fourth floor of Trinity College Dublin’s (TCD’s) arts building, around two dozen people watched in silence.
Playing on the screen, in the 4050B lecture hall, was an Al-Jazeera documentary Restitution: Africa’s Stolen Art.
A banner from the Africa Centre sat in the corner. “Advocate. Educate. Network”, it said in dark-red letters under the logo.
Later on, Olusegun Morakinyo – Africologist and former visiting scholar at the TCD and Queen’s University Belfast history departments – recounted his personal odyssey cataloguing the National Museum of Ireland’s colonial artefacts, taken from the African continent.
Friends told him he couldn’t do it, said Morakinyo, wearing a khaki-coloured dashiki, a traditional red cap, and golden bracelets.
That he had a better shot at swimming the length of the Liffey than viewing the reserve of colonial relics that is closeted away, he told the full lecture room on a sunny morning in mid-August.
“In the late 1970s, pressure for space led to the closure of the gallery [at the National Museum of Ireland] where artefacts from the Pacific, the Americas, and Africa were displayed,” says a 1995 paper published in the journal African Arts.
After that, they were tucked away in storage like a secret, it says. They remain unavailable for public viewing at the moment, said Aoife O’Brien, the museum’s curator of world cultures and ethnography.
When Morakinyo did gain access and a window into the world of African relics at the museum, he took photo after photo and held them close, he said.
An image shows Morakinyo in a room with shuttered lockers, wearing purple rubber gloves and holding a stick from the National Museum’s African collection with a small note attached to its end.
In late 2023, the government set up an expert advisory committee to hammer out guidelines for the return of historical items to the countries they’d been taken from “illegally or unethically”, says a press release from the time.
But progress has been slow, says Philomena Mullen, a member of the committee and assistant professor of Black Studies at TCD, who attended the meeting on 16 August.
They only meet about four times a year, said Mullen. And the process is fraught, filled with legal and ethical questions. “Things can get slowed down.”
For some of the people who’d attended the Africa Centre event, the guidelines can’t come soon enough, though.
“These are not just objects; these are life and death to me,” said Morakinyo.
A spokesperson for the Department of Culture said it appreciates that “interested parties are awaiting the outcome” of the committee’s deliberations.
The committee meets “as a whole” quarterly, they said, “but significant work is undertaken between meetings to progress matters arising” from the discussions. The guidelines are expected to be drawn up by early 2026, the spokesperson said.
Most of the African objects held at the National Museum in Dublin are weapons, taken as souvenirs of colonial wars, said Morakinyo.
Of the over 4,700 African pieces at the museum, almost 2,600 of them are weapons, he said.
Most were taken from what is now South Africa (over 640 pieces), followed by Ghana (over 539) and then Nigeria (over 294), Morakinyo said.
In addition to these, the National Museum also has thousands of artefacts from the Americas and the Pacific.
In his lecture, Morakinyo said the weapons in the collection normalise the atrocities of colonial wars, making museums haunted “crime scenes” in need of forensic study.
In this way, museums themselves become a weapon, he said. “What it does is it subjugates you. ‘I conquered you, this is the evidence of it.’”
“What defines [these objects] is necography, is death, is violence,” said Morakinyo.
O’Brien, the National Museum’s curator of world cultures, said the African collection is not available for viewing at the moment, but sent four photographs.
One image shows three leaf-shaped ceremonial swords with gilded grips. One has its handle covered in a dark cloth tied with shimmering threads.
The British Museum has similar-looking ones in its collection. “Taken from the royal palace in Kumasi [in Ghana] by British troops during the fourth Anglo-Ashanti (Anglo-Asante) War,” says a description for a similar-looking sword on its website.
It was “purchased from the Gold Coast [British colonial] Government through the Crown Agents for the Colonies in 1900”, it says.
The 1995 paper says the ones in Dublin’s National Museum are also from today’s Ghana.
“Lent to the museum in 1903 by Captain W.B. Davidson-Houston, Acting Resident in Kumase in 1899 and later Commissioner and Acting Chief Commissioner in Asante,” it says.
At the event in mid-August, Mullen, of TCD, mentioned how the British government doesn’t allow colonial pieces in its museums to be “deaccessioned” or officially removed, she said.
“That’s why the British Museum is very problematic,” said Mullen.
Though some museums in the UK have “loaned” some stuff back indefinitely to the people they belonged to, Mullen said. “In some way, they have given it back without saying they’ve given it back.”
Some 36 percent of the respondents – which included local authorities and universities – to a government national survey said they may not have the power to “deaccession”or officially remove pieces from their collections, while 17 percent said they were unsure if they could, its results suggest.
Morakinyo mentioned how curators can diminish the significance of African objects in European museums by presenting their provenance as a matter of finders keepers.
“Finders keepers is a thief,” he said.
Ireland grapples with the idea of acknowledging its part in colonialism, said Jude Hughes, a Black community activist, who was born in a mother and baby home in Dublin 84 years ago.
“Ireland claims to be innocent in a lot of things, because they say, ‘Oh, we’re not a colonial country,’” said Hughes, who aided Morakinyo’s research.
But it was the “second-best recruiting ground” for the United Kingdom’s imperial army, he said. “And it was their number two in the empire.”
Some Irish men joined the British army to afford food or rent, or to curry favour with the English, historians have said. The complexities of identities and hierarchies of empire make it hard to generalise about motivations.
One photo from Ireland’s National Museum shows a figurine of a Black man wearing hoop earrings and a pointy hat. Out of where his belly should be sprouts a circular window like the nose of a telescope.
The 1995 paper says it was obtained by the Irish Republican Dubliner Roger Casement, “from a trader named Oliveira in 1902”.
In his lecture, Morakinyo mentioned Casement, who served in the British consular service in several European colonies, but was later executed in 1916 by the British military, accused of treason.
Casement’s collected African objects are part of the National Museum's reserve, he said.
But to Morakinyo, he wasn’t just another uncaring European collector, he said.
“My favourite collector,” he said of Casement.
Casement laboured over detailing the ethnography of every single piece, said Morakinyo, charting the map of their existence and travels, especially as he wrote the Congo Report – in which he chronicled human rights violations in the former colony.
“How he collected it, how much he paid for it. The meaning, the cultural meaning of those objects,” said Morakinyo.
In doing so, he lit the way for future researchers to examine those objects with greater understanding, he said.
At the meeting on 16 August, Mullen, the member of the government’s advisory committee, navigated tough questions from the audience.
Later, Lassane Ouedraogo, chairperson of the Africa Centre – who’d organised the gathering – thanked her for taking a lot of heat.
Mullen said she wasn't there to defend the government. But they are trying to clear a world of hurdles before they clinch details and release the guidelines, she said.
And they worked with one government, and now there’s a new government, and a different culture minister, said Mullen.
Endless questions crop up, she said.
What counts as restitution for one person may not be enough for another, said Mullen. People recognise justice in different shapes, she said.
What happens if there are no takers for an object in the place it originally came from? said Mullen.
Sixty-nine percent of respondents to the government’s national survey said they hadn’t heard from anyone asking for the return of objects in their collections, 22 percent said they had, and the rest said they didn’t know, the results suggest.
Local authorities were more likely to respond positively when asked if they’d gathered any requests for return, it shows.
Sometimes, an object of spiritual value was made to be later destroyed, said Mullen, at the meeting. “They were made for a specific time and place and event.”
Should a museum give it back, knowing it is aiding its ruin? she said. They have to make complicated calls on fraught matters, said Mullen.
A spokesperson for the Department of Culture said the committee itself is only tasked with drawing up the guidelines based on research and best practices.
It “does not have the authority to make decisions on whether an item is to be repatriated”, they said.
It’s then up to the representatives of national cultural institutions on the committee to consider any return proposals, the spokesperson said.
“And the expert guidance from the Advisory Committee will assist in these processes going forward,” they said.
At the recent gathering, when Sinn Féin activist Mamy Nzema asked if the Irish government should help African museums build “capacity” and train them on how to handle returned objects, Morakinyo roared from the back of the room.
“This whole capacity building, you’re going to make me very angry. We have studied enough, we have enough skills to actually manage this.”
Capacity building, he scoffed, is another English word that writes off Black people as inferior and in need of saviours.
Mullen said the advisory committee hopes to present draft guidelines, for the return of items, to the Minister for Culture, Fine Gael TD Patrick O’Donovan, by the end of this year.
The committee has carried out significant work so far, debating complex, sensitive matters, and it must take all the time it needs, said a spokesperson for the Department of Culture.
That the objects remain closeted away as Mullen and others chew over questions about guidelines for returning them cropped up at the meeting, too.
Ken McCue, a community activist at Sports Against Racism Ireland (SARI), said that in the 1990s, he tried to arrange a museum like that with the aid and encouragement of Michael D. Higgins, who was then a Labour TD and Minister for Culture, and now President.
It hit a snag when the Department of Justice took issue with the participation of people in the asylum process, McCue said.
At the time, it was unlawful to publish anything that could identify people seeking asylum, even with their consent. It is still unlawful to do so without consent, but now they have more agency and can choose to speak to the press.
But he remembers, said McCue, filming a documentary in 1996 at the National Museum and how jarring it was to face an assortment of African masks tucked away in a cabinet in its basement.
The museum’s director was embarrassed and said they needed to be moved elsewhere to shield them from damp and flooding, said McCue.
“At that stage, I started becoming interested in this whole area, you know, the fact that they had all these artefacts, and most of them were plundered,” he said.
O’Brien, the curator at the National Museum, said it can only display a fraction of its reserve on account of resource and space restraints.
“Our World Cultures collections do not have a dedicated exhibition space within the Museum at present,” she said.
It has displayed some African objects, though, as part of temporary and permanent exhibitions, at the Collins Barracks museum.
Formulating new “exhibition concepts” needs close collaboration between internal and external teams, she said.
And “each new exhibition requires programme funding and resources,” O’Brien said.
But the museum is eager to work with local and international communities “to develop co-curation opportunities to exhibit our global collections, and to support collections research”, she said.
Morakinyo said that if the National Museum’s African items were to be displayed, they have to be presented as part of an African heritage exhibition that makes no bones about why they’re here.
“Show it like you stole it,” he said.
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