Photo courtesy of the author Shimrit Lee is a writer, educator, and curator based in Philadelphia. An interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of visual culture, performance, and critical security studies, Shimrit’s research interests relate to the cultural production of security narratives in Israel and the U.S. She holds a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Studies from NYU, and teaches high school social studies as well as community-based adult education at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

Photo courtesy of the author Bhakti Shringarpure is editor-in-chief of Warscapes magazine. She is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital and co-editor of the forthcoming Insurgent Feminisms: Women Write War. She has written for The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Africa is a Country, among other places.

The 2018 film Black Panther may be best known as the first Black superhero blockbuster, but it offers plenty of lessons for students of decolonization. Early in the film, the villain Erik “Killmonger” Stevens (played by Michael B. Jordan) stands in front of a glass museum display, examining a selection of African artifacts inside. He is approached by a white curator, who condescendingly offers to tell him about the display. As she explains that the exhibited war hammer was made in the 7th century by the Fula tribe in Benin, he quickly contradicts her: “Nah.”

“I beg your pardon?” she inquires.

“It was taken by British soldiers in Benin, but it’s from Wakanda,” he says, referencing the fictional sub-Saharan African country. “I’m gonna take it off your hands for you.”

When the curator tells him the items aren’t for sale, Killmonger confronts her: “How do you think your ancestors got these? Do you think they paid a fair price? Or did they take it… like they took everything else?” Just then the curator, poisoned by her coffee, collapses on the floor. Killmonger and his team smash the glass display case and take off with the hammer. While this is fiction, it’s representative of the very real issues in museums today. Killmonger’s very presence in the museum as a visitor of color is noteworthy, given that just over six percent of visitors to U.S. museums are Black. As Lisa Ragbir points out in Hyperallergic, Killmonger’s co-conspirator, disguised as a museum cafe worker, points to the hierarchical divisions between a museum’s “diverse” service workers and a predominantly white curatorial staff. The scene also raises questions about the retelling of colonial narratives, and who gets to tell these stories. Above all, it brings up the issue of unethical acquisition practices, which fits into a long history of colonists robbing African artifacts to put on display for European consumption.

The scene is set at the “Museum of Great Britain,” a thinly veiled reference to London’s British Museum, which has long been embroiled in its own debates over acquisition and repatriation. The institution currently faces calls from Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments to return the Benin Bronzes, which British soldiers looted in an 1897 raid.

Recently, a real-life episode reminded me of this scene from Black Panther. On June 13, 2020, Congolese activist Mwazulu Diyabanza wrested a 19th century wooden funerary post from its fixings in Paris’ Musée du Quai Branly while declaring to a live-stream audience on Facebook: “No one has the right to take what belongs to the African people because it is our heritage.” Together with four other activists, Diyabanza triumphantly carried the post through the museum shouting, “We’re bringing it home!” Museum guards eventually stopped them, but their point had been made. Even before he went on trial, Diyabanza sued the French state for the same crime he allegedly committed: theft.

Some museum conservators viewed Diyabanza’s act as a reckless incident of vandalism. Others, however, viewed his act as a demonstration of radical visual protest, a reclaiming of African cultural heritage that had been forcibly taken during the colonial period. The tension between these two views is emblematic of the clashes between museums and formerly colonized people when it comes to questions of repatriation—that is, the return of stolen cultural materials to their countries of origin. Those complex, ongoing debates are the subject of this chapter.

Photo courtesy of the author Shimrit Lee is a writer, educator, and curator based in Philadelphia. An interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of visual culture, performance, and critical security studies, Shimrit’s research interests relate to the cultural production of security narratives in Israel and the U.S. She holds a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Studies from NYU, and teaches high school social studies as well as community-based adult education at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

Photo courtesy of the author Bhakti Shringarpure is editor-in-chief of Warscapes magazine. She is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital and co-editor of the forthcoming Insurgent Feminisms: Women Write War. She has written for The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Africa is a Country, among other places.

The 2018 film Black Panther may be best known as the first Black superhero blockbuster, but it offers plenty of lessons for students of decolonization. Early in the film, the villain Erik “Killmonger” Stevens (played by Michael B. Jordan) stands in front of a glass museum display, examining a selection of African artifacts inside. He is approached by a white curator, who condescendingly offers to tell him about the display. As she explains that the exhibited war hammer was made in the 7th century by the Fula tribe in Benin, he quickly contradicts her: “Nah.”

“I beg your pardon?” she inquires.

“It was taken by British soldiers in Benin, but it’s from Wakanda,” he says, referencing the fictional sub-Saharan African country. “I’m gonna take it off your hands for you.”

When the curator tells him the items aren’t for sale, Killmonger confronts her: “How do you think your ancestors got these? Do you think they paid a fair price? Or did they take it… like they took everything else?” Just then the curator, poisoned by her coffee, collapses on the floor. Killmonger and his team smash the glass display case and take off with the hammer. While this is fiction, it’s representative of the very real issues in museums today. Killmonger’s very presence in the museum as a visitor of color is noteworthy, given that just over six percent of visitors to U.S. museums are Black. As Lisa Ragbir points out in Hyperallergic, Killmonger’s co-conspirator, disguised as a museum cafe worker, points to the hierarchical divisions between a museum’s “diverse” service workers and a predominantly white curatorial staff. The scene also raises questions about the retelling of colonial narratives, and who gets to tell these stories. Above all, it brings up the issue of unethical acquisition practices, which fits into a long history of colonists robbing African artifacts to put on display for European consumption.

The scene is set at the “Museum of Great Britain,” a thinly veiled reference to London’s British Museum, which has long been embroiled in its own debates over acquisition and repatriation. The institution currently faces calls from Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments to return the Benin Bronzes, which British soldiers looted in an 1897 raid.

Recently, a real-life episode reminded me of this scene from Black Panther. On June 13, 2020, Congolese activist Mwazulu Diyabanza wrested a 19th century wooden funerary post from its fixings in Paris’ Musée du Quai Branly while declaring to a live-stream audience on Facebook: “No one has the right to take what belongs to the African people because it is our heritage.” Together with four other activists, Diyabanza triumphantly carried the post through the museum shouting, “We’re bringing it home!” Museum guards eventually stopped them, but their point had been made. Even before he went on trial, Diyabanza sued the French state for the same crime he allegedly committed: theft.

Some museum conservators viewed Diyabanza’s act as a reckless incident of vandalism. Others, however, viewed his act as a demonstration of radical visual protest, a reclaiming of African cultural heritage that had been forcibly taken during the colonial period. The tension between these two views is emblematic of the clashes between museums and formerly colonized people when it comes to questions of repatriation—that is, the return of stolen cultural materials to their countries of origin. Those complex, ongoing debates are the subject of this chapter.