Institutional collaborations parallel to a legal framework: PROCHE at the Africa Museum

de Clippele, Marie-Sophie [UCL] Dewitte, Madelon [USL-B]

The research project PROCHE funds provenance research on Congolese ethnographical and musicological heritage conducted by the AfricaMuseum from 2022 until 2025. The project set up collaborations with the Institut des Musées nationaux du Congo (IMNC) as well as with researchers from the University of Kinshasa under the supervision of professor Placide Mumbembele. A few months later, on July 3rd 2022, the Belgian Parliament adopted a general law on the restitution of colonial collections in federal museums, a pioneering framework despite some shortcomings. The collaborations set in place by PROCHE rest on institutional relations rather than governmental diplomacy, somehow ignoring the legal framework based on bilateral cultural agreements. The timeframe of course differs – PROCHE started a few months before the restitution law was adopted – but it is nonetheless interesting to reveal divergent dynamics at hand: an institutional and conjunctural research project gaining results vs. a diplomatic restitution policy still struggling to be launched. Moreover, PROCHE tries to indirectly include – by means of the fieldwork conducted by Congolese researchers – heritage communities, whereas the legal framework only rests on a State-to-State approach. Finally, PROCHE developed a collector-focused methodology for provenance research that is far more precise than the mere “scientific review” the law requires. This paper will also question what the foreseen outcome of PROCHE might be. How will the little research that could have been conducted in the short time frame compared to the enormity of the task (84.000 objects on a shared inventory) be included in later restitution talks? How will this institutional approach eventually interact with the existing national framework? Will it help finetune the notion of goods that were illegitimately acquired (“biens mal acquis”)? What about the interaction with similar initiatives in Belgium such as the provenance research at the Museum aan de Stroom (MAS) in Antwerp?