Artefacts much like the rest of the real history are not inventoried. How can you reconcile with the past if you don’t know what is there to begin with? (see Núcleo Museológico Rota da Escravatura)
“**Inventorying is an important part of reckoning with the past.*”
“There is a lack of information about acquisition everywhere, no objective account of the extent of colonial expropriation. Poor inventorying is often attributed to poor management or negligence within museums. I see it as a deliberate strategy of invisibility instead, and museum negligence or omission in this area as being underpinned by a blindness caused by conscious or unconscious racism. The act of identifying artefacts is itself radical in this context. Under Portuguese heritage legislation, one of the main acts of protection of an object is its inventorying. It shows that the Portuguese state is caring for the object. The lack of inventorying and cataloguing of colonial objects in Portugal shows that, contrary to one of the anti-restitution arguments, Portugal is not caring properly for these objects. Further, from the perspective of the imbued meaning and social practices of the object, bad cataloguing, in failing to acknowledge those aspects, hollows out the artefact. To know the quantity and origin of artefacts is an indispensable basis for restitution action. In many ways, too, inventorying is just as important on its own as it is as a step for restitution. Inventorying is an important part of reckoning with the past. Just returning the pieces in crates would be insufficient, we need an admission of colonial violence and extractivism. Portuguese institutions inventorying these objects forces them to come to terms with the full extent of this extractivism, it renders the violence visible within Portugal, on the public record in Portugal, and before the eyes of the Portuguese people. Further, this inventorying can expose the ongoing racial capitalist dimensions of the taking of these objects (the income of museums and other cultural institutions on the basis of these collections, for instance), in ways that could be ignored if we moved straight to restitution. Inventorying is necessary, not as a delaying tactic for restitution, but because it had never been done before, so restitution talks are a non-starter without inventorying. I expect inventorying to be partly used as a delaying tactic”
“Portuguese society’s greatest problem with this racial reckoning is not that they do not want to discuss it at all; rather, it is that they only want to discuss it in their own terms, which shores up, repeats, and reinforces narratives of benevolent colonialism. We need a bigger confrontation, and media can help by bringing history and the lives of these artefacts to the forefront.”
“As I wrote for a friend’s creative writing collective project on this matter, in Portugal, “all that is golden has been stolen”. Colonial cultural takings are all around us here, and we need to reckon with this history. Inventorying is an important step not just for African nations where these artefacts rightfully belong, but also for the transformation of Portuguese society, a key step to enable fuller reparations that are long overdue."
"Portugal lags other European countries”
“Portugal lags other European countries. Whenever any conversation on the topic starts, people raise all sorts of obstacles to stagnate the debate. Part of the explanation for this lagging is that Portugal was one of the last European countries to “release” its colonies in Africa, so this history is still settling into the public consciousness. But also people in Portugal want to avoid discussing restitution because they do not want to reopen a conversation about national identity. All of that said, in Portugal we have a type of collective selective hearing, in which we only listen inside our echo chamber of those we deem “peers”, and tend to replace the voices of racialized persons (too “other”) with those of white persons. For this reason, experiences elsewhere in Europe can be very valuable in moving the conversation along here.”