Forum Südliches Afrika, 18. September 2025: Rethinking Restitution

This presentation makes an argument for rehumanisation as a methodolocy of restitution, one whose meanings have significant potential, especially as we have come to understand restitution as distinct from repatriation and Rückgabe. While repatriation and Rückgabe refer to projects of returning and giving back, restitution signals an anticolonial politics of reclamation, restoration and return, which is also connected to a politics of reparation and social repair. The work of restitution belongs to a politics of anti-colonial claims-making. It also should proceed from a critique of European museum classificatory systems, and histories of collecting that turned possessions in to objects and that objectified the bodies of ancestors as ‘human remains’. Restitution should be understood as a politics of disciplinary critique as well as a new practice of museology.

Ciraj Rassool is Senior Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, and director of the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies. He has published widely on changing old museums & making new museums, race in museums, restitution, political movements and the politics of nonracialism. In 2012, and during the years before, he together with the late Martin Legassick was crucially involved in the repatriation of human remains from Austria to South Africa (https://www.wienerzeitung.at/h/osterreich-restituiert-gebeine-aus-sudafrika). 
Prof. Rassool served on the boards of the District Six Museum & Iziko Museums of South Africa and is a member of the South African National Advisory Board for Restitution and Repatriation. Recently, he was appointed to the technical team of South Africa’s presidency of the G20, to work on preservation and restitution.