Ashraf Johaardien: Restitution is repair, and repair is a process, not an arrival.

In 2015 I met Molemo Moiloa as a guest at Creatives in Conversation, a public series hosted by UJ Arts & Culture, where I was then connected to the university. She was not a speaker on the programme then. This morning she is, at 10:20 in the Tapestry Room at the Origins Centre, giving the Memory Engines keynote at Fak’ugesi.

What I had mostly heard about restitution was process. Land claims, legal frameworks, museum policy documents, all necessary, and all capable of becoming the limit of what restitution is taken to mean. She spoke about it as grief work and conflict work, and about staying with the difficulty, and I have not heard it put that way since. Bureaucracy is on her list of what to stay with, not off it: “staying with bureaucracy and political maneuverings”.

Her keynote, A Radical Commitment to Repair, was given at the Homecoming Centre on 14 February 2024. It opens with a secret.

“I am going to tell you a secret. Restitution makes me uncomfortable.”

“But restitution is not meant to be comfortable.”

She is co-director of Andani.Africa, a creative sector insights and data analytics company, where she co-leads Open Restitution Africa, an Africa-focused research platform for the restitution of African heritage. If you are looking for comfortable, she tells the room, African heritage work is not the place for you.

Open Restitution Africa is an open data project. It gathers knowledge on restitution processes and puts it where anyone can read it. Return is one part of restitution, she says. Her project does not limit itself to it, and includes cultural repair work in places where nothing has been returned. She calls return “a thing process, not a human process.”

Then she reads from Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, 1978, on peoples robbed of a memory, and does what the speech leaves undone. She says what the memory is.

“That memory is not simply of the fact of masterpieces, but of the peoples, gods, cultural processes, agricultural rituals, birth and death rituals, the very fabric of what makes people, people, that needed to be re-engaged.”

In her telling, the first written records of demands for return begin at the moment of the taking. Her example is 1884. Jacobus Hendrick’s daughter stands before a German grave desecrator and demands her father’s skull back. By his own admission, she says, the German lies and gives her another skull, a cracked one, of lesser value.

“Africans have demanded their heritage be returned to them for over 200 years. With little to no impact.”

The recent surge of attention has not closed that distance, in her account. She asks the room to guess how much of it centres African voices. Her answer is that Africans are being marginalised, again.

“When restitution is led by non-Africans, non-African priorities are centred.”

The result, she says, is that “we miss the mark of why we have embarked upon this process.” And the cost is paid in labour.

“African labour is navigating customs, fundraising for flights because that Global North budget can only afford the ticket of the royal queen but not her traditionally mandated interlocutor.”

“African labour is now focused on the technocracy of museum practice in the global north.”

For her, restitution is repair on three fronts at once. Repair of Africans, whose memory and self-knowledge were taken with the objects. Repair of African relations and communities. Repair of history and its legacies. She sets storage and display aside and goes to the people.

“Because humans make memories, not places.”

“If Africans make the mistake of thinking objects in empty museum halls in Africa will repair our wounds we are gravely mistaken.”

In a 2021 essay in Museum | Futures she makes the same move at the level of the word. Nto, in many Bantu languages the root of the word for thing, becomes ntu, the root that grounds humanist traditions across much of the continent. She calls the shift from the thing to the human a destabilising proposal, and asks the museum to be built from relationships before it is built from objects.

She is exact about words, and the one that gives the keynote its title comes next.

“Reimbursed is to replace the cost of a thing.”

A price is paid and the account closes. Repair keeps the break on show.

“Scars, stitches, mending lines, and patches included, the process repairing is better than throwing it all away.”

“It is a process, and not an arrival.” It will never be reimbursed, she says, and so it is not an attempt to go back to some better time.

A process does not finish and hand over. It goes back to the break and works on it again.

She asks for three things. Remain in difficulty. Act in solidarity, which she takes from Mathura Mahendren as distillation, not dilution. Keep an eye on what brings life. And then the sentence that turns restitution from a favour into a stake.

“We do not restitute for communities, we do not support Africans, when we do restitution. We repair ourselves.”

Nobody hands the future back with the objects.

She has a test for anyone who thinks the work is finished when the crate leaves the building.

“Final reminder that putting a thing in a box and shipping it over with a handshake and a press release is platitude, it is not repair.”

She opens Memory Engines at 10:20 on Wednesday 14 October, in the Tapestry Room at the Origins Centre. Eleven hand-embroidered panels hang there, roughly four metres by two, designed by Tamar Mason with a collective of eighty craftswomen from across South Africa. They tell the history of the San. The sixth is Sara Baartman. The seventh is called Genocide. The eleventh is called The Future.

The festival calls Memory Engines a frequency, a pitch the whole week is tuned to.

Repair does not end.

After the crate has left the building, who carries it?

Ashraf Johaardien is the Writer-in-Residence at the Fak’ugesi African Digital & Innovation Festival 2026. His views are his own and do not represent those of the festival or its partners.

Ashraf Johaardien
ashrafjohaardien@me.com
M\e. Creative
http://www.fakugesi.co.za

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