In recent decades, the questioning of these certainties by Afro-descendant and indigenous communities has entailed a bankruptcy of that epistemological paradigm. Monuments are devices of memory and forgetting.
They celebrate the dead, but when they have not been properly veiled, their ghosts haunt the societies that created them. For decades, European institutions have resisted the repatriation of these riches, arguing that they could only guarantee their conservation. Three years later, the French Government commissioned a catalog of the seventy-six entries in the Musée du Quai Branly. Only twenty-six of the entries have been returned.