Cultural Rights and Cinematic Heritage: Framing Film Restitution as a Human Right

Author: Pauline Kuranchie

August 19, 2026

Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (1925-1987), a Benin-born Senegalese filmmaker, producer, and film historian. He is a key figure in West African film history and one of the earliest voices to articulate the demand for the restitution of Africa’s film and audiovisual heritage. [Source: Criterion Collection]

From Egypt’s Rosetta Stone, Nigeria’s Benin Bronzes, and the remains of South Africa’s Sarah Baartman, calls for the restitution and repatriation of looted material heritage artifacts and the human remains of ancestors have rung out from the African continent for almost 200 years – and continue to intensify.¹ But what about the restitution of Africa’s displaced film and audiovisual heritage? Film is an archive of humanity, and it shapes how people, cultures, and nations understand themselves.² Africa’s film and audiovisual archives are an invaluable repository of the continent’s history and culture.³ 

Unfortunately, much of Africa’s film history remains unknown or undocumented, and the films most often studied today are those screened at festivals and distributed or circulated internationally.⁴ According to experts, more than 90% of Sub-Saharan African artistic heritage is currently housed outside the continent as a result of colonial occupation during the 19th and 20th centuries. In the 2021 documentary Film: The Living Record of Our Memory, film scholar Dr. Aboubakar Sanogo observes that due to the fragmentation of Africa’s film heritage, “we [Africans] find ourselves with a dismembered memory.”⁵

Artifacts from the Benin Bronzes [Image credit: Boudewijn Bollmann/Wereldmuseum Leiden Museum]

As early as the 1950s, calls for the restitution of Africa’s film and audiovisual heritage were voiced as part of ongoing decolonization struggles and have been restated by filmmakers, activists, and other commentators. The best surviving elements for historic African films (including those filmed both before and after independence) are rarely found in Africa, but are held, and in some cases, monetized, by public and commercial archives in Europe and North America, where it remains largely inaccessible to African filmmakers, scholars, and the wider public.⁶ This means that these pioneering films are not available in educational institutions across Africa. As a result, very few people, and especially African audiences, know about the continent’s film and audiovisual heritage.⁷ “How are we supposed to do more research about our roots and identity?” asks Raphael Chikukwa, the executive director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. “Cultural rights are human rights, too, and Western countries are denying us those. The repatriation and restitution of African heritage is long overdue.” ⁸

Africa’s film and audiovisual heritage – whether as analog copies, videotapes, or more recently, data packages – arrived in Western archives legally, but still marked with structural violence. This was done through co-production contracts, festival circulation, and the pull of continuing economic and technical dependence. From the 1960s onward, many newly independent African countries lacked resources and functional post-production facilities. For instance, camera negatives were routinely sent for processing to commercial film labs in Europe and remained there until those labs ceased operation after the industry’s pivot to digital. Any remaining negatives were either transferred to national archives, sold to the highest bidder, or simply thrown out.⁹  

Chris Tsui Hesse, the official cinematographer for Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah, had captured endless hours of footage on thousands of feet of film. Unfortunately, much of it was destroyed after the 1966 coup d'état in an effort to erase the history and legacy of Nkrumah’s revolutionary leadership.¹⁰ At the time, London was the primary location where films coming from Ghana were sent to be developed. Hesse secretly shipped the film negatives there to safeguard them from destruction.¹¹ Right now, only a fraction of Hesse’s footage has actually been restored. The documentary The Eyes of Ghana (2025) follows Hesse’s decades-long fight to restore, preserve, and digitize the films from Nkrumah’s time. Hesse believes that these films should not only be accessed by current and future generations but also serve as an archive of Ghana’s rich and flourishing cinematic and national history.¹²

Chris Tsui Hesse and director Ben Proudfoot at a screening of The Eyes of Ghana in Accra, Ghana [Image source: UniMAC-IFT]

As for the audiovisual archives stored locally on the continent, they have slowly been deteriorating due to continued lack of resources and adequate preservation methods.¹³ In April 2021, a devastating wildfire that started on the slopes of South Africa’s Table Mountain engulfed the Jagger Library at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Water used to extinguish the fire in the library seeped into the basement, where the library’s special collections were stored.¹⁴ These collections included 3,000 African films and 20,000 other audiovisual items. With no legal obligation for a deposit system on the continent, the first (and often only) stakeholders in restoration and preservation are national film archives. There are just eight on the entire continent, located in Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, South Africa, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Mozambique.¹⁵ 

Similar to material heritage artifacts, restitution demands for film and audiovisual heritage are met with racist, problematic, and paternalistic responses by Western governments and institutions, who create stumbling blocks to requests and erase and deny African agency.¹⁶ In the 1960s and ’70s, former colonial powers such as France, Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy systematically avoided directly addressing restitution claims issued from Africa. These powers used neutral terms like return or transfer and cast the return of looted cultural heritage as a voluntary and benevolent endeavor. In this way, the political significance of restitution was absorbed into the rhetoric of Western-led aid and development.¹⁷ 

In recent decades, there has been a proliferation of global partnerships and initiatives, Africa-focused conferences, forums, and summits with the aim of salvaging, restoring, preserving, and promoting Africa’s audiovisual heritage. Unsurprisingly, most of these institutions and individuals are based in the West. While the preservation and safeguarding of fragile film heritage is an urgent and important task, current frameworks for archival cooperation and exchanges often ignore and sometimes perpetuate colonial legacies of uneven development and unequal exchange. In the book Restitution and the Moving Image, researchers Nikolaus Perneczky and Cecilia Valenti argue that addressing this issue requires broadening the restitution debate to account for forms of structural violence rooted in a long history of uneven development and unequal exchange.¹⁸ As long as archival holdings and capabilities remain unequally shared across the globe, return or access alone do little to alter these underlying inequalities.¹⁹  As Cameroonian art curator and critic Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung aptly writes in The Delusions of Care, it is a type of “care that always keeps you in need of care.”²⁰

Film and audiovisual restitution is a demanding, nuanced, and complex task. There is no straightforward way to apply restitution—especially if narrowly interpreted as return or repatriation—to a technical object that can be reproduced across multiple formats. Even among film scholars and archivists, there is no consensus on what should be done.²¹ Still, a better world is always possible. A crucial starting point is centering African voices in the film and audiovisual restitution narrative and attending to alternative knowledge and practices elaborated by African filmmakers, scholars, and archivists. When African voices about restitution are centered, knowledge creation, renewal, and cultural formation become the focus of the narrative.²²

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Glossary

• Agency (in the context of diversity and social justice): Thoughts and actions taken by people that express their individual power in social context; denotes the power people have to think for themselves and act in ways that shape their experiences and life trajectories.

• Coup d'état (also referred to as coup): A sudden and often violent overthrow of a government, typically executed by a small group that may include military leaders or civilians.

• Cultural heritage: The legacy of physical artifacts, traditions, and practices that are passed down through generations within a community. It encompasses both tangible elements, such as monuments and artworks, and intangible aspects like folklore and rituals.

• Cinematographer: A cinematographer is in charge of achieving the visual look and feel of a film, television show or commercial both from a technical and creative standpoint.

• Decolonization: Can refer to a country achieving independence or the social, cultural, and psychological process of deconstructing and dismantling colonial ideologies and challenging the superiority of Western thought and approaches.

• Deposit system (or deposit agreement): A legal document between archives and another entity that establishes terms and conditions for transferring physical custody, but not title, of an archival resource.

• Film and audiovisual heritage (also referred to as cinema or moving image heritage): The collection of sound and moving image materials that capture and convey cultural, historical, and social information. It includes cultural products, such as films, radio broadcasts, music recordings, and other forms of multimedia, as well as the instruments, devices and machines used in their production, recording and reproduction, and the analog and digital formats used to store them.

• Material heritage artifacts (or material culture): The physical objects and architecture that a society, or cluster of people, use to define itself. It encompasses items from everyday tools and clothing to buildings, monuments, and even art.

• Paternalism: The interference of a state or an individual with another person, against their will, and defended or motivated by a claim that the person interfered with will be better off or protected from harm.

• Restitution: The process by which cultural objects are returned to an individual or a community.

• Repatriation: The process by which cultural objects are returned to a nation or state at the request of a government.

• Structural violence: Harm done to persons and groups through inequitable social, political, or economic structures.

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Footnote

1. Molemo Moiloa, Reclaiming Restitution: Centering and Contextualizing the African Narrative, (Open Restitution Africa, 2022), 1, https://openrestitution.africa/resources/reports/reclaiming-restitution. 

2. “African Cinema, Memory, and the Work of Preservation,” Carleton University - Institute of African Studies, accessed June 29, 2026, https://carleton.ca/fass/story/aboubakar-sanogo-on-african-cinema-memory-and-the-work-of-preservation/.  

3. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), The African Film Industry: Trends, Challenges and Opportunities for Growth, (Paris: United Nations, October 5, 2021): 36, https://doi.org/10.58337/DEJM2927. 

4. “African Cinema, Memory, and the Work of Preservation.”

5. Film: The Living Record of Our Memory, directed by Inés Toharia Terán (Kino Lorber, 2021), 1:02:57. https://tubitv.com/movies/100043853/film-the-living-record-of-our-memory. 

6. Nikolaus Perneczky and Cecilia Valenti, Restitution and the Moving Image: Global Film Heritage Between Return, Access and Archival Reparation (Routledge, 2026), 2.

7. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), The African Film Industry, 37.

8. Sarah Schug, “The politics of looted African art: Decolonising Europe’s museums,” The Parliament, February 19, 2024, https://www.theparliamentmagazine.eu/news/article/the-politics-of-looted-african-art-decolonising-europes-museums. 

9. Perneczky and Valenti, Restitution and the Moving Image, 6.

10. Corey Atad, “The Limits of Vision,” Truth Dig, October 24, 2025, https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-limits-of-vision/.

11. Edith Mensah, “The Eyes of Ghana Premieres Today,” The Daily Graphic, April 16, 2026, https://www.graphic.com.gh/entertainment/showbiz-news/the-eyes-of-ghana-premieres-today.html. 

12. “The Eyes of Ghana: On Archives & Cultural Preservation with Filmmaker Anita Afonu,” The Produced, September 24, 2025, https://theproduced.substack.com/p/the-eyes-of-ghana-on-archives-and. 

13. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), The African Film Industry, 36

14. Perneczky and Valenti, Restitution and the Moving Image, 115.

15. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), The African Film Industry, 36

16. Moiloa, Reclaiming Restitution, 5

17. Perneczky and Valenti, Restitution and the Moving Image, 3.

18. Ibid., 6.

19. Ibid., 14.

20. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, The Delusions of Care (Archive Books, 2021), 40. 

21. Ibid., 11.

22. Moiloa, Reclaiming Restitution, 2-3.