•President Emmanuel Macron (France) and President Alassane Ouattara (Ivory Coast)
France’s parliament today approved returning to Ivory Coast a “talking drum” that colonial troops took from the Ebrie tribe in 1916, in the latest green light to the repatriation of colonial spoils.
The Djidji Ayokwe drum is a communication tool more than three metres (10 feet) long and weighing 430 kilos (almost 950 pounds) that was once used to transmit messages between different areas, for example, to warn others of a forced recruitment drive, reports AFP.
The lower house of the French parliament approved separating out the artifact from national museum collections to enable its return, after the upper-house Senate backed the move in April.
In 2018, Ivory Coast officially asked Paris to return 148 works of art taken during the colonial period, including the Djidji Ayokwe.
President Emmanuel Macron promised to send the drum and other artifacts back home to the West African country in 2021.
Clavaire Aguego Mobio, leader of the Ebrie, at the time called Macron’s pledge “a highly historic move.”
He told our correspondent that his people had long given up on the return of the drum, “which was our loudspeaker, our Facebook.”
Since his election in 2017, Macron has gone further than his predecessors in admitting to past French abuses in Africa.
The restitution of looted artworks to Africa is one of the highlights of the “new relationship” he wanted to establish with the continent.
