In a ceremony held on Friday at the Musée Quai Branly in Paris, France officially returned a drum known as the “talking drum” or Djidji Ayôkwé, to the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire. The news was reported by French newspaper Le Monde.
The ten-foot-long, 940-pound drum has a single-piece soundbox slit in half longitudinally. Extending out from the slit are two planks, one of which supports a carving of a jumping leopard. The box itself is decorated with carved faces and geometric patterns.
The drum was once used by Côte d’Ivoire’s Atchan/Ebrié people to transmit messages between villages many miles apart, including warnings of impending recruitment operations by French colonial troops. It was seized by French authorities in 1916 as a way of suppressing local resistance.
Between 1916 and 1930, the drum was kept outside the French governor’s Ivorian home. It was transferred to France in 1929 and housed most recently at the Musée Quai Branly, where it recently underwent restoration.
The drum topped a list of 148 objects that Côte d’Ivoire requested from France in 2019; the petition followed French President Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 pledge to return works of art looted in Africa during the colonial era. Despite the president’s announcement, however, considerable legal obstacles to restitution exist in France, where publicly owned assets are regarded as inalienable possessions.
The current return comes as a result of a 2025 vote by the French parliament to authorize the drum’s repatriation. A new bill headed to a vote in the senate’s lower house aims to broaden the restitution of colonial-era artifacts, avoiding the need to pass a separate law for every object.
The drum will be permanently exhibited at Côte d’Ivoire’s Museum of Civilizations, where it is scheduled to arrive today.
