For decades, the descendants of the Senegalese Muslim mystic, scholar, and military commander Omar Saïdou Tall have been trying to retrieve his stolen belongings, known as the “treasure of Ségou,” from the French state.
The trove, spread across several French museums and the national library, includes nearly 500 manuscripts containing Tall’s writings and those of contemporaries documenting the region’s history and culture, plus jewelry, weapons, and other artifacts. In 1890, French troops led by General Louis Archinard snatched them from Tall’s family palace, located in the town of Ségou, in today’s Mali.
To many in Senegal, who remember Tall as an anti-colonial hero and founder of the 19th-century Toucouleur empire, which covered present-day Senegal, Mali, and Guinea, the pillaged items are a precious, missing part of their heritage.
Now, thanks to a new French law facilitating the restitution of looted colonial-era artifacts, Tall’s heirs in Senegal are hoping the Ségou treasure will finally come home, according to a report by Le Monde. “That’s my mission,” said Thierno Madani Tall, an influential Muslim religious figure in Dakar, and a direct descendant of the 19th-century leader. “This law is essential, because words have been said,” Madani Tall told Le Monde. “France is finally acknowledging that it stole these highly valuable objects. They have been well preserved, but it’s time for them to come home.”
Cultural artifacts were not the only things taken during the French raid of Ségou. In 1995, France repatriated the remains of Tall’s grandson, Abdoulaye Tall, who was kidnapped during the same 1890 attack. The boy was 10 years old at the time and was brought back to France, where he was forced to assimilate and live with a wealthy family in Paris. He later became the first African student accepted into the prestigious Saint-Cyr French military school. His life was cut short at age 20, however, when he died of an illness.
In 2019, France also returned Tall’s sword, which had been part of the Ségou treasure.
Yet those isolated cases were the result of years of cumbersome diplomacy and legislation. By contrast, the historic law adopted in May was designed to simplify the return of items like the Ségou treasure — marking a landmark reform in President Emmanuel Macron’s effort to ease France’s tense relationship with its former colonies, while reckoning with its painful colonial past.
The new law also helped fulfill Macron’s 2017 promise to return African heritage to the continent, becoming the last of three so-called “framework” laws designed to ease the return of cultural objects owned by the French state. While the two other framework laws apply separately to human remains and Nazi-looted art, this last one concerns items looted from 1815 to 1972, during the time of France’s second colonial empire, up until the UNESCO World Heritage Convention. However, the law avoids explicit mention of colonialism, effectively broadening its scope.
Once an official restitution request is made for the Ségou treasure – in this case by Senegal — then two committees, including experts from France and the requesting country, plus government representatives, will examine the case. Officials in Senegal told Le Monde they plan to lodge a formal request following their completion of a full inventory. In the meantime, French curators are working on digitizing the Ségou treasure manuscripts for study anywhere in the world.
