France's parliament approved on Monday, July 7, returning to Côte d’Ivoire a "talking drum" that colonial troops took from the Ebrié tribe in 1916, in the latest greenlight to the repatriation of colonial spoils. The Ayôkwé Djidji drum is a communication tool more than three meters long and weighing 430 kilos that was once used to transmit messages between different areas, for example to warn others of a forced recruitment drive.
The lower house of the French parliament approved separating out the artefact from national museum collections to enable its return, after the upper-house Sénat backed the move in April. In 2018, Côte d’Ivoire officially asked Paris to return 148 works of art taken during the colonial period, including the Ayôkwé Djidji. President Emmanuel Macron promised to send the drum and other artefacts back home to the west African country in 2021.
Clavaire Aguego Mobio, leader of the Ebrié, at the time called Macron's pledge "a highly historic move." He told Agence France-Presse 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 said he wanted to establish with the continent.