Q&A With Open Restitution Africa's Founders On ORA's Open Data Platform

A new digital resource is taking aim at one of the most difficult and least transparent areas of museum practice: the return of African artifacts and ancestral remains. On March 31, Open Restitution Africa launched the ORA Open Data Platform, a bilingual database designed to help users study restitution history and build their own approaches to the process.

Developed over six years by ORA's all-woman, pan-African team, the platform is available in French and English. It presents 25 case histories spanning 200 years and combines data visualizations, essays, podcasts, videos, research reports, and interactive tools. The result is less a static archive than a working reference point for communities and institutions trying to understand how restitution has unfolded, and why it remains so difficult to map.

The platform is aimed at African communities, educators, activists, researchers, and other stakeholders who have often had to piece together information from scattered sources. By gathering case studies and contextual material in one place, ORA is addressing a basic problem in the field: reliable data is hard to find, and the public record is uneven.

The project grew out of a conversation between founders Chao Tayiana Maina and Molemo Moiloa. Maina, a historian who runs African Digital Heritage, and Moiloa, an artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa, met at the 2019 Museum Conversations conference in Namibia, hosted by the University of Namibia and Goethe-Institut-Namibia. The gathering focused on the future of African museums, with restitution emerging as a central topic.

Moiloa said the project began with a simple question about how many objects had been restituted in a given year. When she could not find a clear answer, she reached out to Maina. What started as an idea for a digital tracker soon expanded, as the founders realized that restitution is far more complex and opaque than it first appears.

That complexity shaped the platform's design. ORA has long worked across formats, including video series and podcasts, and the new database continues that approach by offering different levels of engagement. The platform is meant to be useful not only to specialists, but also to younger audiences and to anyone trying to understand the mechanics of return.

In a field where information has often been fragmented, ORA's new platform offers something more durable: a structured way to see the history of restitution, and to imagine what comes next.

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