Writing the next shot

The film YOU HIDE ME, directed by Ghanaian filmmaker Nii Kwate Owoo in 1970 in London, is one of the earliest films to confront the colonial museum from within¹. Shot during a single day inside the storage rooms of the British Museum, it reveals how African art–including Asante artefacts and Benin bronzes–is literally kept out of sight in the basement. The dramatised visit of two young Africans who descend into the stacks, open crates and unwrap objects charts a clear emotional trajectory: initial wonder at the sheer abundance of the objects gives way to shock and mounting anguish as they realise that this “treasure” is the material record of colonial appropriation, kept out of view and out of reach. The film condenses a long history of dispossession and concealment into this brief clandestine filming and ends as both an accusation and a call for the return of these works.

This pattern of revelation and frustration resurfaces decades later in the account of Mozambican writer and cultural figure Luís Bernardo Honwana². On a mid‑1980s visit to the Museum of Ethnology (formerly the Museum of Overseas Ethnology) in Lisbon, Honwana–then Mozambique’s Secretary of State for Culture–came across collections of Makonde art, musical instruments and other cultural objects kept meticulously out of public view, the result of colonial collecting in northern Mozambique’s Makonde territories and of a museology more invested in study than in access. Struck by pieces unknown even to living Mozambican memory, he proposed a major exhibition in Maputo, only to see the project stall under insurance costs that rivalled the state budget, escalating bureaucratic demands and political discomfort over the objects’ colonial origins. His testimony shows how Mozambican heritage remains effectively “underground” in Portuguese and other European institutions: not because it cannot be seen, but because decisions about its circulation, exhibition and possible return are still dictated by European legal, financial and diplomatic regimes.

Putting the two narratives together, Honwana’s testimony folds into the space opened by YOU HIDE ME. What the 1970 film exposes as a scandal of hidden collections in London reappears, in the Mozambican case, as an ongoing dispute in which the mechanisms of concealment have shifted from basements and boxes to conventions, inventories and risk calculations. In both, African subjects are allowed to see and even request access, yet they are never the ones who ultimately decide the fate of the objects. Here, Achille Mbembe’s description of decolonisation as an unfinished work of destruction and reassemblage is a useful lens³: confronting persisting colonial afterlives means accepting a long and uneven attempt to remake the world out of colonial ruins.

Both YOU HIDE ME and Honwana’s account do not begin a story that ends in successful restitution, but instead mark scenes in a long, unfinished play. In Mozambique, Honwana’s failed project for a Makonde exhibition at home works almost like the next shot after Owoo’s basement sequence: not a celebratory homecoming of the objects, but a cut to the negotiation table where every attempt to move the works is stalled or priced out. The “problem” persists, mutating and tightening its ties with global regimes of heritage governance that keep Mozambique dependent on the same bureaucratic and record‑keeping logics that once objectified its cultures, and on standards and authorisations defined elsewhere.

Read in this way, Mozambique’s narrative does not simply echo the film, but extends and complicates it. The work of restitution appears less as a path from exposure to repair than as a process in which the same structures of power repeatedly reassert themselves in new guises, keeping the story unresolved.

The next shot

The sequence now unfolds in real time in Mozambique. Even if the “next shot” after the negotiating table is not (yet) the moment when the object returns home, it already signals the beginning of a different kind of movement driven from Mozambique itself.

It is within this shifting scene that the texts collected in this issue intervene, tracing how new local contexts and global debates have resonated in the country since the restitution debate gained heightened visibility in 2018. Taken together, the five articles in this issue register the impact of this period as it spills into the recent celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of independence in 2025, marked by renewed scrutiny of the legitimacy of power and state institutions, the emergence of justice movements, clear public stances for or against reparations, and a proliferation of artistic and civic initiatives. Some contributions speak directly to these milestones, while others foreground more enduring issues within Mozambican society; all, however, help shape a fragile landscape that poses difficult questions about memory, reparations and the future.

The opening piece, “Civil society debates on restitution”, offers a first‑hand perspective on how public discussion around restitution began to take shape in Mozambique. It draws on this issue editor’s experience co‑organising, with the academic collective Oficina de História (Mozambique), the seminar “Restitution of Cultural Heritage to Mozambique: History, Reality and Utopia” at the Franco‑Mozambican Cultural Centre in Maputo in 2019, one of the first public conversations on the topic in the country. The title underscores the central role of non‑state actors in pushing the debate beyond official and museum channels and framing restitution as a question to be opened up rather than settled in advance. For this account of the seminar, the essay turns to notes, recordings, posters, press coverage and email exchanges which, taken together, sketch a field of references and competing claims in which notions such as restitution, legal responsibility and historical reparation were repeatedly tested and rephrased. It introduces historical figures–such as Ngungunhane, the last ruler of the Gaza Empire, captured and deported by the Portuguese in 1895, whose remains have been symbolically restituted to Mozambique in the 1980s–and key questions about who speaks, who decides, and what forms of resgate (in the sense of “reclamation” or “rescue”) are at stake, which recur in more complex and displaced ways in the essays that follow.

Seen from this vantage point, the word resgate in Portuguese, as it circulated in the seminar discussions, carried a dense, layered meaning that exceeds literal translations. Participants used it to name acts of retrieval and reconstruction–of value, dignity, memory and capacity for action–that had been blocked over time. Read alongside the devices of concealment staged in YOU HIDE ME and in Honwana’s account of Mozambican collections kept out of view, resgate no longer points to a single moment of return. Instead, it names the ongoing, everyday work of dismantling those devices and the infrastructures that keep local knowledge and the transmission of heritage out of reach, and of relocating power over meaning and circulation to those who have long been excluded from them.

In the essay “Coffee marks in the archive”, visual artist Maimuna Adam traces the history of the amakhosikazi – the seven senior wives of Ngungunhana–through coffee stains, photographs and scattered references that rarely cohere into a complete picture. Treating the coffee bean as a “living archive” that connects Mozambique, Portugal and São Tomé, she chooses to remain within ambiguity: rather than “filling in” the archive, she lingers in its gaps, moving between family stories, fictional scenes, film and spiritual consultation to craft a micro‑history that embraces opacity as part of these women’s survival. The text returns to small, everyday moments – food, clothing, gestures, silence–to open a space in which the amakhosikazi emerge as complex figures marked by contradiction, rather than being fixed in roles of pure victimhood or exemplary resistance. In doing so, it loosens the simplified oppositions that have often organised both colonial narratives and post‑independence national histories. Adam slows down the impulse to judge and classify, inviting readers and viewers to stay with partial traces and to accept speculation and incompleteness as part of a gesture of symbolic restitution.

In “Restitute or Institute”, the Mozambican artist Titos Pelembe starts from a single setting: the colonial monument to Mouzinho de Albuquerque inside the Fortress of Maputo. This former military stronghold has become a historical museum where colonial statues, reliefs and the coffin of Ngungunhane compress different versions of Mozambican history into one uneasy courtyard. The coexistence between the celebrated coloniser and the defeated emperor–between victory plaques for Portuguese troops and the belated honouring of Ngungunhane–becomes his starting point for thinking about how public symbols might be reconfigured rather than simply preserved. A key move in the essay is the “decapture” of Ngungunhane: Pelembe digitally reworks a well‑known image of the monument so that the last emperor of Gaza appears protected by the queens of the Gaza Empire rather than subdued under Mouzinho’s heroics. Throughout the text, playful, speculative wordings test different futures for the archive and turn the paradox in the title–“restitute or institute?”–into a curatorial question. Set against these imagined titles and images, photographs of gatherings in the gallery–artists sitting in a circle to debate–introduce another kind of scene: not the frozen pose of the statue, but a provisional, collective space of discussion. In this way, Pelembe’s work on the screen is inseparable from his curatorial practice on the ground, where looking, talking and learning together become part of an experiment in how images of Mozambique’s past might yet be “re‑instituted”.

Jessemusse Cacinda’s essay “Historical Reparations and Multiple Identities: The Amakhuwa of South Africa and their relationship with Mozambique” examines how the Amakhuwa‑Zanzibari community in South Africa turns a history marked by enslavement, displacement and misclassification into a collective movement for recognition, historical repair and the right to sustain multiple, overlapping identities. Writing as a Mozambican philosopher and editor, he links this trajectory to broader debates on nationhood, restitution and responsibilities towards descendant communities. The text underlines the persistence of the Emakhuwa language, Islamic religiosity and specific cultural practices as ongoing markers of belonging. In post‑apartheid South Africa, organisations such as the Zanzibari Community Trust and the Amakhuwa Research Group use research and editorial work to assert both Makhuwa origins and South African citizenship. At the centre of the essay is a 2023 conference in Durban that calls for official recognition of Emakhuwa, the creation of a heritage museum in Kings Rest and its inclusion among South Africa’s recognised official languages. These demands frame historical reparation in terms of returning looted objects to organised descendant groups such as the Amakhuwa‑Zanzibari, proposing a more precise map of belonging and responsibility than that offered by colonial borders and nationalist frameworks.

In “Signs of the future”, Eduardo Quive situates his reflection in the fiftieth anniversaries of independence and the April Revolution, showing how recent youth mobilisations and the first official acknowledgements of colonial crimes expose tensions between symbolic reparations, economic compensation and still‑pending structural reforms. Grounded in street‑level experience–listening to urban youth, revisiting old heroes and attending official ceremonies–he follows public celebrations, promises of reparation and the staged return of symbols such as Ngungunhane or Cahora Bassa, and notes how these gestures coexist with silence, inequality and ongoing forms of extraction. Moving between quoted voices, vignettes and critical commentary, the essay gives space to ambivalent positions that register small gains while doubting the sincerity of the new language of apology. In this landscape, restitution appears less as a finished programme than as a contested promise, easily absorbed by slogans unless it is tied to material change in people’s lives. Quive’s attention to fractures in public debate and to informal ways of speaking about injustice and future horizons shapes the text’s tone: patient with complexity, yet impatient with carefully choreographed rituals, guarded apologies and “second independences” that defer structural transformation.

Bringing these cases into conversation, what comes into view is a shifting sequence of scenes in which each intervention marks a different “next shot” in how restitution is imagined from Mozambique. Recent events make this tension explicit: during the 2025 Africa Day celebrations, a public call by Minister Samaria Tovela for reparations briefly raised expectations of a bolder stance, only to be swiftly countered by former President Joaquim Chissano’s defence of “good cooperation and investment, not reparations for the colonial past”. Across these pages, restitution, reparation, the archive and identity appear as tightly linked notions that reopen colonial legacies and forms of violence that persist in the present.

Rather than promising closure, the issue invites readers to stay with processes and impasses, and to recognise the limits of any attempt to “settle” what remains structurally contested in Mozambique’s political and social life. If earlier scenes turned around hidden collections, failed exhibitions and negotiation tables, the next ones will be written wherever communities, artists and publics in Mozambique are able to reshape the conditions under which heritage circulates–materially and symbolically–and to claim a decisive voice over the futures it opens for those who inherit it.