I began my academic career as an art historian exploring Napoleon’s art theft in Europe and the ensuing trauma of what I came to refer to as translocation. Whereas Napoleon gathered the best available European artworks for a single Parisian super-museum during his campaigns, driven by a firm belief in the cultural superiority of Frenchness, European museums in general were filled to bursting during the colonial era. They competed heavily on the best and the most of everything that could be extracted from the colonies.The colonial context implies that these items were taken by violence, in a relationship where the military and economic power was on the side of the colonizers. No continent was stripped of its cultural heritage as thoroughly as Africa in the nineteenth century: The major public museums in Paris, Berlin, London, Brussels, Vienna, Amsterdam and Leiden together hold more than half a million African objects.Most of these collections were and are never on view. This allowed some museums, especially in Germany, to conceal the vastness of their holdings from potential claimants for decades. As I wrote in the book, “museums also lie.” It is only now that a drive for transparency and the opportunities offered in the digital age open more information to the outside world about these institutions. They are also increasingly inspecting and questioning their own history as conceptual creations of the nineteenth century.Restitutions of cultural heritage are not the end of a story; they do not erase or replace anything. The pieces that leave or return have changed because times and people have changed. It is the return of the same, but different, and it is a new history that opens up, for the works themselves, but also for the societies that are attached to them, in Europe as in Africa.My research focus is on causes and effects of the historical absence and presence of cultural property. The effects of dislocating culture do not simply disappear over time or though denying they exist. They are real.