Once upon a time, a Belgian king returned a sacred Congolese mask to its homeland. The cameras rolled, the speeches flowed, and everyone pretended not to notice the punchline: the mask was only on loan. Belgium still owns it.
This is the fairy tale Europe tells itself about colonial restitution. A bedtime story where thieves become guardians, where “indefinite loan” means justice, where museums with millions of stolen objects celebrate returning one. During the same visit, the King even promised to return Lumumba’s tooth. They’d dissolved the rest of him in acid but kept the tooth for sixty years. Another souvenir. Another ceremony. Another performance.
Welcome to the grand theater of colonial restitution, where every gesture is designed to look like justice while preventing it. Where the dragon still hoards the gold but has learned to call it preservation.

The cross was everywhere in the Kingdom of Kongo, and for the European missionaries who found it, the meaning was obvious. It was a sign from their God, a relic of a shared past.
They saw everything but the truth.
For the Bakongo people, this symbol was no mere icon. It was a key; a map that unlocked the path of the soul, the journey of the sun, and the very structure of the universe. This is the story of a truth hidden in plain sight, and the world that comes into view when we learn to see it through the eyes of “the insiders.”

You think the title exaggerates? Consider the evidence. The San Francisco Art Institute is gone. Prestigious academies worldwide are closing. Those that persist are calcifying into irrelevance.Like monarchies: ceremonial, expensive, and increasingly detached from reality. They keep issuing diplomas like royal titles. Impressive to their own circle, meaningless to everyone else.
In Kinshasa, this irrelevance takes perfect form. The Académie des Beaux-Arts still requires students to copy European masters while the street painters it refuses to recognize fill MoMA and the Pompidou. The workshops teach through practice what the Academy buries in theory. The streets didn’t overthrow the institution. They simply built something better alongside it. Merit beating privilege, necessity breeding innovation. The revolution already happened. The Academy just hasn’t noticed.