By examining one ethnographic object kept at the Royal Museum for Central Africa, this article discusses three consecutive demands for restitution of eo.0.0.7943, in 1878, in the 1960s-1970s, and in 2016. Neither informal nor official demands resulted in the actual return of the object to Congo. Instead, it featured in major exhibitions in Belgium, the Netherlands and the United States. While the Tervuren museum donated other objects to local Congolese museums in the 1970s and 1980s, Congolese voices by now seem powerless, and debate is almost inexistent in Belgium. So what can museums and communities do? I argue that both provenance research and local expertise can provide rich and useful contemporary insights on objects and people, as well as on acquisition and exhibition history. Such objects and insights may be integrated in exhibitions Europe and Africa, with all its uplifting and darker consequences. What is more valuable: owning an object or the encounter?