Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
African nations seek artifacts’ return
Items stolen by Europeans spur ownership debate
TANA RIVER, Kenya — The men and women, some claiming to be nearly 100 years old, gathered in a small courtyard to sing a hymn passed down to them by their forebears.
“Oh, holy vibration,” the call to prayer began, sung as loudly as their lungs allowed. The air hummed with the sound of their voices, but something essential was missing — the source of the holy vibration, the centerpiece of their ancestors’ religion.
The Pokomo people of Kenya’s Tana River valley once worshipped a god represented on Earth by an awe-inspiring drum. It stood taller than any man. Rubbing the cowhide stretched across its massive, hollowed-out tree-trunk body made a sound that could be heard throughout the villages clustered around the Pokomo king’s compound.
“Our legend has it that it sounds like a lion’s roar,” said His Majesty Haye Makorani-a-Mungase VII, the Pokomo’s current king and the descendant of a dynasty he claims goes back more than a dozen generations. “It forced everyone to listen. It was alive.”
That drum, the ngadji, the source of power and pride for the Pokomo, has been relegated to a storage room in the British Museum in London for 111 years.
The theft of the ngadji by British colonial officers is a story well-known among the eldest Pokomo. The British Museum, too, acknowledges the ngadji was “confiscated” before being donated to its collections in 1908. The museum also acknowledges a request by the Pokomo community for its return.
So why is the ngadji in a closet in London, rather than in Mchelelo, Haye Makorani’s sacred grove along a bend in the Tana River?
The answer lies in a fierce debate taking place in Western museums, where halls are filled with the riches of plundered lands, over whether institutions that benefited from colonialism have any right to keep such collections long into the postcolonial era.
To the British Museum and others, even ill-gotten artifacts are now their property. The argument is a legal and utilitarian one: This is where the items are safest and most people will see them.
“The British Museum takes its commitment to being a world museum seriously,” said Nicola Elvin, a British Museum spokeswoman, in an emailed statement. She added that objects the museum holds are viewed by millions of visitors. “The Trustees of the British Museum have always been clear that they will consider (subject to the usual considerations of condition and fitness to travel) any loan request for any part of the collection.”
The Pokomo aren’t asking for a loan, but Haye Makorani and Pokomo elders have accepted the British Museum’s stance, even if they disagree with it. The king’s brother, who lives in Liverpool, was granted access to the drum by the museum and became the first in his community to touch it in over a century. Yet while almost all the roughly 200,000 Pokomo alive today have now converted to Islam and Christianity, including the royal family, the absence of the ngadji is a constant reminder of the ruinous effects of colonialism.
“If you combined Britain’s parliamentary mace and the Queen’s crown jewels, you would still not equal the amount of cultural significance the ngadji had for us,” Haye Makorani said. “Its loss has stripped us of our sense of who we are.”
Elders within the community who have vivid memories as adults of the colonial period, and whose parents and grandparents witnessed the destruction of traditional Pokomo society, are less forgiving. Many are worried they will die before the ngadji is returned, and with their deaths any possibility of keeping Pokomo culture alive will die, too.
“If the ngadji in London is really ours, I will know from the sound that it will make when it will be played in front of me,” said Said Kumbi-a-Wadesa, the chairman of the kidjo, the Pokomo council of elders. His grandfather once held the same position and spoke wistfully of the ngadji’s roar. Wadesa claims to be 99years-old, has one tooth left and has mostly lost his eyesight. “Those who aren’t blind will see it, but I will know that particular sound.”
Since the 1960s, when most African countries gained independence from European colonial powers, the continent’s political and traditional leaders have called for the return of stolen cultural heritage.
But it wasn’t until a 2017 speech in Burkina Faso by French President Emmanuel Macron that the moral argument for large-scale repatriation of artifacts was made by a European leader.
“I cannot accept that a large share of several African countries’ cultural heritage be kept in France,” Macron told a rapt audience of students at the University of Ouagadougou. “Within five years, I want the conditions to exist for temporary or permanent returns of African heritage to Africa.”
A report commissioned by him found that 95% of African cultural heritage was held outside the continent and that most of it was obtained by theft, trickery or under egregiously unfair terms.
Little progress has been made on Macron’s demand, but France has vowed to fast-track the return of treasures like royal thrones and carved palace doors to former colonies such as Benin. Governments in Germany and the Netherlands have issued guidelines to investigate collections in publicly funded museums and repatriate “wrongfully obtained” artifacts.
The Smithsonian Institution in Washington has given back thousands of objects to Native American tribes, and museums around the world have returned the remains of aboriginal people to Australia and New Zealand.
But for publicly funded museums, these precedents are worrying. Governmentmandated repatriation processes could empty entire collections.
And the questions of restitution are also ones of scope: How far back in time should the process go? To the times of early civilizations, when the borders of countries like Kenya or Greece didn’t exist? In African countries still struggling to overcome the economic setbacks of colonialism, should European governments be helping them build museums first, and only then sending artifacts back?
France’s government is loaning Benin $22.5 million to build a museum to house artifacts it is in the process of returning, for instance.
For Kenyans, what’s concerning is that while some former colonial powers are starting to consider and act upon restitution demands, Britain is not.
“France is leading the way, which is good for West Africa,” said Purity Kiura, the director of antiquities, sites and monuments for the National Museums of Kenya, “but Britain is the most stubborn, which is bad for East Africa.”