Looted art from Kenya: Empty display cases

What would a Catholic church be without a cross? Or without a holy water font, statues of saints or tabernacles? It would be a place of gathering, but not much more. After all, faith is expressed not only in interaction with other people, but also through objects that are part of religious rituals.

If these rituals were not regularly performed, knowledge of them would presumably fade over the years, and the meaning of these acts would disappear to the point that succeeding generations would not remember them at all.

This was what the Pokomo, a Kenyan ethnic group living along the Tana River, experienced firsthand.

The Pokomo once considered a drum to be a symbol of supreme authority. They refer to it as the ngadji. Sacred and revered, it was their centre of sovereign power and communal life: "People could not perform a ceremony without the ngadji being present," Emmanuel Nzimba told DW.

Nzimba is part of the Kidjo, the Pokomo's Council of Elders. "Under the supervision of the Kidjo elders, the children behaved demurely. Nowadays, children don't know good manners, they don't follow laws, because without the ngadji, there is no tradition."

Painful loss of identity

In 1902, British colonial officials forcibly took the ngadji. Six years later, the drum ended up in the British Museum, where it remains today. The museum admits that the ngadji was "confiscated," but talks between the Pokomo and museum officials about a possible return have so far been unsuccessful.

Losses like these have been experienced by numerous states and ethnic groups on the African continent: According to estimates, over 90% of sub-Saharan Africa's cultural heritage is contained in Western museums.

This was the finding of a report commissioned to art historians Benedicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr by French President Emmanuel Macron in 2017. 

Since then, the debate about the legitimate acquisition and ownership of African cultural objects among museums has entered the public domain.

The discussion also picked up steam in Germany and led to a surprising turn of events in April: Germany agreed to return its collection of the famous Benin Bronzes to Nigeria. The West African state had already made demands for restitution as early as the beginning of the 20th century.

Making invisible inventories visible

Until now, most of the debate about cultural assets from a context of colonial injustice has occurred mainly in the Global North. But the discussion is also gaining momentum on the African continent: In March 2021, the exhibition series "Invisible Inventories" was launched in Nairobi's National Museum.

The exhibition organizers addressed the question as to how cultural assets that are in Western institutions could nevertheless be made accessible to Kenyans: "The obvious answer with regard to this exhibition are the empty display cases," Jim Chuchu said.

They symbolize the absence of 10 selected objects that are located in the collections of Cologne's Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum and the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt. "I thought it was a really powerful way to spark people's imaginations," Chuchu continued. "What could these objects have been? What could have been done with these empty display cases?' Honestly, it's a little sad."

Chuchu and his artist colleagues from the Kenyan collective The Nest and the German-French collective The Shift supplemented the absent historical objects with current works. The two collectives are part of the International Inventories Programme (IIP), which has joined forces with the National Museum in Nairobi, the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne, the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt and the Goethe-Institut. 

32,000 items from 30 institutions

Part of their work has also included collecting Kenyan cultural assets into a digital database. As of April 2021, it contained more than 32,000 objects from 30 different institutions that have made their inventories available.

"We felt it was important, because how can you ask for things if you don't know what they look like and where they are?" says Jim Chuchu, summarizing how elaborate the endeavor it.

It also raises an important point in the restitution debate: In order for restitution to take place, requests for return must be transmitted by verbal note, which is a particular kind of diplomatic correspondence. The note must include details of which objects are being requested and why.

However, since only a fraction of the inventories are and were ever exhibited, research on the part of the countries making claims for restitution resembles more of a guessing game. For example, France, the Netherlands and Great Britain began digitizing their museum archives several years ago. Germany, on the other hand, has only been slowly following suit since this year.

The new database is "just a drop in the bucket," as Jim Chuchu puts it, but it can help speed up the process in this country: Of the 10 museums in Germany where inquiries were made, all have agreed to publish their inventory lists.

The database officially launched on May 27, when the exhibition series moved on to Cologne's Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum (RJM) and opened on May 28. "In Nairobi, the exhibition conveyed a sense of absence and amputation," Nanette Snoep said during the exhibition opening's press conference. "In Cologne, it shows opulence, abundance, and depicts the 'museumization' of things and of the history of collecting in a colonial context or in a context of unequal power relations," the museum director said.

Traces of colonialism in collective and individual memory

The RJM presents its entire Kenyan collection of 82 objects acquired by the museum between 1905 and 2006. With a few exceptions, most of them — mostly everyday objects — have never been exhibited before: The previously invisible inventories are now finally becoming visible.

"This exhibition is really about colonial, symbolic violence," Snoep continued. "It's about the traumatic experience of being robbed of your cultural heritage, your history, identity and memory. It's an amputation; it's a cut."

For the exhibition, scholars from Nairobi worked with the RJM to create "biographies" for the objects on display. They are intended to illustrate the significance attached to these objects in Kenya, but also what they mean to members of the Kenyan diaspora in Germany.

A ribbon of object labels around the museum

Jim Chuchu and Njoki Ngumi from The Nest have also visualized excerpts from the object database: Identification labels of the objects were used to create a seemingly endless ribbon, which is wrapped around the RJM from the outside and continues into the interior of the museum. In this way, the artists aim to illustrate the overwhelming amount of data collected and the number of 32,000 objects located outside Kenya.

How Kenya will deal with issues surrounding the restitution of its cultural assets in the future is unclear. Until now, there has been no formal policy governing such a process.

Nanette Snoep of the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum affirms that she will do everything in her power to return objects from her collection should a request come. "I can't decide that on my own, of course," says the museum director, "but I would try to convince politicians that restitution is necessary."

The Pokomo in Kenya have recently received a message from the British Museum that they would like to "talk." That is a big step forward: representing his people, Pokomo King Haye-Makorani-a-Mungase VII had already made an initial request for the return of the ngadji drum eight years ago.

The "ngadji" is exemplary for the many African objects that are mere exhibits in Western museums, but for the people who lost them, they are part of their identity.

Exhibition series such as "Invisible Inventories" show that the effects of colonialism can still be felt more than 60 years after the independence of many African states and have left deep furrows in the collective and individual memories of the people.

Christine Kinyanjui contributed from Kenya to the reporting in this article.

This text was translated from German.