Though collecting is an impulse with deep roots in human history, museums as we know them are mostly a 19th-century invention, designed to share the fruits of European conquest. Read more about the repatriation of artifacts in our March issue:
borne by winds from the far-off Sahara coats everything in Foumban, a town of about 100,000 in Cameroon. In a month the spring rains will start, but for now every day feels the same—hazy sun, dry heat, and on the main road through town, a cacophony of honking horns and buzzing motorcycles.
A new museum in Foumban, Cameroon, is modeled on the emblem of the Bamum kingdom: a double-headed snake topped by a spider. Sacred objects can be borrowed for use in traditional ceremonies and then returned.Njoya had turned down many German offers to buy or trade for the throne, but in this case he agreed. If he wrote down why, those records are lost. Maybe it was a gesture of gratitude to thank colonial officials for sending troops to help him fight and defeat his neighbors.
Opened in 2009 within sight of the Parthenon, the hypermodern Acropolis Museum answered British claims that Greece lacked a museum fit for the famed Elgin Marbles. Statue fragments in this gallery await the return of missing pieces held by the British Museum.in Germany have heard of the Mandu Yenu throne. Even fewer could locate Foumban on a map.
Many curators hope the shift will be the beginning of a new era of cooperation between museums and the communities and countries their collections originally came from. Critics, meanwhile, worry that the returns may spark a chain reaction that will dismantle “universal” museums whose international collections offer unique insights into how the world is interconnected.
From Ghana to Greece, former colonies had been asking for their artifacts to be returned, some for half a century or more. Finally, governments, museums, and the media were starting to listen. As night fell, the dignitaries trickled out and the staff wandered in. Security guards and chefs in tall hats reverently posed for selfies with the historic objects. When I finally slipped out a side door into the warm, humid night, they were still there. Over the next four months, nearly 200,000 people visited the exhibitions, sometimes waiting in line for hours for a chance to see the returned artifacts.
Even the museum’s longtime defenders seem flummoxed. After wandering the museum’s sprawling galleries, I meet author Tiffany Jenkins for tea. In 2016 Jenkins wrote a defense of the British Museum entitledarguing that modern museums should focus on telling the stories of ancient objects and the people who made them, and steer clear of political posturing.
Zuni elder Octavius Seowtewa visits Tularosa Cave, a sacred site on the tribe’s traditional land in New Mexico. The Zuni were key players in Native efforts to reclaim tribal artifacts, including backing national repatriation legislation, which became law in 1990.Today more than 5,000 objects taken in the 1897 raid are held in museums around the world rather than at the National Museum in Benin City.
The moment was powerfully symbolic—and, Parzinger says, a win-win. Many of the objects will stay in Germany on long-term loan for the next 10 years, and others will remain until Nigeria builds new museums with German help. After that, Nigerian officials will lend artifacts to Germany on a rotating basis.
What about Ibrahim Njoya’s throne? I ask. No Bamum ruler has ever made a formal request for the throne’s return, nor has the government of Cameroon. But what if they did? the museum’s Benin collection to Nigeria. Today museum curators are meeting their counterparts in former colonies for eye-to-eye discussions, sometimes for the first time. “Maybe it’s the end of the 19th-century museum,” Savoy says, sounding entirely unbothered by the prospect, “and the beginning of something else.”I head to Suitland, Maryland, a Washington, D.C., suburb where the Smithsonian Institution keeps most of its 157 million artifacts in a multi-acre storage and research complex.
Vigango are still coveted by art collectors. Once returned to Mijikenda communities, they must be guarded from thieves. In Chalani, a village in eastern Kenya, Festus Thinga built an iron cage to protect the statues of his ancestors.Anthropologists and archaeologists worried that relinquishing collections of human remains would be an irrecoverable loss to science, making it impossible to study the country’s prehistoric past.
While thousands of objects have been returned, some have stayed. Eric Hollinger, the tribal liaison in NMNH’s repatriation office, stops halfway down one of 46 rows of cabinets and swings open a door, releasing the pungent smell of wood and old leather. Inside there are blankets, beaded cradle covers, and buffalo calf robes—offerings left for a Cheyenne child who died in 1868. Not long after, U.S. Army soldiers tracking the tribe found their abandoned encampment and the burial.
The museum still regularly gets return inquiries. Before agreeing, researchers talk to tribal representatives and comb through journals and diaries to discover all they can about how the object was acquired. Whether or not tribes ultimately make a claim, both sides usually find out something new about the object along the way. The consequences of NAGPRA were not dire, Gover says. “We learned a lot about those cultures we didn’t know.
“The ethnographic museum of the past is making its way to the exit,” Gover says. “It tried to freeze these cultures in time, and no culture stops. We want to make the point that these communities are here; they’re present and alive and vibrant.”
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