According to a recent study, German museums hold a staggering 40,000 items from Cameroon, more than the British Museum’s entire African collection. These mostly vaulted artifacts include textiles, musical instruments, masks, royal treasures, and more.
German museums have an important collection of 40,000 items from Cameroon, outstripping the entire African collection held in the British Museum. This conclusion was made public during a recent presentation of a study by Benedict Savoy, professor at Technische Universität in Berlin, and Albert Guaffo, professor at Dschang University in Cameroon, co-authored The Art Newspa.
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The work, called Atlas der Abwesenheit (Atlas of Absence), is the result of two years of joint work by researchers from Germany and Cameroon. With the support of curators from 45 German museums, she sheds light on the number of cultural artifacts from Cameroon currently in German institutions.
Benedict Savoy expressed his surprise at the Cameroonian heritage in German museum collections, noting that no other country has so much. For comparison, Cameroon’s own public collections in Yaounde contain around 6,000 items, which is far less. However, it is worth noting that most of the 40,000 items in German museums are stored in warehouses and not made public.
Savoy explained that the above issue does not include objects found in natural history museums, archaeological finds in prehistoric museums, and objects in private collections.
Germany’s purchase of Cameroonian artifacts can be traced back to the colonial period, when Germany declared Cameroon a colony in 1884. In an effort to expand trade opportunities, Germany took increasingly brutal measures to suppress local resistance until the end of the First World War.
After the war, the territory of Cameroon was divided between France and England. During the three decades of German rule, colonial troops carried out at least 180 “punitive expeditions” aimed at seizing lands, which led to the destruction of villages, farms, robbery or destruction of cultural heritage.
At a panel held in Berlin on the occasion of the presentation of the study, representatives of the Cameroon embassy expressed their wishes for the return of the works. They called compensation the finishing touch, the peak they were trying to reach.
In response, the Cameroonian government established an extradition commission, which included representatives from the foreign, education and culture ministries, traditional royal leaders, civil society and academia. Regular meetings between the museum commission and directors in Germany have begun, but reinstatement remains a distant goal, requiring completion of several previous steps.
Various artifacts from Cameroon held in German world culture museums include royal treasures, manuscripts, weapons and tools such as textiles, musical instruments, ritual masks, stools and thrones. Savoy noted that none of these items were originally designed to be displayed in shop windows.
The study presents various examples of Cameroonian objects found in German museums. Among them is a beaded chair, now in the Linden Museum in Stuttgart, which was seized during a “punitive expedition” from the Bahama and later returned to Germany by an army officer.
Another artifact, a wood-carved drum used as a war prize, is now kept in the Ethnological Museum Berlin (Ethnological Museum Berlin).
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Source: Focus
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