Jim Chuchu Why are stolen African artifacts still in Western museums TED

if you live in new york

or london or some other so-called

cultural capital

it’s likely that you visited an art

museum that features a collection of

african art

these collections usually consist of

masks and sculptures

but also include weapons and ceremonial

dress

cutlery jewelry and even toys

these objects are markers of traditions

and cultural beliefs

but also of adaptation and ingenuity

science and spirituality cultural

objects are the way that human

beings say we were here have you ever

wondered how

these african objects ended up in

museums

some are bought by traders and tourists

some were gifts

exchanged in acts of friendship and some

were excavated in archaeological digs

but then there are many others that were

looted during raids

confiscated by colonial forces and

stolen at gunpoint

i’m an artist and i tell stories for a

living

to tell stories you need imagination and

memory

and in kenya we have a gap in our memory

so much

of what happened in between the late

1800s until our independence in 1963

is missing because too many of the

objects that tell the stories from that

period

are gone according to our 2018 report on

african cultural heritage

90 percent of sub-saharan africa’s

material cultural legacy

is housed outside the african continent

what does it mean for a society to lose

so many objects

it means that we forget our religions

and our spiritual practices

it means that we forget the names of our

kingdoms and heroes

it means that we forget our music our

crafts and our languages

we forget our stories and as a result

we adopt other people’s religions and

call our old religions witchcraft

we start to eat burgers and pasta and

look down

on our indigenous foods and our children

begin to believe in their hearts that

other societies have richer cultures

where do you begin to fix something like

this

one place to start is to find out

exactly which objects are missing

and where they are in 2018 as a member

of the nest collective

and together the coalition of kenyan and

european museums

artists and researchers we co-founded

the international

inventories program which began creating

a database of kenyan cultural objects

that are held outside our country we

called and emailed museums across north

america and europe asking them if they

had

any kenyan cultural objects in their

collections

we hosted public debates about object

restitution and created exhibitions to

bring the debate

into the public sphere and that was the

easy part

the more difficult part for us kenyans

was having to read through the most

troubling

historical texts and records from a time

in history when africans were

on the receiving end of colonial force

violence

and discrimination those texts are still

difficult to read even today

in two years we collected data on more

than 32 000 objects held by these

institutions

and that might seem like a huge number

but there are many other institutions

that haven’t yet replied to our requests

and that’s just kenya there are 46 other

countries in sub-saharan africa that

have experienced a similar

extraction of objects our next step is

to publish this database online

so the data is accessible to community

leaders who have been campaigning

for the return of sacred objects but

also for every teacher

researcher and citizen who wants to find

out what we are missing and where it can

be found

we are not the only initiative of our

kind across africa and asia there are

other projects

asking similar questions about their

cultural heritage

our hope is that we can provoke

institutions in north america

and europe to rethink the morality of

their collections

we’re asking them to account for the

violent histories of some of the objects

in their collections

by labeling their collections more

truthfully

we’re asking them to return objects that

were improperly acquired

back to the communities that need them

we ask them to trust african museums to

store objects on behalf of the people of

africa

there can be no collective identity

without collective memory

so we’re asking for our objects to help

us remember who we are

thank you