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