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

64,486 views ・ 2021-08-25

TED


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If you live in New York or London or some other so-called cultural capital,
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it’s likely that you visited an art museum
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that features a collection of African art.
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These collections usually consist of masks and sculptures,
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but also include weapons and ceremonial dress,
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cutlery, jewelry, and even toys.
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These objects are markers of traditions and cultural beliefs,
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but also of adaptation and ingenuity, science and spirituality.
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Cultural objects are the way that human beings say, “We were here.”
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Have you ever wondered how these African objects ended up in museums?
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Some were bought by traders and tourists,
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some gifts exchanged in acts of friendship
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and some were excavated in archaeological digs.
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But then there are many others that were looted during raids,
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confiscated by colonial forces and stolen at gunpoint.
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I’m an artist and I tell stories for a living.
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To tell stories you need imagination and memory.
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And in Kenya, we have a gap in our memory.
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So much of what happened in between the late 1800s
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until our independence in 1963 is missing
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because too many of the objects that tell the stories from that period are gone.
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According to a 2018 report on African cultural heritage,
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90 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s material cultural legacy
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is housed outside the African continent.
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What does it mean for a society to lose so many objects?
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It means that we forget our religions and our spiritual practices.
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It means that we forget the names of our kingdoms and heroes.
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It means that we forget our music, our crafts and our languages.
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We forget our stories.
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And as a result, we adopt other people’s religions
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We start to eat burgers and pasta and look down on our indigenous foods
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and our children begin to believe in their hearts
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that other societies have richer cultures.
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Where do you begin to fix something like this?
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One place to start is to find out exactly
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which objects are missing and where they are.
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In 2018, as a member of The Nest Collective
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and together the coalition of Kenyan and European museums,
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artists and researchers,
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we co-founded the International Inventories Programme,
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which began creating a database of Kenyan cultural objects
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that are held outside our country.
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We called and e-mailed museums across North America and Europe,
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asking them if they had any Kenyan cultural objects in their collections.
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We hosted public debates about object restitution
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and created exhibitions to bring the debate into the public sphere.
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And that was the easy part.
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The more difficult part for us Kenyans
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was having to read through the most troubling historical texts and records
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from a time in history
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when Africans were on the receiving end of colonial force,
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Those texts are still difficult to read even today.
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In two years, we collected data
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on more than 32,000 objects held by these institutions,
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and that might seem like a huge number,
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but there are many other institutions that haven’t yet replied to our requests.
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And that’s just Kenya.
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They are 46 other countries in sub-Saharan Africa
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that have experienced a similar extraction of objects.
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Our next step is to publish this database online,
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so the data is accessible to community leaders
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who have been campaigning for the return of sacred objects,
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but also for every teacher, researcher and citizen
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who wants to find out what we are missing
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and where it can be found.
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We are not the only initiative of our kind.
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Across Africa and Asia, there are other projects
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asking similar questions about their cultural heritage.
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Our hope is that we can provoke institutions in North America and Europe
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to rethink the morality of their collections.
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We are asking them to account for the violent histories
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of some of the objects in their collections
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by labeling their collections more truthfully.
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We are asking them to return objects that were improperly acquired
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back to the communities that need them.
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We are asking them to trust African museums
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to store objects on behalf of the people of Africa.
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There can be no collective identity without collective memory.
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So we are asking for our objects to help us remember who we are.
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Thank you.
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