The Thinkers
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9025741 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kasalina Maliamu Nabakooza (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 54 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 8-9 |
| Publication date | 2021-08-03 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | African Arts (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0001-9933 • E-ISSN: 1937-2108 |
| Publisher | MIT Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1162/afar_a_00593 |
| OpenAlex | W4212765276 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 8 |
In my research on Buganda art disseminated throughout the Global North, I excavated museums in the United Kingdom and expanded my scope worldwide (Nabakooza 2020). In early 2020, I was following up virtually on museum visits, with concerns similar to those of Amanda Maples's First Word essay “African Restitution in a North American Context,” in which she calls for the “repatriation, restitution, return, and reparations” of African art in American museum collections (Maples 2020). Last November, upon the 150th anniversary of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote: “It needs to be said that recent scholarship has cast shade on the robber-baron and colonialist provenance of many Met treasures—a problem shared by other formerly piratical museums worldwide” (Schjeldahl 2020). As curator of a smaller museum than the Metropolitan Museum of Art, described by Schjeldahl (2020) as “a battleship,” Maples (2020) explained that she is nimbler in her ability to challenge the complicity of American museums in collecting African art with dubious provenances. She describes how the release of The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage report in November 2018 caused reverberations that reached American museums, sparking several conferences that she attended (Maples 2020; Sarr and Savoy 2018).Savoy and Sarr's seminal report focuses specifically on art from sub-Saharan Africa, the region in which the Buganda Kingdom resides, within the equatorial nation of Uganda in East Central Africa. As comprehensive as the Sarr-Savoy report is, and as Maples points out, much work remains to account for African art outside of the continent and currently there is no active centralized inventory of all African art in museums or on the market. Similarly, in his recent publication The Brutish Museum, Dan Hicks, curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford contends that: “We need to open up and excavate our institutions, dig up our ongoing pasts, with all the archaeological tools that can be brought to hand” (2020: xiii). His call to action resonates with my own provenance research conducted last year, during which I identified a sacred bundle and a royal drum at the Pitt Rivers Museum (2012a, 2012b) which should be restituted to the Baganda in the Buganda Kingdom of Uganda. The sacred bundle (1916.26.26) contains human remains of the Kabaka (King of Buganda) and together with the royal war drum (1898.14.1.1) are regarded by the Baganda as “relatives, ancestors, or spirits, and Kings” (Kafumbe 2018: 41). The Kabaka is the head of all the Buganda clans and shares kinship, spiritual, and political relationships with all the Baganda (Kafumbe 2018: 2). Burial of the Kabaka is sacred and it is unacceptable to his descendants that his remains would leave Buganda, let alone be subject to research in the storage room of a British museum.The Sarr-Savoy report notes that many African countries have demanded the return of objects for decades since Independence and Maples emphasized the need for museums to be transparent about their collections of African art, quoting Daudi Karungi, director of the Kampala Biennial, that “what was taken away should be brought back to our country” (Sarr and Savoy 2018: 17; Maples 2020: 13). In July 1962, just before Independence, Abubakar Mayanja, a law graduate of Cambridge University and Uganda's minister of education, successfully negotiated the return of objects similar to this sacred bundle and royal drum (Thomas 2016). This early and successfully negotiated pre-Independence case is not common, but certainly backs up the need to return objects discovered during my research and illustrates the longstanding restitution calls.However, my provenance research began not at the Pitt Rivers, but at the British Museum because of a written description of Sir Apollo Kaggwa, Katikkiro (prime minister) of Buganda and diplomatic guest of the British government. On June 14, 1902, Sir Apollo Kaggwa and his secretary Hamu Mukasa visited the British Museum and they both noted that:I found Buganda objects under similar circumstances in museums throughout Europe and the United States. For example, Zachary Kingdon, curator of African Collections at the National Museums Liverpool, shared letters with me that were sent between the director of the Liverpool Museum and Margaret Trowell, a British curator at Uganda Museum who founded the oldest school of art in East Africa (Miller 1975: 70). Like Roscoe, Trowell had questionable methods in obtaining Buganda objects. For instance, she shared an anecdote in her memoir where she misrepresented herself as a witch to an unnamed woman she described as Nilotic, to purchase a Buganda object she believed to have spiritual significance (1957: 74–76).During a panel I attended at the French Embassy, Felwine Sarr (2019) explained that African civil society must have a right to interrogate the legitimacy of looted objects, such as the bundle under discussion, and accordingly, the Baganda have used knowledge in many forms as a weapon to resist colonialism (Roberts 2016: 806; Summers 2019: S127–S143). I, for example, was born into the Ente clan (specifically, the sacred cow born without a tail) on my father's side. Our clan has been active in anticolonial resistance to the British in Uganda (Earle 2018: 389) with the understanding that cultural knowledge and material culture are closely kept and transmitted within Buganda clans (Kafumbe 2018: 10). I here point out that the catalogue entry for the royal drum in the Pitt Rivers Museum (2012b) was described as “booty,” implying that it was looted from Kabaka Mwanga after he went to war with the British and was sent into exile. The drum was also described in the catalogue as a “status object.” I believe the British were aware of the symbolic power of the Kabaka and removed material culture (and sometimes the Kabaka himself through forced exile) to destabilize the Buganda Kingdom and the identity of the Baganda throughout the colonial period. As this illustrates, such methods burden many colonial collections.The call to action to restitute African art collections is heightened by the global coronavirus pandemic. As museums face budgetary concerns, I wonder how marginalized collections will be accounted for, preserved, and restituted. In an article for the New York Times, Paul Theroux (2020) recalled how the current crisis reminded him of curfew set in Uganda during a violent coup in 1966 while he was at Makerere University. This similar period of disturbance coincides with my great certainty of the current asymmetry between stakeholders and museums, as shown by numerous others, including Kostas Arvanitis and Louise Tythacott (2014: 139). Looking to The Thinkers, a 20-foot-tall metal sculpture at Dar es Salaam University, Tanzania by George Kagaba Kakooza, and the Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu's four monumental sculptures for The Seated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that illustrate the undeniable “dignity and the peacefulness” of our elders (Wangechi Mutu, email with author, May 1, 2020), I call for the restitution of Buganda collections in museums worldwide to the Buganda Kingdom of Uganda. I affirm Maples's proposal for a conference in a year to discuss the restitution of African art from American museums. I hope to contribute to the return of African art to the continent
African art · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Context (archaeology) · Political science · Repatriation · Restitution · Scholarship · African history and culture studies · History · Law
| Highly cited | No |
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