Foreign museums must return Kenyan artifacts

Before this new lockdown was announced, I was privileged to attend an exhibition opening for the Invisible Inventories Programme at the National Museums of Kenya. I heard of this project for the first time a few years ago from a friend who wrote a piece for them, and I was fascinated by the idea and drive behind it.

A few decades ago, there was an initiative, the Materials Project, targeted at getting back Kenyan artifacts from foreign museums. This was in the 60s or 70s. In the same vein, a few interested parties, including Kenyan artist collective The Nest, began the Invisible Inventories Programme which is meant to, in simple terms, write to a number of museums across the world and ask them if they have any Kenyan artefacts stored therein.

Last I checked, of the 40 museums that were written to, 33 have responded. And so far, there is a record of 32,000 Kenyan artifacts in 33 foreign museums. 

The number boggles the mind, and is shocking – but not surprising. Of course it follows that in addition to pillaging the land, using up or exporting resources and rubbishing our native religions, white imperialists must have taken souvenirs – and sold them, according to history, for a pretty penny. There was a total and complete stripping down in the scramble and partition for Africa, and quite literally, for all she had to take.

This is not the first time Kenyans, or Africans have inquired about or demanded their property back. According to a Quartz Africa report, ‘For the past three years, Benin has been officially asking France for the return of anthropomorphic (half human-half animal) statues that were looted during the sacking of the Abomey place in 1892. In Ethiopia, Afromet (the Association For the Return Of the Magdala Ethiopian Treasures) has fought for the return of cultural items seized by the British army at Magdala in 1868. 

Last year, Britain’s Victoria & Albert Museum agreed to return certain artifacts as part of a 'long-term loan'. The audacity. 

We don’t have such basic pieces, such as the taxidermied bodies of the fabled Man Eaters of Tsavo whose bodies lie in an American museum, to showcase a part of something that America never experienced. We don’t have Koitalel Arap Samoei’s head – he who withstood British rule for so long that the only way they could stop his rebellion was by killing him through treachery.

And these are just the documented ones. There are literally hundreds of thousands of objects being displayed all over the world that belong on this continent. 

Back to the exhibition, which is in itself eye opening in terms of what we should actually be reframing in our histories. Because it is not that we did not have these histories, or these cultural significances – it is that they were violently taken from us. 

When you think about it critically, there are things that were removed from communities that resulted in these communities never knowing how to make these things or engage with these concepts again; beauty implements like combs, clothing and war armour, emblems of a lifestyle that was rich and vibrant – destroyed.

The listing of these artifacts feels like a first step. To what, though, I’m not sure. Knowledge and remembrance? For agitation? For a detailed record of who took what from us, that we may not make the same mistake the Kenyan government did – to name an auditorium at National Museums of Kenya after a man who was an informant for the British government, and was against our own independence? Perhaps.

The exhibition is running until May and should probably come with a disclaimer – it will most likely anger you. It definitely did anger me – and not that, as a Kenyan, I need more to be angry about, but, all knowledge at this point is useful, for whatever we decide as a country that the next steps should be.