Stanford Symposium on the Ethics and Legal Issues in Collecting "African Art"

.
Since 2003, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University has been holding an annual symposium on the 'Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas'. This one (Sat Jan 21st) has the title: "Cultural Heritage and African Art: Negotiating the Rise of Ethical and Legal Collecting Concerns". The blurb says:

In recent decades, the media and academic circles have given great attention to the protection of cultural property from looting and the sale and collection of archaeological materials. More recently, collectors, scholars and curators of African art have been increasingly confronted with ethical dilemmas and legal ambiguities in the collection of non-archaeological arts from Africa.

This day-long symposium focuses on identifying the ideological concerns and practical solutions surrounding the legal and ethical considerations of collecting African art made in the last 500 years.[...]Speakers are:

• George Okello Abungu, Ph.D., founding director, Okello Abungu Heritage Consultants, Nairobi, Kenya
• Derek Fincham, J.D., Ph.D., assistant professor, South Texas College of Law, Houston
• Kate Fitz Gibbon, J.D., attorney, Kate Fitz Gibbon Law Office, Santa Fe, N.M.
• Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, Ph.D., assistant professor, Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University
• John Henry Merryman, J.D., LL.M., professor of law emeritus and affiliated professor emeritus in the Department of Art, Stanford University
• Sylvester Okwunodo Ogbechie, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara
[...][my hyperlinks]

Discussions of collecting and international movement of cultural property these days tend to focus on the issue of dugup (archaeological) material. An equally contentious area is the collecting of ethnographic material. There is here too the same range of ethical problems as with the appropriation by individuals of the cultural property of an 'Other' for personal entertainment and profit and all the issues that involves. Perhaps the problems are greater in the sense that some of this material has freshly been removed from its social functions and context of living memory, while archaeological material has been through the stage of being 'forgotten'. I would argue too as indigenous societies undergo transformation, there is a context destroyed too when items are removed from one cultural context to serve as trophy "art" or "collectables" in another without adequate documentation. It is rather sad therefore to see that the issue is represented rather one-sidedly - several of the participants are connected with the "art" side of the issues of collecting of African ethnographic items, but no anthropologist or ethnographer will be on the panel. The concentration in this panel alongside the representative of the arts world of known pro-collecting advocates Merriman, Fincham and Fitz-Gibbon is striking. That they'll not be recommending "sending it all back" is my guess.

Also one is struck by the terms used, ethical and legal considerations are to be "negotiated" rather than guide actions. One almost gets the impression that this panel will be working on the premise that private collecting of African ethnographic items should go on unabated, but collectors, scholars and curators of "African art" should be learning to "negotiate" the ethical issues and the legal constraints.

It would be useful if this meeting resulted in a publication for those who cannot be in the audience in person.

In addition, I think one valuable first step to aiding "negotiating" the underlying question of concern to collectors (of legal origins) would be if somebody would gather together for collectors of such items a compilation of all the relevant cultural property legislation of the 54 recognised African states (65 territories) concerning the ownership, transfer of ownership and in particular export of collectable items, so anyone thinking of buying a piece can see at a glance what the legal, at least, criteria by which in doing their 'due diligence' they should be applying. There are translations of the legislation of individual countries available on the Internet (several such databases listed in the left sidebar of my main blog), but they are not complete or systematically compiled, so absence of legislation for a given country could be due to that country having a free-for-all on its cultural property, or the fact that the compilers have not yet found the relevant acts in a form that they can incorporate into their database. It is a notable circumstance that as far as I can see, not a single US dealer in "Tribal Art" includes even links to such resources, let alone lay out what the various pieces of legislation on export of cultural property relate to the items they have on sale, which ones need (and in their stock have) export licences, and which do not require export licences and why.

Vignette: Fundamental ethical issue to be "negotiated", making African cultural property accessible to all, including future generations in Africa.

Juliet Torome on "Africa’s Stolen History"

.
Juliet Torome, a Kenyan writer and documentary filmmaker now living in California reflects on a party that she attended recently. The rich American host was proudly showing his guests around showing off his collection of paintings and sculptures. One object caught the journalist's eye:

...an animal skin stretched and decorated with colored beads, and framed behind glass. The beads were the same kind that my people, the Maasai, use, but the dominant color was blue, not our preferred red. “Where is that from?” I asked, pointing at the piece on the wall. “That is from Zimbabwe,” our host replied. “It’s a wedding skirt that was worn in a Ndebele royal wedding in 1931.”

For an African away from home, finding even the most insignificant African object on display can make you happy. When I see Kenyan or Ethiopian coffee for sale in New York or Paris, for example, it makes me proud that there are Americans and Europeans who consider a product from my homeland valuable. Learning that a wealthy American had found a traditional African skirt worthy of a place in his home triggered the same feeling. But our host’s next remark erased it instantly.

He boasted that he had acquired the skirt illegally through a friend who had “paid” a Zimbabwean government official to smuggle it out of the country. My friend and I looked at each other, trying hard not to show our disapproval. “I’m so disgusted,” my friend said a moment later. “Let’s leave before I get drunk and say something inappropriate to this guy.”

We left the party. On the way home, we ranted angrily about what we had witnessed. But our contempt was driven more by the West’s role in supporting corruption in Africa than by the fate of the specific Zimbabwean artifact we had seen.

The writer recounts that it was only later when she "heard that Yale had returned the Peruvian objects" that she "began to think about African artifacts as culturally and historically important". As she points out the many African artefacts that have ended up in foreign museums or in the hands of foreign private collectors "are largely the loot that Europeans pillaged from Africa during the slave trade and the colonial period". When on display, African art often gives details about each piece’s origins, which are often tied to a specific African kingdom or polity. There is rarely such expansiveness about the artefact's journey out of Africa, she says - citing the New York Times account of the exhibition of the famous Bangwa Queen last year in which it merely said that the sculpture had been owned by many famous collectors “since she left her Cameroonian royal shrine in the late nineteenth century”. This left unsaid anything about the role of Gustav Conrau, a German colonial explorer who later gave the statue to a museum in his home country.

Peru’s reclamation of its cultural heritage made me wish the same for Africa’s looted artifacts. But Peru is fundamentally different from any African country. Its demand reflected a reverence for its past. To Peruvians, the artifacts are a reminder of the great Inca civilization that European conquerors destroyed. Africans, on the other hand, tend to discount their past. To some extent, Africans appear to have internalized the condescending colonialist idea that Africa was primitive and needed to be civilized. We don’t treasure our historical artifacts, because they remind us of our rich civilizations’ supposed inferiority. It is no wonder that an object as culturally important as a royal wedding skirt can be smuggled out of a country without anyone noticing. Until Africans recognize the value of their history, their cultures’ artistic output will continue to be up for grabs.

In other words collectors' continued acquisition of such cultural items, far from helping to perpetuate cross cultural understanding as they so often claim, merely perpetuate the patterns of dominance and submission as a legacy of the colonial era.

Juliet Torome, 'Africa’s Stolen History', Project Syndicate 13th Jan 2012.

"Heroic" collectors?

.

Heroic Africans
Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures
Metropolitan Museum of Art
September 21, 2011–January 29, 2012

This major international loan exhibition challenges conventional perceptions of African art. Bringing together more than one hundred masterpieces drawn from collections in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Portugal, France, and the United States, it considers eight landmark sculptural traditions from West and Central Africa created between the twelfth and early twentieth centuries in terms of the individual subjects who lie at the origins of the representations. [...]

The works featured are among the only tangible links that survive, relating to generations of leaders that shaped Africa's past before colonialism, [...]

The works come from a number of west and central African cultures: the Akan of Ghana, ancient Ife civilization and the Kingdom of Benin of Nigeria, Bangwa and Kom chiefdoms of the Cameroon Grassfields, the Chokwe of Angola and Zambia, and the Luluwa, Hemba, and Kuba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

sculptors from these regions captured evocative, idealized, and enduring likenesses of their individual patrons whose identities were otherwise recorded in ephemeral oral traditions.

This exhibition raises a number of questions about the presence of the objects themselves. Why are no African museums represented in the loans programme? Also if these works form a link with the past of the regions covered, why are they scattered in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Portugal, France, the UK and US?

Following the presentation at the Metropolitan, the exhibition will travel to the Museum Rietberg in Zurich, where it will be on view February 26 through June 3, 2012. There are no plans to show it in Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Angola, Zambia, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Kwame Opoku on the Recent Looting in Egypt and the Repatriation Debate

.
Kwame Opoku has a well-argued response (Restitution and Recent Upheavals in Egypt, March 24, 2011) to the comments of the antiquity dealers and collectors lobbyists alleging that the recent looting in Egypt shows what a bad idea restitution of scattered cultural heritage to their source countries is. Those who are against restitution will use the present situation as an excuse for rejecting the restitution of certain items.

Opoku argues that the disorder, revolt or revolution in Egypt does not change the nature of the debate on restitution nor does it provide any convincing excuse for the retentionists in the Western world. The determination of some museums and collectors not to return certain items to Egypt has never been based on the security or insecurity in Egypt. In all the previous thirty years in which Hosni
Mubarak ruled Egypt there were no reported major disturbances, but still the "cultural property retentionists" refused to return some of the Egyptian artefacts as requested by Zahi Hawass.

If we look at the other cases of restitution, for example, the Benin bronzes, we note that there is no revolution in Nigeria and yet for more than hundred years, including the period when Nigeria was a British colony, the British Museum refused to return the bronzes though the venerable museum has at times been very willing to sell these objects even to Nigeria. [...] Similarly, the British have been unwilling to return the golden Asante regalia they looted from Asante (Ghana) in 1874 even though the country which was British colony until 1957 has been peaceful without any major civil unrest [...]. Again, if we consider the Parthenon/Elgin Marbles, there is no disorder in Athens but the British Museum is not considering the return of the marbles to Athens. Clearly, those who argue against returning artefacts to Egypt are using a very convenient but unconvincing argument. They will not convince anyone who has carefully followed the debates on the issue in the last years.

Opoku then turns his attention to the person who has done more than anyone to raise awareness of these issues in the past years:

Many Western museum directors may be rejoicing at the resignation and departure of Zahi Hawass from the position of the Secretary-General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities. Let them rejoice for the period of respite they have unexpectedly gained will be shorter than they wish. The question of restitution was there before Hawass came and will remain after his departure and after all of us are gone if attitudes in the West do not change. Whatever happens to Hawass in the post Mubarak period, one must acknowledge that the celebrated archaeologist has rendered to Egypt and to Africa immense services which many others envy. He has made the issue of restitution known to a broader public in the world. Which other archaeologist is as well-known as the famous Egyptian archaeologist? He has made archaeology a lively subject for many persons. He has restored to Egypt, Egyptology, a science dominated for too long by Westerners. Westerners can no longer go to Egypt as if they were going to an archaeological supermarket to take whatever they want. They have to seek permission which may be refused and they may be asked to leave the country. One may not always like his style and tactics but there is no gainsaying that Hawass has been more successful with his approach than many others. The dedication and enthusiasm he brought to the issue of restitution deserve the admiration of all honest people. [...] How many people can bring such energy and dedication to their work? We wish other countries had such worthy and energetic representatives who speak out clearly in the cultural field. The West, of course, has never liked intellectuals and representatives of non-Western peoples who know their work and articulate their positions boldly. A man like Hawass who mastered modern media and used them effectively was a thorn in the flesh of many. [...] One undoubted achievement of Zahi Hawass was his success in bringing together states with restitution claims in April 2010 to the Cairo Conference on restitution - Conference on International Cooperation for the Protection and Repatriation of Cultural Heritage - in Cairo, on April 7 and 8, 2010. For the first time, States with restitution claims met for two days to discuss common problems and to develop
strategies for recovering/stolen/looted cultural artefacts. In addition to emphasizing that ownership of cultural heritage by the country of origin does not expire, nor does it face prescription, the communique issued at the end of the conference added that the efforts initiated in Cairo should be pursued and expanded upon and there should be continued consultations among the participants as well as with other countries and institutions.

The dismemberment of the SCA which was to liaise with other delegations for the preparation of the next meeting and outlining the future activities of the Conference leaves the future of the initiative difficult to predict, but the very fact that it took place was an important step.

Opoku concludes:

The recent events in Egypt may be analysed and assessed differently but it would clearly be illegitimate to argue that the temporary disorder in that country offers a valid reason for not returning artefacts illegally taken from Egypt. Certainly, we do not expect anybody to return artefacts in the midst of revolts and public disorder. This situation however will improve soon and the retentionists in the West will be exposed for their dishonest arguments which are based on grounds other than the present disorder.

Indeed, now the (initial) anti-government demonstrations are over, the main source of danger to antiquities in Egypt is continuing theft from sites and museum stores which Opoku is right to link with the appetite of the foreign antiquities markets, he quotes the view of Prof. Barry Kemp:

The most useful thing the international community can do about this is to examine its conscience. The looting of sites is done to satisfy the market in antiquities, which continues to flourish in Europe and the US. It is now a reasonable assumption that any Egyptian piece that is for sale is either fake or was looted.

Western archaeological concerns

.
Stepping into the role of a political commentator, Californian antiquity dealer Dave Welsh solemnly intones:

Whatever one's perspective regarding Libyan governmental legitimacy, such a state of flux is disturbing. In such circumstances there is always some risk that Western archaeological concerns may not be respected. At this point it appears that all that can be hoped for is that a Libyan regime will emerge which is sympathetic to Western archaeological concerns.

Why "western"? Is the "west" the only home of archaeologists who might be concerned about anything? Do brown skinned people in African countries not count for anything in the US antiquity dealers' world-view?
.

Looted Ghanaian Gold in Britain

Kwame Opoku., 5 January, 2011

WHEN WILL BRITAIN RETURN LOOTED GOLDEN GHANAIAN ARTEFACTS? A
HISTORY OF BRITISH LOOTING OF MORE THAN 100 OBJECTS

A recent visit to London reminded me that apart from the British
Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum many other museums in
London and elsewhere in the United Kingdom are still holding onto
African cultural artefacts which, to put it very mildly, were removed
from the continent under conditions and circumstances which can be
considered as questionable. One such museum is the Wallace
Collection, London.

full text including links and images:

http://www.museum-security.org/opoku_asante_regalia.htm

Can't Trust the Natives

.
In a post ('More on Benin Mask') on his little-read Cultural Property Objector blog, Washington lawyer Peter Tompa argues that "additional context is necessary" to the story of the withdrawal of the sale of colonial loot by Sotheby's last week. According to Tompa "any Nigerian claim to the high moral ground" is "undercut" by the "destruction of the Oron Museum and the wanton burning of hundreds of ancestral figures (ekpu) as firewood during and after the Biafran civil war".

In short, any self-righteous indignation about 19th c. looting needs to be tempered by an acknowledgement of what Nigeria itself did to Oron culture in 1975.

So basically Tompa is saying that material looted from Benin by the British punitive expedition should not be returned because the natives had a destructive civil war forty years ago? That argument reeks of neocolonial paternalism.

See also: Elor Nkereuwem, 'Time and tide at the Oron Museum'.
.

Sotheby's Retract Benin Mask From Sale at Request of Consigners

"Sotheby's Retract Benin Mask From Sale at Request of Consigners" Originally published on Paul Barford's Portable Antiquities collecting and heritage issues Blog (Sunday, 26 December 2010)
.
Well, here's a piece of good news, it is being reported on MSN this evening that Sotheby's has withdrawn a controversial sale of a Benin ivory hip mask from sale. For the controversy see several recent texts by Kwame Opoku and also Tom Flynn's coverage: ' Sale of looted Benin treasures "reprehensible and unconscionable", say Nigerian cultural activists (don't miss the Open University film embedded in it). If this is true, it shows that public opinion can sometimes hold sway over commercial interests.

Hat-tip to MSN

UPDATE
The Independent has an article about the withdrawal by Sotheby's a few days ago of a Benin mask that had been causing such controversy (see also the Looting Matters coverage). I was interested to read the not-very sympathetic wikipedia biography of Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Henry Lionel Galway, KCMG, DSO (1859–1949) the British official in whose possession it left Africa.

The Scramble for Africa's Treasures

The Scramble for Africa's Treasures
From Paul Barford's Portable Antiquities and heritage Issues Blog ( Sunday, 21 March 2010).

From Nigeria Daily News Sun, 21 Mar 2010:

"The history of the African continent is littered with the exploits of plunderers. Slave traders - local and foreign - held sway for centuries, carting multitudes of Africans across the Atlantic, to plantations in the Americas and elsewhere. When the slave trade went out of fashion, the land grab followed. In Berlin in 1885, the colonial warriors carved Africa up into bits - represented on the map as brightly coloured slices - which they then proceeded to administer and exploit, until the wave of independence that arrived with the 1950s. Following that phase, the scramble has largely taken on an economic dimension, with Africa’s oil and minerals and farmlands up for grabs. Less overt, is another kind of plunder - involving the relocation of hundreds of valuable pieces of artwork - sculptures, pottery, from Africa to museums and private collections in the West. Take Benin’s bronze heads for example. In 1897, the British attacked and destroyed the Benin Kingdom. In the process they gained access to the Kingdom’s rich trove of extraordinary artwork, which they wasted no time looting. And the plunder has continued to the present day. Over the last few decades, hundreds of vigango (ancestral totems used to mark burial sites) have disappeared from Kenyan villages, ending up in museums and private collections in the United States. In 1994, the National Museum in Ile-Ife was broken into three times, with the vandals carting away some of the finest heads in the collection.

It is estimated that the global illicit trade in artifacts is currently worth billions of dollars. It would also not be farfetched to say that the West’s thriving exhibition circuit is propped up to a significant extent by artifacts illegally acquired from Africa. An exhibition, currently going on in London at the moment, is showing the finest of Ife’s terracotta and brass heads. At the moment, there are no plans to host the exhibition in Nigeria.

It would not be true, or fair, however, to lay the blame solely at the feet of Europe and America. The West would find it extremely difficult to gain possession of African artifacts, especially in contemporary times, without the collusion of Africans themselves, within and outside the government bureaucracy. Unscrupulous Western businessmen and art dealers may pay for Kenya’s vigango, but the actual stealing is done by unscrupulous Kenyan youth, who loot burial sites".

The rest is here.