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The entrance to the Nairobi National Museum. The Denver Museum of Nature
and Science is planning to return 30 ceremonial totems to Kenya and the
National Museums of Kenya will determine whether to display them or to
try to trace and return them to the sites where they were created. PHOTO
| JEFF ANGOTE | FILE
NATION MEDIA GROUP
A US museum is planning to hand 30 ceremonial totems later this month to a visiting Kenyan delegation in a move that could lead to the return of hundreds of sacred objects to their countries of origin.
The Denver Museum of Nature
and Science is voluntarily presenting to the National Museums of Kenya
the vigango donated to it in 1990 by Hollywood actor Gene Hackman and
film producer Art Linson.
“There is no legal instrument
or international treaty that requires us to return them,” said Chip
Colwell-Chanthaphonh, the museum’s curator of anthropology. “This is not
about the law; it's about ethics.”
Officials of the
museum in the US state of Colorado have determined that “these objects
are communally owned and deeply sacred to the Mijikenda community of
Kenya,” Mr Colwell-Chanthaphonh explained.
He said he
hopes his museum's action will encourage dozens of other institutions in
the United States to return to Kenya the “hundreds” of vigango in their
collections.
“We want to signal to other museums that
that these are sacred objects and must not be treated as an ordinary
vase or carpet,” Mr Colwell-Chanthaphonh said.
Only two
vigango have previously been sent back to Kenya – one from a museum in
Illinois and another from a university in Virginia.
SOLD BY DEALERS
The
consecrated objects, created to commemorate relatives, are typically
sold by dealers in the US for $5,000 (about Sh435,000) or more, with one
fetching nearly $10,000 (about Sh869,000) at a 2012 auction in Paris,
the New York Times recently reported. (NYT: Sending Artworks Home, but to Whom?)
Mr
Colwell-Chanthaphonh said he had been seeking the return of his
museum's 30 vigango to Kenya for the past five years, but it wasn't
until November that an agreement was reached, he noted.
A
delegation headed by Nairobi County Assembly Speaker Alex Ole Magelo
had come to Denver then as part of the sister-city relationship between
the Kenyan capital and Colorado's capital city.
Discussions
between the visitors from Nairobi and Denver municipal officials led to
the decision to hand over the vigango to the National Museums of Kenya,
which will determine whether to display them or to try to trace and
return them to the sites where they were created.
The Denver Museum of Nature and Science intends to conduct a formal ceremony marking the transfer of the vigango to Kenya.
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