The research project on the Max von Stetten Collection shows that provenance research does not have to be exclusively archival research and art market research. The temporary commander of the so-called German Schutztruppe in Cameroon had collected them in the 1890s and donated them to what was then the Royal Ethnographic Collection. This first ethnological museum in Germany, founded in Munich in 1862, is now called the Five Continents Museum and broke new ground by entering into a research cooperation, in which Cameroonian scientists conducted field research in their own country. They followed in the footsteps left by von Stetten - first as a traveling Africa explorer, later as an officer and commander of brutal punitive expeditions,with which the German Reich wanted to assert its claims to possession and power.

Hubert Spiegel

Editor in the Feuilleton.

  • Follow I follow

At the final conference on the research project, there was no mention of the circumstances of these military actions and the casualties they caused.

The fact that it could only take place online because several participants from Cameroon were denied entry visas was only acknowledged with a bitter side note.

It was almost all about the objects: what they once meant, what they mean today, and what they might mean in the future.

Many questions still need to be clarified, not least those of a political and social nature.

Provenance research goes to the roots of self-image – of the communities of origin as well as of the receiving countries.

It starts in the country of origin

According to Albert Gouaffo from the University of Dschang, classic provenance research takes place in the host country, while postcolonial provenance research begins in the country of origin.

Two young Gouaffo employees, Yrine Matchinda and Lucie Mbogni Nankeng, report on the difficult circumstances under which their two-year field research had to take place in the Anglophone part of Cameroon: There is a separatist movement there, and a civil war has been raging since 2016.

In many villages there is a lack of accommodation and food, while the distrust of the residents was often great.

Some places where von Stetten was in the 1990s no longer exist or are hard to find because they were renamed.

The approximately two hundred objects in the collection are everyday objects such as drums, arrows and spears, but also, in no small part, cult objects that their owners are unlikely to have parted with voluntarily, as the historian Ngome Nkome from the University of Buea says of the five Cameroonian scientists involved in the conference, emphasized: "It would be like someone selling their own story".

And last but not least, this is where the value of these objects lies: They are often part of a story that can hardly be reconstructed without them, because many traditions are closely linked to objects.

Villagers have identified individual objects in pictures as cult objects without being able to say anything about the cult itself.

In some cases it has even been suggested

Karin Guggeis, the project manager on the German side, suspects that around fifty objects in the collection are in a difficult acquisition situation.

So far there have been no restitution negotiations;

they would be difficult enough.

But Gouaffo makes it clear that there is more to him than that.

He leaves no doubt that the acquisitions took place in an "unlawful context", which applies to apparent purchases as well as to "extorted donations".

But an equal dialogue is more important to him than acts of reparation.

The decolonization of Cameroon is still in its infancy, and the same applies to the processing of German colonial history, which he does not want to leave to the Germans alone: ​​"The past of others cannot be our future".