Sell it!
In 2023, auction house Hôtel des Ventes in the French city of Montpellier attracted worldwide attention when it managed to sell a Fang mask, which had been estimated at €300.000-400.000. It had come from the attic of an elder couple, which had sold it to a small dealer for €150 and via him it had come into auction. The mask had been collected by a French colonial governor ‘under unknown circumstances’ around 1917. A French judge had rejected the demand of the Gabonese government and of a diaspora organisation that the object be returned. The auctioneer hammered down the mask for over €4 million, ten times its estimated value.
In the same year, an art dealer in the Dutch city of Utrecht advertised with a silver tobacco box and some coins soldered on a marble plate, all described as coming from the Lombok raid (1894). He had purchased the coins at an auction in the Netherlands and the tobacco box from a colleague in the UK. He sold both for a modest amount on to a private collector.
Earlier, I had seen a comparable box in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, but by then the Dutch government, the owner of the box, had returned it to Indonesia. In 2022, Indonesia had claimed all Lombok treasures in Dutch state-collections, but this private box fell outside it.
Not opposed to restitution, but …
It much less frequently happens that descendants recognise that their heritage belongs more in the country of origin than with them. They are not opposed to restitution either, but for various reasons it does not happen.
Some of them, such as Christa Blom, granddaughter of German missionaries in Papua New Guinea, miss the knowledge and the network to make this happen. In TV-program Panorama of the Nord Deutsche Rundfunk of 9 October 2024, she shows a skull, which her grandparents once took with them. It is an uncomfortable possession that she would like to return, but she doesn’t know how to go about it.
She is not the only one with such a wish.
Some current owners are not against the restitution of their heritage but they want to get something in exchange. The 10th-century, two metres tall stone of Sangguran might serve as an example.
In 1813, it was taken by Thomas Raffles, British lieutenant-governor of Java (1811-1816). He donated it to his patron, Lord Minto, the British administrator in Kolkata. After his term of office, the old Minto took the stone to his ancestral seat in Scotland.
Indonesia has been asking for its return since 2004. Currently the 7th Earl of Minto is said to be willing to relinquish the stone but he wants to get some financial compensation. Indonesia, however, is not willing to pay for what it considers its own.
Voluntary returns as a new trend?
‘In the past few years, we have seen an increasing number of private individuals requesting to return their cultural assets to their countries of origin’, said Fabienne Baraga of the Swiss Federal Office of Culture.
She made the statement after an anonymous Swiss woman, who had inherited a collection of more than sixty pre-Hispanic objects that had been in the family for generations, had brought them back to their various home-countries in South America.
I do agree that the number of private individuals requesting the return of an inheritance to the country of origin is growing. But turning such a request into an actual return is difficult.
Third party help
These private individuals often invoke the help of a third party, often specialists, some of them based in the country of origin, others in the country where it is located.
The Swiss citizen Katharina Küng engaged the help of curator Laidlaw Peringanda of the Swakopmund Genocide Museum in Namibia to return a headdress that she inherited from her mother. After visiting the rather modest museum on the coast of western Namibia, Peringanda explained that it was a traditional Herero headdress.
In 2013, Mark Walker contacted the Richard Lander Foundation in the UK. It campaigns for the return of artworks to the Kingdom of Benin. He had inherited two bronzes – a bird of prophecy and a bell for invoking ancestors – from his grandfather, Captain Herbert Walker, who had participated in the 1897 raid on the Kingdom. In 2014, Mark brought his inheritance to Benin City.
Erica Baud and her brother Michel Baud are fifth generation descendants of the Governor-general of the Dutch East Indies, J.C. Baud. They kept some objects of the latter but wanted to part with them. After contacting the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the museum’s historian Harm Stevens pointed to a pilgrim’s staff as the most important, since it once had belonged to Prince Diponegoro, an Indonesian national hero. In 2015, the Bauds delivered the staff in Jakarta. Stevens describes the return in ‘Bitter Spice’ (2016).
Voluntary returns by private collectors and art dealers are rare.
The secrecy surrounding colonial collections in the private sector is a major obstacle for countries of origin to know of the existence of these collections. If they discover them, they might be rather eager to retrieve them.
In case compensation is asked, neither the country where a collection is located nor the country of origin have financial resources for it.
