(Although this contribution is from 2023, it is worthwhile reading). The Grassi Museum has begun a process of self-reflexivity and has solicitated artistic interventions to criticize, comment on, and “re-invent” its museal practice, as the title of one of its latest exhibitions maintains.
Still, considering the huge number of African artworks, belongings and ancestral remains snatched by colonialists in its holdings, a long and strenuous path lies ahead.
The museum bears an ethical responsibility to address histories that have been overlooked, acknowledge its participation in the colonial project, and take a stand on the presence of loot within its walls.
In the storerooms in Leipzig lie half a dozen of belongings of the former rulers of Sansanné-Mango, a town in northern Togo. Among them, a silk brocade decorated with gold, reportedly owned by the ‘Djamarbu’ royal family for three hundred years,1 five war garments ornamented with so-called ‘amulets’ and several weapons and personal belongings.
This material heritage of the Anufôm is part of a larger collection of 1,700 items from the former colony of German Togoland, attributed to the officer Gaston Thierry.
They were packed in forty-six crates that landed at the Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde on 14th August 1899.
Yann le Gall also writes about loot from Togo in the Linden Museum in Stuttgart, https://www.linkedin.com/feed/?highlightedUpdateUrn=urn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7434122856533266432&highlightedUpdateType=SHARED_BY_YOUR_NETWORK&origin=SHARED_BY_YOUR_NETWORK&showCommentBox=true
