Offer to Return 27 Vigango

Kigango (singular) or vigango (plural) are memorial funerary posts that maintain a perpetual connection between the living and the living dead. The homesteads that the 27 vigango were taken from are unknown.

Vigango originate from the Mijikenda community, which is made up of nine closely related but distinct cultural groups that live along the Kenyan and Northern Tanzania coasts. The exact places of origin of the 27 vigango are not known.

The Mijikenda believe that their supreme spiritual being, Mulungu, does not intervene directly in the community’s affairs. Their ancestors, materially embodied in vigango, mediate between the community and Mulungu. In this way, they oversee the community’s well-being. They bring petitions of their living relatives to Mulungu and return blessings, messages of advice and warnings to their living relatives.

In 2011, the 27 vigango were located in the California State University Museum at Fullerton (CSUF Museum), in the United States of America (USA).

The looting of Vigango has been ongoing for the past 100 years, however, a spike in theft was experienced in the 1980s and 1990s. There was a growing demand for vigango, as “African art” pieces, in the tourist and Global North art market. In the face of worsening economic conditions, local Kenyan youth saw an opportunity to meet this demand. They began stealing vigango and supplying them to hotels, galleries and tourist shops, who openly displayed them in Mombasa. For them, the monetary value of vigango in these spaces outweighed the religious and cultural value they had for elder members of their communities. 

Many of the vigango that made their way to the USA did so through Ernie Wolfe III; a prominent collector of African belongings, and sold them to private and public American buyers. 

In this instance, the 27 vigango had been purchased by the Ciaramellas; wealthy businessmen from the Bronx who owned the Ciara Corporation and worked on more than 47 buildings in the Los Angeles area. In December 1991, Wolfe donated the vigango to CSUF Museum, on behalf of the Ciaramellas. When asked where the vigango came from, he stated that he had acquired the vigango in Mombasa, and then sold them in America. 

However, in 1999, John Baya Mitsanze [curator at the National Museums of Kenya (NMK), and a member of the Mijikenda community], Prof. Monica Udvardy [an American academic and anthropologist who had conducted research on the Mijikenda community] and Linda Giles [academic and anthropologist then based at the Illinois State University Museum] conducted provenance research on 294 vigango in North American collections. They found that, in fact, all the vigango that Ernie Wolfe III ‘collected from the field’ were stolen before he sold them on the illicit trading market.

The 27 vigango were then kept in storage.

The Mijikenda community believes that once a kigango has been removed, it cannot be reinstalled unless immediately recovered. This means that the connection to the spirit embodied in a kigango is permanently lost. They also believe that if a kigango is disturbed, displaced or stolen, misfortune will be cast by the embodied human ancestor, on their descendants and/or on the offender who committed this act of the highest disrespect. The repercussions of this spiritual sanction can take the form of unproductive land or poor harvest, physical or mental illness, physical disabilities of newly born descendants,  loss of family members and/or conflict between family members.

In 2010, the Museum Anthropology Journal published a special issue that reflected on the challenges and opportunities that the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 presented, twenty years after its enactment. The Act mandated state-funded institutions to return sacred belongings and human ancestors in their collections to the Indigenous American communities that they belonged to or face federal funding cuts. The publication of this special issue prompted North American institutions to review their collections, to ensure they were aligned with the guidelines set out in the Act. The CSUF Museum archaeologists itemised their collections, and set aside belongings that had a provenance of looting, and identifiable descendants who could receive those belongings. The 27 vigango were included in the belongings set aside for return, as they had been stolen and could be traced back to the Mijikenda community. 

Museum staff then contacted Prof. Chapurukha Kusimba [Curator of African Anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago and a Research Associate at the National Museums of Kenya (NMK)] and Dr. Idle Farah [Director General of the NMK] to assist with planning the repatriation. A plan for Prof. Kusimba and Dr. Farah to guide the 27 vigango back to the Mijikenda community, through the NMK in Nairobi, and then the Fort Jesus Museum in Mombasa was made. However, it was not executed, due to CSUF museum’s lack of urgency in the matter.

The museum’s administration then established a repatriation committee. In April 2011, they facilitated the meeting of United States Congressman, Ed Royce, and the Kenyan ambassador to the USA, Honorable Elkanah Odembo, in Washington D.C. They discussed the particulars of the repatriation and decided that a transfer ceremony should be hosted at the CSUF Museum. The 27 vigango would then be transported to the Los Angeles International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya. 

The transfer ceremony was held on 21 November 2011, when CSUF officials and Kenyan consular officers signed documents that handed over the duty of care to the NMK. The 27 vigango were also removed from storage and packed into crates, in preparation for shipment to Mombasa, Kenya. However, the question of how the vigango would be transported, and who would bear the cost for shipment and customs was still unanswered. Deliberations around the logistics of transportation and costs continued for over two years.

On 24 January 2014, the 27 vigango were finally transported to the Los Angeles International Airport, where they were cleared for travel to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya. When officials from the NMK arrived to receive the shipment, they were stunned to be informed that they needed to pay an import tax of $47,000 for the 27 vigango to be released into their care. The tax imposition stemmed from the vigangos’ categorisation as “African art”, and was calculated based on their collective appraised value when donated to the CSUF Museum in December 1991. Although CSUF Museum had transferred money to facilitate transportation to Fort Jesus Museum in Mombasa and the beginnings of return to the Mijikenda community, they had failed to enquire about or make provisions for the import tax. Since neither the CSUF museum nor NMK had the funds to pay the import tax, the 27 vigango were detained at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport storage warehouse until further notice.

Over the next two years, CSUF Museum completely disengaged from repatriating the 27 vigango. Dr. Purity Kiura [then  Director of Antiquities, Sites and Monuments at the NMK] had to now take it upon herself to find a way to circumvent the import tax. She sought to circumvent the import taxation imposed by the Kenya Revenue Authority by arguing that the economic value assigned to the 27 vigango in the USA did not apply, as they were being returned to Kenya because of the spiritual value they had for the Mijikenda community. Mijikenda community members also appealed to their county governors to intervene, and academics and activists from the community gave further voice to these appeals by publishing articles through local media houses. However, the Kenyan Revenue Authority did not budge.

In 2017, museum officials discovered that the 27 vigango were no longer in the airport’s storage house. After a few months of further investigation, it was found that the vigango had been reabsorbed into the illicit trade market.

The 27 vigango have not been traced, and there are no plans to search for them.