Offer to Return 30 Vigango

Kigango (singular) or vigango (plural) are memorial funerary posts that maintain a perpetual connection between the living and the living dead. It is unknown which families and/or homesteads the 30 vigango were taken from.

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 place of origin of the 30 vigango is not known.

The Mijikenda believe that their supreme spiritual being, Mulungu, does not directly intervene 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, bringing petitions from their living relatives to Mulungu and returning blessings, messages of advice, and warnings to their living relatives.

The 30 vigango are housed at the Fort Jesus Museum (National Museums of Kenya) in Mombasa. They were previously stored at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (DNMS) in Colorado, 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 would steal vigango and supply them to hotels, galleries and tourist shops, which openly displayed them in Mombasa. For them, the monetary value of vigango outweighed the religious and cultural value they had for older members of their communities. 

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

In this instance, actor Gene Hackman and film producer Art Linson donated the 30 vigango to DNMS in 1990. The circumstances under which the vigango were acquired initially are unknown. However, provenance research conducted in 1999 on 294 vigango in North American collections found that all the vigango that Ernie Wolfe III ‘collected from the field’ were stolen before he sold them on the illicit trading market. The 30 Vigango were then stored at the museum.

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 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 2008, the DMNS adopted its Ethics Policy, which sought to ensure its collections and museological approaches and practices complied with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Museum staff identified which human ancestors and belongings in their collection were from indigenous communities. It began consulting with the identified communities of origin – in and outside of North America – about the best method of return. It was during this process that Dr Chip Cowell [Senior Curator in Anthropology] and Dr Stephen Nash [Historian of Science and Archaeologist] linked the 30 vigango in their collection to the Mijikenda community in Kenya. 

From 2008 until 2013, Colwell and Nash made several attempts to contact the National Museums of Kenya, the Kenyan Ambassador to the USA, and American anthropologists researching vigango via email. They hoped one of these contacts could advise them on the protocol for returning the vigango to the Mijikenda community. The details of who the emails were sent to and how often are unknown. However, they did not receive a response from any of their contacts.

In 2013, Colwell came across a community newspaper article on former Councilman Albus Brookes, who had been involved in Denver’s Sister City initiatives with Nairobi. When Colwell contacted Brookes’ offices, he was advised that a delegation from Kenya would be in Denver the following week to discuss a youth exchange programme and trade between the two cities. The representatives from Nairobi City County were invited to visit DMNS, where the repatriation of the 30 vigango was discussed. It was agreed that a handover ceremony would be held, which mirrored the ceremonial protocols of NAGPRA. 

On 19 February 2014, stakeholders from DMNS and Denver City Council and six Kenyan dignitaries, including the Kenyan Ambassador to the USA, participated in a repatriation ceremony. The memorandum of understanding that was signed during the ceremony outlined that the Nairobi City County would hand over the 30 vigango to the National Museums of Kenya, and the National Museums of Kenya would then return the vigango to the indigenous Mijikenda community. 

Based on this agreement, the vigango were crated and transported to the Denver International Airport for air travel on 25 February 2014. Before going forth with the shipment of the vigango, the DMNS representatives were advised that an import tax of $40,000 would need to be paid to release them from the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Kenya. This is because the vigango were categorised as “African art” in DMNS’s catalogue and would be evaluated as highly valuable belongings by Kenyan customs officials. Since the DNMS had not made provisions for this tax, the shipment of the 30 vigango was cancelled, and they were kept at the Denver International Airport’s storage warehouse until further notice.

From 2014 to 2018, Nash attempted to contact Nairobi City County and Sister-City Initiative colleagues to resolve the import tax issue. However, neither one had sway over the Kenyan Revenue Authority. Their eventual non-response to Nash was also a clear position –  as the party who initiated the repatriation, DNMS should be responsible for the import tax that was imposed.

In 2018, 4 years into the 30 vigango being stored at the Denver International Airport, Dr. Purity Kiura [then Director of Antiquities, Sites and Monuments at the National Museums of Kenya] enrolled in a Museum Leadership Course at the Claremont Graduate University in California, USA. Nash was also in attendance. He approached her and, for the first time, informed her of the 30 vigango that had been housed at DMNS, and the predicament that DMNS now faced with them being stored at the Denver International Airport. They discussed the possibilities of having the import tax either waived or lowered so that the 30 vigango could be transported to the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi. Kiura agreed to look into the matter further. 

Upon her return to Kenya, Kiura began looking into local and international legislative frameworks that could circumvent the import tax. She found that the vigango fell outside the scope of the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property of 1970 and the UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects of 1995, as there was no evidence to show the vigango had been removed from Kenya after 1970. More importantly, Kenya had not yet ratified these conventions. She also found that although the Mijikenda community had a right to demand vigango back in terms of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People of 2007, this international cultural property legislation did not trump the protocols of the National Finance Act in place. 

While conducting her research, she learnt that the 27 vigango returned from California State University in Fullerton had re-entered the illicit trade market after being indefinitely detained at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. Fearing that the 30 vigango would meet the same fate at the Denver International Airport, she advised Nash to have the vigango transported back to the DMNS until the issue was resolved.

In March 2019, Kiura found a loophole between the Finance Act of 2018 and the Value Added Tax Act of 2013. The former amended the latter by stating that goods and services imported into the country to implement special government projects were exempt from value-added tax. Since the 30 vigango were being imported into Kenya for the National Museums of Kenya [a government institution] to facilitate their return to the Mijikenda community, they qualified for an exemption from import tax. Based on this, Kiura obtained a letter from the Kenyan Revenue Authority that allowed the vigango to be shipped and delivered into the care of the National Museums of Kenya sans an import tax. 

Upon receipt of the official letter, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science immediately transported the vigango to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi. The National Museums of Kenya received the 30 vigango and held a press conference to announce their arrival. Thereafter, the vigango were transported to Fort Jesus Museum in Mombasa. The goal was for the vigango to be closer to the Mijikenda community and for museum preservation work to begin in the conservation lab.

In October 2019, a formal handover ceremony was held between Stephen Nash (as a representative of the DMNS) and Mijikenda elders in Kaya Fungo, a sacred Mijikenda Forest in Kilifi County. Jimbi Katana, an employee of the National Museums of Kenya and a Mijikenda community member, oversaw the handover. For the Mijikenda elders, the return of the 30 vigango, symbolically represented by the handing over of one Kigango, was a momentous occasion, as it signalled the beginning of the end of a tumultuous period for the community. 

After the handover ceremony, the 30 Vigango were sent back to Fort Jesus Museum for provenance research to be conducted. This process was required to identify the specific Mijikenda sub-tribes and, by extension, the families to which the vigango belong. 

Although the 30 vigango have been returned to a museum in the same vicinity as the Mijikenda community, there have been several challenges in returning the vigango to the community. Mijikenda elders from different sub-tribes have been invited to the museum to support this process, but it has been slow for several reasons. Firstly, there are significant debates around whether the intellectual and museological value of the vigango outweighs their spiritual value. And in turn, whether the museum should be holding the vigango. The Mijikenda community also feels that the repatriation of vigango should be accompanied by reparations, as many families have experienced spiritual sanctions.

This has been seen particularly with the spike of mental health issues in the community over the last twenty years. There is also a split between community elders; some believe the vigango should be reinstalled in the sacred Kaya Fungo forest, while others believe the vigango should be returned to their homesteads. The latter poses a further challenge, as there is no documentation to facilitate the identification of the family to whom a kigango belongs.