Return of 23 Cultural belongings to Namibia.

Case Study

Return of 23 Cultural belongings to Namibia.

At a Glance

Status

Return

Origin

Namibia

Researcher

Katrine Hoandi Vigne

Belonging

Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures (CCPECF) is a restitution project which was undertaken in Namibia from 2019 – 2024. The project was centred around 23 cultural belongings, which were selected from a collection of +/-1400 cultural belongings, on the basis of their rarity, ability to travel well (fragility, arsenic poisoning etc), cultural, historical and aesthetic significance, as well as their connection to the history of Namibian fashion.

Place of Origin

The 23 cultural belongings are from various communities in Namibia, and were selected to represent the various cultural groupings that make up contemporary Namibian society. The specific communities of origin are iteratively being determined through provenance research.

Significance

The collective significance of the 23 belongings is the (hi)stories they embody around the everyday life of Namibians during the German colonial era. For example, the aesthetic elements of many of the belongings indicate that multiple cultural groupings influenced or contributed to their making, suggesting that socio-cultural exchanges were common in pre-colonial Namibia.

Current Location

The 23 cultural belongings are currently under the curatorship of the National Museum of Namibia in Windhoek, Namibia. They have been released for exhibition at the Museum of Namibian Fashion and the National Art Gallery of Namibia. They were previously housed at the Ethnological Museum of Berlin in Germany.

Circumstances of Removal

According to the Ethnological Museum of Berlin’s records, the 23 belongings were removed from Namibia between 1884 – 1919. This period encompasses the early years of German occupation of Herero and Nama land, the subsequent genocide of 80% of Herero and 50 % of Nama people by Germans, and the years of German colonial rule that followed thereafter. The specific details around the looting of each of the belongings is not known.

Impact of Loss

Many Namibian belongings have been accessioned into sites outside of the region’s borders. The narratives that have been assigned to these belongings have also been created without reference to the stories, meaning and function that they carried for that generation of Namibians. This has had a number of implications for present day Namibians, and more specifically the cultural and heritage sector in the region.

In 1990, the Museums Association of Namibia (MAN) was established as a non-governmental organisation, and in 2002 it was mandated, by the Namibian government, to facilitate museum development across the country.  This mandate has largely been frustrated by the lack of Namibian belongings in the country, and the major knowledge gaps that have been left behind by colonial pillage and plunder.

MAN’s mandate includes the return of expatriated cultural belongings, local and international network building, fundraising for and implementing initiatives that develop soft and hard infrastructure for museums, education, and increasing public – particularly youth – engagement. Thus, the restitution of belongings is deeply entangled with the broader objective of growing Namibia’s museum and heritage sector.

Chronology of Restitution Efforts

In 2014, The Africa Accessioned Network; a multi-country initiative funded by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) was initiated. The 3 year long project sought to create an inventory of ethnographic collections from four African countries (Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe) held in museums in four European countries (Finland, Germany, Sweden and the UK).  The objective was to map institutions that held Namibian belongings, and to establish connections and networks that could support their discovery and recovery. Although this initiative did not yield many returns, it did strengthen connections between Namibian and European museum professionals; further intertwining MAN’s mandate of return with that of network building and museum and heritage sector development.

In 2017, off the back of the network that was built through Africa Accessioned Network, Dr Jeremy Silvester [Director of MAN], was invited to visit the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. He was accompanied by a handful of German colleagues – Jonathan Fine (Head of Collections and curator of West African collections at the Ethnological Museum of Berlin), Julia Binter (research associate for postcolonial provenance research at the Ethnological Museum of Berlin) and Dr. Larissa Förster (German Lost Art Foundation). During this visit, he was shown a collection of +1400 Namibian belongings. Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures – a multi-pronged restitution project was collectively conceptualised shortly thereafter. The broad objectives of this collaborative project between Namibian and German institutions and stakeholders were to:

  1. Return and reconnect belongings  to a Namibian public and;
  2. Enhance the Namibian museum sector.

This project paved the way for 23 cultural belongings to be returned to Namibia, and for a number of MAN’s mandates to be partially realised.

In 2018, funding was received from Gerda Henkel Stiftung to implement the project. The contribution of 700,000 Euros was utilised for collaborative provenance research, the founding and launch of the Museum of Namibian Fashion, infrastructural improvements to the National Museum of Namibia, job creation, capacity building and skills development in the museum sector, academic scholarships, academic, community and artistic research, and public engagement.

The project kicked off in 2019, with collaborative provenance research, and cultural belongings selection. A handful of heritage experts from Namibia travelled to Berlin to conduct the research with German partners. Through intensive consultations with committees formed in Namibia, and several workshops with community members, the number of belongings chosen for return from the Ethnological Museum of Berlin was whittled down from +1400 to 79, and finally to 23. The 23 belongings were selected on the basis of rarity, ability to travel well (fragility, arsenic poisoning etc), cultural, historical and aesthetic significance, as well as their connection to the history of Namibian fashion. The final criterion was also in consideration of the fact that the returned cultural belongings would be central to founding the Museum of Namibian Fashion. Stakeholders in the selection process intentionally excluded belongings that may have been looted during the genocide of Ovaherero and Nama peoples, as this could disrupt ongoing restitution and reparations negotiations between these communities, and the Namibian and German governments. 

The development of the Museum of Namibian Fashion happened in tandem with the provenance research and cultural belongings selection. The decision to establish a fashion-focused museum stemmed from a survey that was conducted prior to the initiation of the project, where Namibia’s youth indicated that they would be more interested in visiting museums if there were collections/exhibitions about music, fashion and environmentalism. Decolonising the museum space was at the heart of the development and curatorial discussions, which took place through workshops with representatives from museums, academia, the fashion sector, and various communities. The intention was to create a minimalist space that afforded ample opportunity for communities to become the curators, and to implement an outreach programme that would extend the work of the museum beyond the four walls, and beyond the immediate surrounding environment. 

COVID-19 disrupted much of the work that was planned, however, by November 2021, learnings from working together on provenance research were shared in a film, Tracing German-Namibian Collaborations, and in an exhibition at the Humboldt Forum in Germany. Six months later, in May 2022, the cultural belongings were returned to Namibia on “permanent loan”, and in June 2022, the Namibian Museum of Fashion – the soon to be home of the 23 cultural belongings – opened its physical and virtual doors to the public.

Amidst these two major activities, strides were also made towards the skills development, knowledge production and infrastructure development goals of the project, which spoke back to MAN’s broader objectives as an organisation. In 2020, two documentalists were trained and hired to create a digital heritage database of the ethnographic collection at the National Museum of Namibia, and one conservator was trained and hired to implement preventive conservation and conservation techniques for a range of materials, documentation and photography at the National Museum of Namibia. Shortly before the return of the 23 cultural belongings, the conservator received further training in Berlin to bolster her knowledge and skills in conservation techniques. Interns were also hired by MAN and the National Museum of Namibia to expose young people to all the ongoing work, and training workshops were held for existing museum workers.

In 2020, two scholarships for a Masters in History (Material Culture) at the University of Namibia were awarded, to boost local provenance research and data collection capacities. In 2022, four scholarships were awarded for a Postgraduate Diploma in Heritage Conservation and Management, to support the development of conservation and curatorial skills and knowledge in Namibia. 

In 2023 focus pivoted to the second aspect of the project, “Envisioning Creative Futures”. Ndeenda Shivute-Nakapunda [Chief Curator at the National Arts Gallery of Namibia] and Golda !Ha-Erios [Senior Curator at the National Museum of Namibia] were able to secure supplementary funding from Heinrich Böll Foundation to undertake The Artistic Research Communal Knowledge (ARCK) project. 

In conceptualising the project, they, along with Ndapewoshali Ilunga [Director of MAN], noted that the returned cultural belongings had limited to no local knowledge attached to them, and that a more critical discourse around the meaning and impact of restitution for everyday Namibian people needed to be engaged with. ARCK, thus, sought to “unlock” the 23 cultural belongings, and bring them into conversation with the public. With guidance from the National Art Gallery of Namibia, five artists worked collaboratively with communal knowledge keepers, to create interpretive works of art that connected the belongings to the silences and gaps in Namibia’s historiography and cultural heritage.

Curators from the National Museum of Namibia focused on recovering and collating intangible knowledge. They travelled across the country, hosting workshops with communal knowledge holders, where they shared photographs and the information they had, and listened and learned from communities. The project culminated in an exhibition, Reconnecting with Returned Cultural Belongings  at the National Art Gallery of Namibia, where the 23 cultural belongings were exhibited alongside the artistic interpretations. The intention was to create a space and opportunity where contemporary Namibians could begin to reconnect with their belongings and their stories.

Throughout the CCPECF project, network building and public engagement remained key features of all the activities. The network that has formed around MAN, both locally and internationally, was leveraged for input and participation throughout the project. There were also multiple avenues created for people outside the museum and heritage sector to engage with the project. These invitations for people who were interested to get involved took the form of open calls for participation in workshops, arts and logo competitions, and extensive public communication via television, radio and social media. 

Current Status

Return

In 2024, just prior to the exhibition at the National Art Gallery of Namibia, the status of the belongings changed to “permanently returned”. At the exhibition, the Directorate of the Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture pledged funding towards the cultural heritage sector. A reflective assessment of learnings from the project is due for publication in 2025, along with a documentary, which will be aired on NBC Namibia.

Contents

Katrine Hoandi Vigne

Case Study Researcher

Katrine Hoandi Vigne

Katrine Hoandi Vigne is a Namibian-Danish heritage practitioner. In  2018, she undertook a Master of Arts in Sustainable Heritage Management at the Aarhus University in Denmark. The focus of her dissertation, “Restitution of a whip and Bible – A postcolonial story of museum restitution”, was the contentious return of Hendrik Witbooi’s Whip and Bible to Namibia. As part of her Masters programme she took up a year long internship at the Museums Association of Namibia.

At the time, 23 cultural belongings were being returned to Namibia, as part of a five year long restitution project called Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envision Creative Futures. She is in community with the close knit network of Namibian arts, culture and heritage practitioners who drove the dialogues, and implemented the experiments and outputs of this project.

Methodology and Field Experience

This research was conducted during the final year of the project, at a time when the Museums Association of Namibia (MAN) was sharing the work that had been done, the milestones that had been achieved, and the possibilities for the future, with Namibian and German stakeholders. Katrine was able to conduct oral interviews with people who had led and participated in the various strands of the project over the last five years, as well as engage in participatory observation in the public debates that surrounded the sharing sessions.

She also worked with MAN’s archive of annual reports, and media publications that reported on the public facing events and engagements that had been undertaken as part of the project. She found that people were enthusiastic to speak about their experiences, and reflect on the project in frank and open ways. They were also willing to point her towards other people who would have deeper knowledge about an aspect of the restitution project that they were not clear on, or had not been a part of.

However, she also found that there is pervading mistrust of researchers, particularly amongst communities that have had information extracted from them, and most people preferred to speak in an informal setting, where they could simply tell their stories, as opposed to responding to prescribed interview questions. It is largely through these more relaxed moments of exchange that she was able to better understand the contextual environment that impacted decisions.

Duration of research:

This research data was gathered as part of the third case study research cohort, from March – June 2024. The information in this case study profile reflects the status of this restitution case as at June 2024.

Return of 23 Cultural belongings to Namibia.

Return of 23 Cultural belongings to Namibia.

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