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The Tangué is a personalised and artfully decorated ship’s beak that was carved from wood and placed on the bow of the ship of the royal Bele-Bele family. This mystical and sacred belonging symbolises power, particularly the ultimate authority of the King over the water tribes of the Douala kingdom, and is an integral part of socio-cultural and spiritual practices.
Bonaberi (now Hickory Town), in Douala, Cameroon.
The Tangué is intertwined with the political, spiritual and cultural lives of the water tribes of the Douala region. The belonging is passed down from one generation of the Bele-Bele royal family to the next, to signal the common ancestry of the chosen leaders of the Douala community, making it an integral part of enthronement ceremonies.
Tangué is also a conduit for communication between the living and the living dead (ancestors), especially those who were present as marine water spirits. Spiritual rituals such as oaths, cleansings and appeasements are performed through the belonging. The rituals are often performed to prepare for the community’s participation in political, social and cultural activities such as wars, burials and fishing. The involvement of crafts (wo)men in the making of Tangué, and the importance it holds in the community also indicates that what is often categorised as works of African art hold other roles or meaning in African communities.
The Tangué is currently housed at the Museum Fünf Kontinente (Five Continents Museum) in Munich, Germany.
In the 1880s, kings and chiefs in Douala, as well as other communities along the Bight of Biafra, fiercely resisted territorial occupation – first by the British, who failed, and then by the Germans.
On 12 July 1884, German military forces. annexed the Douala region by signing the ‘Germano-Douala’ treaty. King Kum’a Mbappé, also known as Lock Priso, refused to sign the treaty, as it essentially sought to dislocate his people from their land, and turn them into a landless labouring class for the Germans. In retaliation, the Germans sieged Lock Priso’s palace in December 1884, where they looted sacred and cultural belongings and subsequently burnt the royal house to the ground. During this brutal attack, a German colonial officer, Max Buechner seized Tangué.
A year later, Buechner donated the belonging to the Royal Ethnographic Collection (now known as Museum Fünf Kontinente) in Munich, Germany .
Germany’s approach to consolidating colonial administration and rule involved disrupting, destabilising and dismantling the structures of traditional authorities, by capturing, imprisoning and oftentimes killing the leaders of communities in grossly violent manners. The attack on King Kum’a Mbappé was part and parcel of this broader agenda, and the German’s destruction of the royal palace as well as the seizure of Tangué; a symbol of divinely ordained authority for the Bele-Bele family, weakened their leadership position in the Douala community. Tangué has also been absent for use in ceremonies and socio-cultural practices. As a result, the protections and blessings that were derived from this belonging have not been experienced.
In 1961, Prince Kum’a Ndumbe III, grandson of Lock Priso, moved to Germany to further his studies. As a student, and later as an academic and writer permanently resident in Germany, he gathered information, frequented museums and made enquiries about Tangué, in the hopes of locating the sacred belonging. In 1981, while on an academic trip to Munich, Prince Kum’a Ndumbe III saw three pieces or specimens of the Tangué on display at the Museum Fünf Kontinente.
After sighting Tangué, Prince Kum’n Ndumbe III sought to get in touch with the museum staff to establish a working agreement that would lay a concrete foundation for negotiations for the return of the Tangué. To this end, he wrote a letter to Museum Fünf Kontinente demanding the return of the Bele-Bele Kingdom’s belonging, and stating the intention to come to an agreement. Representatives of the museum dismissed his demands, on the basis that Prince Kum’a Ndumbe III did not have proof that he was heir to the Bele-Bele throne, and by extension rightful claimant of the Tangué.
In 1985, in continued pursuit of the Tangué’s return, Prince Kum’a Ndumbe III established an organisation called AfricAvenir Foundation in Bonaberi, Cameroon, where the Bele-bele Kingdom is located. The Foundation exists to ensure that the status of the Tangué as a cultural heritage belonging is reclaimed both physically and legally. Still in existence to this day, its goals have broadened over the years to include advocacy for an African renaissance where development is rooted in the culture and realities of African peoples, and offering support to Africans reinventing and reconstructing the African continent according to African needs, priorities and values.
From 1981 – 1997, Prince Kum’a Ndumbe III also sent numerous letters and emails, each with supporting documentation and evidence that demonstrated rightful ownership of the Tangué. He also held press conferences to publicly demonstrate his position as the rightful representative of the Bele-Bele royal family, and to draw attention to his efforts to return Tangué to his family, to the Bele-Bele Kingdom and to the Douala community. He also visited Museum Fünf Kontinente several times to apply pressure on museum officials to acknowledge his position. The museum authorities remained unsatisfied with the proof of ownership that was provided, and remained unresponsive to Prince Kum’a Ndumbe III’s communications.
On the 8th of January 1998, after nearly 15 years of attempting to prove his position, authorities from Museum Fünf Kontinente responded with an acknowledgement of Prince Kum’a Ndumbe III as the heir to the Bele-Bele throne, and in turn the rightful claimant to the Tangué.
From 1998 – 2015, Prince Kum’a Ndumbe III entered into a protracted negotiation with Museum Fünf Kontinente and German officials regarding the terms and conditions of the return of Tangué. For Prince Kum’a Ndumbe III, the restitution of the Tangué involved the return of the belonging to the Bele Bele Kingdom and the Douala community, as well as compensation for the violence and looting that surrounded its seizure. The compensation, he felt, could take the form of rebuilding the Royal Palace that was burnt down, and investing in AfricAvenir Foundation International, to afford them the opportunity to rebuild African knowledge systems and engage other scholars in this pursuit. The German stakeholders, however, sought to limit their negotiations to repatriation; the physical return of the Tangué to the Cameroonian government. These differing envisioned outcomes, and the unwillingness of either side to budge from their position, resulted in a stalemate in the negotiations.
In 2015, a Prince Kum’a Ndumbe III, began to devise other ways of restituting and reclaiming the community’s ownership of the Tangué. First, a replica of the Tangué was installed in the conference hall at the AfricAvenir Foundation International premises in Bonaberi. Secondly, on 17 August 2015, the Tangué was officially registered as a legal and protected trademark of AfricAvenir, within the European Union and African Union. This meant that AfricAvenir was now the only organisation permitted to use reproductions of Tangué on its official documents; as its intellectual property. This trademark became officially protected by the Organization of African Intellectual Property (OAPI) in Yaounde, Cameroon on 29 September 2015.
In 2016, Museum Fünf Kontinente suddenly announced their intention to engage in talks about the return of the Tangué in May that year. However, it was Paul Mbappé – Paramount Chief of Bonaberi, where the Bele-Bele Kingdom is located, who was invited to represent the community in these discussions. This was a strange choice given that for the last 17 years they had recognised Prince Kum’a Ndumbe III as the heir to the Bele-Bele throne, and in turn the rightful owner of Tangué, and representative for the Kingdom.
On 13 May 2016, a new set of negotiations for the return of the Tangué was launched with Paramount Chief Paul Mbappé. These negotiations were also eventually stalled, as doubts around who the rightful representative for the Bele-Bele Kingdom was were raised again.
As it became clearer that Museum Fünf Kontinente was leveraging the dispute of leadership within the Douala community to their advantage to reopen the question of rightful ownership, and in essence further prolong the restitution process, a meeting was called. On 26 February 2019, the Bele-Bele extended families, academics, students, journalists, chiefs and notables, government officials and other public and civil society organizations in Cameroon met to offer their opinion on who the rightful owner of the Tangué is.
It was decided that since the Tangué was King Lock Priso’s belonging at the time it was seized, and Prince Kum’a Ndumbe III was his direct descendant, he was the legitimate successor of the King, and the rightful owner of the Tangué. The meeting was documented through media coverage and meeting minutes. These were packaged and sent to Museum Fünf Kontinente to finalise the issue of ownership, and move forward with the discussion of restitution.
On 25 May 2022, at a cabinet meeting, the President of Cameroon, Paul Biya, announced that an inter-ministerial committee would be established in the Ministry of Culture to coordinate and finalise the restitution demands of various communities. He further stated that a National Strategy for the Repatriation of Cameroonian Artefacts would be drafted, to support the formulation of restitution policies in the country. The establishment of the Interministerial Committee for the Repatriation of Cultural Property Illegally Exported Abroad cemented the government’s commitment to restitution, and allowed for greater negotiating power in dialogue efforts with German museums.
Between October and November 2023, a commission of key stakeholders from the Cameroonian government visited public and private museums in Germany. The aim was to identify which European museum collections had the Cameroonian belongings and human ancestors that were already being demanded by various communities in the country; including the Tangué. The stakeholders on the trip hoped to initiate open dialogue between both countries to negotiate the restitution of the identified belongings and ancestors.
By 2024, dialogue between both governments was ongoing. It included discussions with the Cameroonian ambassador to Germany, His Excellency Ambassador Victor Ndocki, German museum directors, Federal Foreign Office representatives, and researchers.
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The Cameroonian and German governments are engaged in a restitution dialogue. The Tangué remains in the possession of Museum Fünf Kontinente while the terms and conditions of its restitution are being negotiated.
Dr. Ngome Elvis Nkome, who is a lecturer in the Department of History and African Studies at the University of Buea in Cameroon and holds a PhD in Economic and Socio-Cultural History, conducted the research for this case study. Prior to joining the third cohort of case study researchers, he contributed to provenance research on Cameroonian belongings in the Max von Stetten’s Collection at Museum Fünf Kontinente. Through this experience, he was able to learn, discuss and share insights into restitution, particularly from a Cameroonian perspective. His existing knowledge of history and heritage issues in post-colonial Africa, his engagement with the contemporary restitution landscape in Cameroon, as well as the networks he forged in Cameroon and Germany through the provenance research project, aided him in capturing this restitution journey in relation to the myriad contextualising circumstances that influenced its progression.
Ngome used desktop research, oral interviews with staff members at Museum Fünf Kontinente and Douala community members, and email correspondence to develop the data for this case study. This enabled him to draw on multiple perspectives to inform the narrative that is shared in this profile.
While the literature was highly informative for the research process, Dr. Ngome encountered some language barriers. People who are knowledgeable about the restitution case in Cameroon, including Prince Kum’a Ndumbe III, are mostly French speaking, and the documentation that exists at Museum Fünf Kontinente is in a dialect of German that even some native German speakers are not able to translate. The lack of common language across the people he gathered resources from made the process of triangulation extremely difficult. Although he organised a trip to Bonaberi, he arrived at a time where Prince Kum’a Ndumbe III was critically responding to Benedicte Savoy’s recent publication, Atlas of Absence; an inventory of the +40 000 Cameroonian belongings that are held in German museums.
As a result he was not able to conduct a one-on-one interview with Prince Kum’a Ndumbe III – however, he was referred to his book; RESTITUEZ A L’AFRIQUE SES OBJETS DE CULTE ET D’ART! – Reconstituons notre mémoire collective africaine ! (Give Africa back its objects of worship and art! Let’s Rebuild our Collective African Memory!) which documents this restitution journey in detail. Some of the nuances of conducting research within African contexts also emerged, such as requests for gifts or fees in exchange for the sharing of knowledge or first-hand accounts. He was able to navigate through this challenge because of similar prior experiences. Some positive reflections of his journey include the realisation that many African activists are progressing in demanding the restitution of African belongings and human ancestors. This is despite sometimes non-supportive responses or actions from postcolonial governments, and the lengthy process of restitution.
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 of June 2024.