Throughout the 1980s, vigango, sacred wooden memorial statues, were stolen from Kenya, sold to art dealers and eventually found their way into tourist shops and museums.
Now, as part of ongoing efforts to recover the stolen cultural artifacts, officials from the Illinois State Museum and other museums and universities will visit Nairobi this week for a ceremony to recognize the vigango’s return to National Museums of Kenya.
Sometimes as tall as seven feet, the vigango is often erected in front of a homestead in memory of a male elder in the Mijikenda community who has died. Memories are not meant to be moved.
“These objects are sacred and cannot be taken away from the people who created them,” Brooke Morgan, a curator of anthropology at the museum, said in a statement. “The separation of vigango from their rightful owners harms the spiritual well-being of the entire community.”
Community members revere the statues and often associate misfortunes such as disease, drought and crop failure with their absence, said Linda Giles, a former professor of anthropology at Illinois State University who has researched Mijikenda. , among other coastal communities.
Museums around the world still hold and display stolen items, however a UNESCO treaty in 1970 stopping the illicit trade in cultural artifacts and a growing awareness of repatriation, which supports the return of artifacts to their home countries.
However, as repatriation continues to be a point of discussion and as institutions that haven’t done so face increasing scrutiny, more are beginning what can be a lengthy process to return items.
Taking artifacts is the beginning of an erasure of a country’s religion and culture, said Veronica Waweru, a lecturer in African studies at Yale and an archaeologist doing fieldwork in Kenya.
“If you can’t see something, you’re likely to forget it,” says Dr. Waweru. “Culture must be preserved. If it is not done and maintained, you will lose it.”
These sacred connections are why curators like Dr. Morgan of the Illinois State Museum that these artifacts should be returned to museums.
“We just don’t have the right to them,” said Dr. Morgan, who was part of the team that returned the vigango. “They represent a spirit.”
Even after museums decide to return artifacts, they have to cut through a lot of red tape to do so, Dr. Morgan. When Dr. started working Morgan at the Illinois State Museum in 2018, he was told that returning the statues was a priority.
However, the museum was stopped for a while because the recipients would face excessive fees. Artifacts are charged upon entry into the country because they are considered art.
For guidance, Dr. Morgan, the museum looked to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, which has been in the process of returning about 30 vigango to its own collection for years. This would leave the recipient facing a $40,000 import tariff, Colorado NPR station KUNC reported in 2020.
In June 2022, the Illinois museum returned the 37 vigangos after two years of planning and coordination and after it secured a lower fee for the memorials, which are taxed as cultural artifacts rather than art.
For now, the National Museums of Kenya will hold the statues because it is not clear who specifically owns them, said Dr. Morgan. The National Museums of Kenya did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Determining who artifacts belong to before they are taken is often difficult, said Dr. Giles.
In 2003, Dr. Giles and Monica Udvardy, a researcher at the University of Kentucky, have tracked more than 300 vigango in American museums, said Dr. Giles. More have been found since then.
said Dr. Giles who encouraged him to see more museums returning artifacts to their home countries.
“It’s taking a while, but it’s catching on,” he said. “Museums are deciding they shouldn’t have them.”
