[MSN] An American epidemic: refusal to return looted cultural property. This time Kenya. Hampton University continues to hold an African statue nearly three months after receiving a letter from the National Museum of Kenya demanding its return.

[Museum Security Network Mailinglist]

Hampton U. Resists Demand to Return Statue
By Marvin Anderson
Black College Wire

 
Photo credit: Monica L. Udvardy
http://www.blackcollegewire.org/news/060515_hampton-statue/

Kalume Mwakiru cried when Monica L. Udvardy returned to Kenya in 1985 to
give him this photograph of himself with the statues.  

Hampton University continues to hold an African statue nearly three months
after receiving a letter from the National Museum of Kenya demanding its
return. The museum contends the statue was stolen. 

Hampton museum officials say they are still investigating how the
blue-and-white kigango statue was acquired and will not return the statue
until they are convinced it was stolen. Hampton has obtained a letter from
Ernie Wolfe, a prominent African art dealer in Los Angeles, who said he
purchased the statue legitimately. 

Hampton possesses a kigango that originally belonged to Kalume Mwakiru, a
Kenyan villager who died in 1987. His statues were stolen in 1985, about two
years after he erected them. Although there is evidence that the kigango
once belonged to Mwakiru, Hampton officials say they are not sure it was
obtained illegally. 

"There is no question that the statues were stolen," said Monica Udvardy, a
cultural anthropologist and an associate professor at the University of
Kentucky. "This single case illustrates what is a growing social problem." 

Udvardy visited Mwakiru's village in 1985, two years after Mwakiru built and
erected his vigango, the plural form of "kigango." At the time, Udvardy was
working with the Mijikenda people, and she took a picture of him next to the
statues after interviewing him for two hours. 

Mwakiru had vigango built and erected in 1983 to memorialize the deaths of
his brothers, Udvardy said. A kigango is sculpted as part of a Mijikenda
ritual memorializing the spirit of a male who has died, followed by a
celebration. The Mijikenda believe the spirit of the dead would come back to
haunt the family and the land if the kigango were not created. The cost to
pay a sculptor, who must also be of the Mijikenda people, usually runs more
than a Kenyan's annual salary, Udvardy said. 

A kigango is erected in an area where, once complete, it is never to be
moved. 

Days after Udvardy left the village and had the film developed, she returned
to give Mwakiru a copy of the photograph. 

He cried, she said, telling her he had been heartbroken because his
brother's vigango were stolen. He asked Udvardy to promise to find and
return them. 

"Vigango are what we anthropologists call inalienable objects," Udvardy
said. "The equivalent in the United States would be the actual paper the
Declaration of Independence was written on, or the Statue of Liberty." It
wasn't until 1999 that Udvardy found one of Mwakiru's missing vigango.
During an annual meeting of the African Studies Association, Udvardy spotted
what she thought was Mwakiru's kigango in a slide presentation by
association member Linda Giles. Udvardy stood up and interrupted the
presentation. 

"It was one of the uh-huh moments," Udvardy said. "I recognized that statue
and knew it was stolen." 

Once Giles and Udvardy compared and matched slides, they paired up with John
Mitsanze Baya, a Mijikenda curator of the National Museum of Kenya, to find
the other kigango. Together, they went through museum catalogs and
eventually found the second kigango at Hampton University. 

International Business Management Inc., in Culver City, Calif., donated the
kikango to Hampton after purchasing it from the Ernie Wolfe Art Gallery in
Los Angeles. Wolfe said he has been to Africa 48 times and that such
conflicts over ownership are a first for his gallery. He maintained the
statues were not stolen. 

"I stand by where I am," he said. "I did my due diligence." 

Wolfe said he considered the quest to return the kigango a personal crusade
of anthropologists and interpreted the significance of the object
differently. He said the Mijikenda told him vigango were priceless at one
time, but as their culture changed, so did the importance of the vigango. 

"Vigango are a sort of bridge to a modern time in society," Wolfe said. 

Wolfe said the Mijikenda use an agricultural technique called slash and
burn, in which they burn old crops to make new ones. The village remains in
its place until the land becomes unfertile and forces it to move. 

Wolfe said when the villages moved, the vigango remained. A group that did
not recognize the statue would burn it or let it rot. 

On one of his trips to Africa, Wolfe said, he sat around a fire with the
Mijikenda drinking palm wine, trying to learn more about their culture and
beliefs. It was at one such gathering that Wolfe said he learned that these
statues were used before medicine was easily accessible. Now, instead of
praying to the spirits in the statues, people go to a doctor, he said. 

"These things had no value to these people until they had value to others,"
Wolfe said. "They were willing to let them rot in the forest until people
offered money for them." 

After finding one of the vigango that Wolfe had purchased, Udvardy returned
to Kenya in January in search of Mwakiru. She tracked his family to a
mud-wall house with palm-tree ceilings, only to discover that Mwakiru died
in 1987. However, his widow, Kadzo Kalume Mwakiru, was still alive and her
jaw dropped when she saw a picture of the vigango, Udvardy said. 

After speaking with Kalume's family, Phillip Jimbi Katana, the National
Museum of Kenya's director of coastal sites and monuments, wrote to Hampton
and to Illinois State University demanding the return of the vigango on the
basis that they were stolen. Illinois State has agreed to return its
kigango. 

Yuri Rogers Milligan, Hampton's director of university relations, said
Hampton has taken longer to make a decision to be sure that the vigango are
with their proper owners. 

"Museums are guardians," said Milligan. "It's not an ownership game -- it's
about finding the right place. Things like this are priceless." 

Milligan said a university group created to look into the vigango dispute
has contacted the National Museum of Kenya and reported the group's findings
to administrators and trustees, who will deliver the university's final
response. 

Udvardy called the episode an example of neo-imperialism, or a way for the
West to take more from Africa. 

"If you buy these things in the West, you are destroying cultural heritage,"
she said. "They are not only losing their cultural history to the West, they
are losing a part of themself." 

Whatever happens, Wolfe said Hampton should keep the kigango, as a museum in
a learning environment would. 

"I would not return them," he said. "They should be exhibitioned. They
represent how humankind are more alike than different." 


Marvin Anderson, a student at Hampton University, is the incoming editor of
the Script. 

Posted May 15, 2006 

http://www.blackcollegewire.org/news/060515_hampton-statue/