Bonaventure-Ndikung-UK - Cópia

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Those
The very strange thing about choking is that one can choke
even while eating the most delicious of foods out there. Maybe,
especially with such foods, as the greed to devour that delicacy
rapidly – with little focus on mastication, more on consuming –
might lead to the diversion of a piece from its track towards Who Bonaventure Soh
Are
the oesophagus into the trachea... Bejeng Ndikung
The institution of the ethnological museum or world museum
Dead
seems to be in the midst of a serious crisis of choking. The deli-
cacies that most of these museums have acquired, which is to
say co-opted, which is to say ingested, seem to have collectively
missed the track to the oesophagus and got stuck in the respira-
tory tract. They have been stuck there for as long as the history Are On the Maintenance of
Supremacy, the Ethnological
Not
of mass collections, acquisitions and looting, for as long as the
ruthless and ongoing extraction of cultural property has occurred Museum and the Intricacies
in the former colonies outside of Europe. of the Humboldt Forum
A twelve-act essay on the maintenance of supremacy, the ethno-

logical Museum and the intricacies of the Humboldt Forum.
Ever
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung was born in 1977 in Yaoundé, Cameroon.
He is an independent art curator, art critic, author and biotechnologist. He is
Gone
founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary Berlin and editor-
in-chief of SAVVY Journal for critical texts on contemporary African art. He was
associate professor at Muthesius University Kiel, and is currently guest pro-
fessor in curatorial studies at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. He was curator-
at-large for documenta 14, and was a guest curator of the 2018 Dak’Art
Biennale in Senegal. As part of the Miracle Workers Collective, he will curate
Finnish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019.
Archive B ooks AB pamphlet 1

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Those
Who Bonaventure Soh
Are
Bejeng Ndikung
Dead
Are On the Maintenance of
Not Museum and the Intricacies

of the Humboldt Forum
Ever
Gone
AB pamphlet 1
Act I
The very strange thing about choking is that one can choke even
while eating the most delicious of foods out there. Maybe, especially
with such foods, as the greed to devour that delicacy rapidly –
with little focus on mastication, more on consuming – might lead
to the diversion of a piece from its track towards the oesophagus
into the trachea. In the process of choking, a tender prawn would
block the upper airway and prevent oxygen from entering the
lungs; within four to ten minutes the lack of oxygen flow to the
brain would lead from a reversible to an irreversible brain death,
if no one comes to your rescue. When the banality of breathing
is obstructed, death is imminent.
Let us afford ourselves the luxury of making a couple of supposi-

tions related by analogy to choking…

say co-opted, which is to say ingested – usually under the most
dubious of conditions, ranging from blatant looting to petty
theft,1 blackmail and acquisition for little money, preying on the
greed and naivety of some sellers, in the best spirit of predatory
capitalism – including historical and ritual sculptures, fabrics,
artworks and artefacts of all kinds, human skulls and skeletons,
over the course of the history of ethnological museums, seem to
1
For instance, as reported by Michel Leiris in his description of the
French-led Mission ethnographique et linguistique Dakar-Djibouti in
his travel journal, Phantom Africa (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2017).
(3)
have collectively missed the track to the oesophagus and got stuck
in the respiratory tract. Actually, they have been stuck there for
as long as the history of mass collections, acquisitions and loot-
ing, for as long as the ruthless and ongoing extraction of cultural
property has occurred in the former colonies outside of Europe.
In the case of the Museum für Völkerkunde Berlin-Dahlem, this
has been since its foundation in 1873 and its opening in 1886.
The coughing caused by the choking throes of the ethnological

museum / world museum / universal museum is becoming loud
and blaring, and while some people are dashing off in a helter-
skelter panic, others are running to slap the ethnological museum
on the back – or punch it beneath the diaphragm – with the
hope of rescuing it at this late stage of choking. But just like in
every choking situation, rescue is only possible if the delicate
morsel blocking the windpipe is spat out.
(4)
Ac t I I
These hits and punches have come in a multitude of forms and

with varying intensities. Since the summer of 2017, particularly,
they haven’t stopped, and while momentum is growing, optimism
is also dwindling as time passes by. In that blessed July of 2017,
as the prominent French historian, professor at TU Berlin and
Collège de France, Bénédicte Savoy stepped out of the blue onto
the pages of the Süddeutsche Zeitung to vent her frustrations and
raise serious allegations against the Prussian Cultural Heritage
Foundation (Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, SPK) and Berlin
Humboldt Forum’s lack of provenance research, lack of autonomy,
dearth of transparency, inadequate scientific prowess and general
irresponsibility, I was sure that this blow to the back was one to
reckon with.2 A blow that could either thrust the blockage out
of the windpipe, if heeded, or sound the ground for demise, if
ignored. In this famous interview, Savoy lamented that the
Humboldt Forum was like Chernobyl, a comparison which drew
venom from the founding directorate, SPK President Hermann
Parzinger and art historian Horst Bredekamp, as well as from the
former British Museum and current Humboldt Forum director
Neil MacGregor.3 Beyond the polemics the interview brought
2
Bénédicte Savoy, ‘Das Humboldt-Forum ist wie Tschernobyl’,
Die Süddeutsche Zeitung, 20 July 2017, http://www.sueddeutsche.de/
kultur/benedicte-savoy-ueber-das-humboldt-forum-das-humboldt-
forum-ist-wie-tschernobyl-1.3596423?reduced=true, (accessed 10
July 2018).
3
Christiane Peitz, ‘Kunsthistorikerin Savoy: “Da herrscht totale
Sklerose”’, Der Tagesspiegel, 20 July 2017, https://www.tagesspiegel.de/
kultur/streit-ums-humboldt-forum-kunsthistorikerin-savoy-da-herrscht-
to-%20tale-sklerose/20092228.html, (accessed 10 July 2018).
(5)
with it, one could finally hear from someone, who once had the
privilege of being an insider, and who had once thought it possible
to change things from within, step out and reveal to us that the
within is just as much of a fiction as those on the outside imagined
it would be. The revelation that all the discourse about prove-
nance and multiperspectivity, all those aurally charming concepts
like ‘shared heritage’, were mere slogans, hashtags, pop political
bling bling, came as less of a surprise.
While further jabs here and there followed, the next full blow
came from a rather unexpected source. In November 2017, French
President Emmanuel Macron gave a speech at the University of
Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso stating that: ‘African heritage must
be highlighted in Paris, but also in Dakar, in Lagos, in Cotonou.’
He went on to add: ‘In the next five years, I want the conditions
to be met for the temporary or permanent restitution of African
heritage to Africa.’4 The world since then has gained another
temporal annotation or demarcation, namely the pre-Macron-
Ouaga age and the post-Macron-Ouaga age. In celebration of
Macron’s call and in critique of the German context, Dr. Kwame
Opoku noted that ‘German officialdom is indeed at a loss; they
do not realize that in this post Ouagadougou period, the old
arguments and methods are no longer applicable. The only choice
available is to keep up with Macron or to out-macron Macron;
they can either follow the steps of the bold and imaginative
French leader or take a step ahead of the Élysée: i.e. implement
some of the implications of the Ouagadougou Declaration.
4
Annalisa Quinn, ‘After a Promise to Return African Artifacts,
France Moves Toward a Plan’, The New York Times, 6 March 2018,
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/arts/design/france-restitution-
african-artifacts.html, (accessed 10 July 2018).
(6)
They could do this, e.g. by returning without any further delay or

discussion some of the 508 or more Benin artefacts they have
been holding in the Ethnological Museum, Berlin since 1897.’5
Another blow aimed at forcing the blockage out of the windpipe.
Now the choking persists and the coughing is becoming desper-
ately tedious, and every ounce of air a battle. With the open letter
initiated by Berlin Postkolonial,6 signed by artists, activists and
intellectuals, and addressed to Chancellor of Germany Angela
Merkel, forcing her to take a stance on looted art and artefacts in
German museums, as well as the appointment of Bénédicte Savoy
and Senegalese writer and economist Felwine Sarr as consultants
for the repatriation of African artefacts held in French museums,
pressure is mounting.
5
Kwame Opoku, ‘Parzinger’s Cri De Coeur: Genuine Plea For Un/unesco
Assistance Or Calculation To Delay Restitution Of Artefacts?’, Modern
Ghana, 24 January 2018, https://www.modernghana.com/news/830590/
parzingers-cri-de-coeur-genuine-plea-for-ununesco-assista.html, (accessed
10 July 2018).
6
Berlin Postkolonial e.V. is a non-governametal organization founded in
2007 that seeks to confront Germany’s colonial past and critically examine
colonial history in its global dimension through numerous initiatives.
(7)
(8)
Ac t I I I
while eating the most delicious of foods out there. To diagnose
the choking, one might have to look at hubris. There is a certain
arrogance of strength and greatness that would restrain one from
pleading for help even if one were at the threshold of the yonder.
Even when one is choking and air is tight. The kind of condescen-
sion not only for the other, but also for oneself, masked under the
guise of power. The power that typically accompanies and emanates
from patriarchy. The hubris which smells of the debris of colonial-
ity or the longing for a time gripped by the claws of the colonial
enterprise. When Paul Gilroy wrote in After Empire: Melancholia
or Convivial Culture that the inclination to romanticise colonial
times reveals itself in our contemporary as ‘an unhealthy and
destructive post-imperial hungering for renewed greatness’,7
he could just as well have been writing an essay on the Humboldt
Forum. It is this hunger for greatness that urged the rebuilding
of a former Prussian Palace in the middle of Berlin. This could
be held as a masterclass on the reconstruction, the rewriting of
history through architecture: the one-to-one reimagination of
the Hohenzollern residence, whose foundations were laid in
1443; reconstructed around 1700 as a baroque residence; demol-
ished after the Second World War; restructured from 1973 as
the Palace of the Republic, in which the People’s Chamber of
the German Democratic Republic (GDR) met, but which was
also a ‘place of happiness and sociability’ for citizens; shut down
7
Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture (London
and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 331.
(9)
after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and from 1998 to 2008 gradually
demolished to make space for this rebuilding of the palace.8
Perhaps this wouldn’t be a problem if this building and the insti-
tution it represents didn’t symbolise a manifold erasure of histories
and an exultation of monarchial and imperial systems.
It is not unusual to hear that after the fall of the Wall and the
reunification of Germany, West Germany usurped and moved
on to fully replace East Germany. Every effort was made to wipe
out a system deemed retrograde and to implement a capitalist
democratic system befitting the twenty-first century that lay ahead.
Not only did the people of the former GDR lose, expeditiously,
their social, economic and political structures and ways of life, they
also lost their bearings, as their street names were changed, monu-
ments were contested, political figures chastised, identity questioned
and shamed, and history challenged, in an effort to erase the com-
munist past. This – what is considered by many as a takeover of the
GDR by the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) – is at the root
of a lot of frustration in the Eastern part of Germany today, which
has led to proto-fascist sentiments, a radical shift to the right, and
xenophobic attacks on foreigners, who have become the scapegoats
of both the political system and the ‘besorgte Bürger’. Director of the
Berliner Festspiele Thomas Oberender, ruminating on why the
Alternative für Deutschland (AfD or ‘Alternatives for Germany’
party) became so successful in the former GDR region, stated:
Thirty years after the fall of the Wall, Germany is building a

Humboldt Forum to bring Humboldtian surveys of the world
8
Truc Vu Minh, ‘Tagung: Ein öffentlicher Ort. Berliner Schloss – Palast
der Republik – Humboldt Forum’, Research Center Sanssouci Für Wissen
und Gesellschaft, 19 September 2016, https://recs.hypotheses.org/718,
(accessed 10 July 2018) my translation.
(10)
in line with German colonial history. For this the Palace of the
Republic was demolished and in its place nothing reminds one
of it. How does one reflect on this inner German colonialism?
This national ‘roof damage’, does it imply that there is nothing
left to worry about regarding the history of the GDR, except
the deaths at the Wall and the Stasi? What remains of the
GDR is a reminder of victims and perpetrators, of injustice
and failure and misbelief, this is the whole truth.9
Architecture as tool for the erasure of history – or, construction

as eraser. The destruction of the Palace of the Republic as one
coordinate in the tradition of tabula rasa urbanism.10 Tabula rasa
and Wiederaufbau (reconstruction) as means of maintaining what
Aníbal Quijano calls the coloniality of power.
9
Arno Orzessek, ‘Humboldt Forum statt Palast der Republik’, Deutsch-
landfunk Kultur, 27 September 2017, http://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/
kulturpresseschau.media.fe4c31b0b0d0521ea48a732768d73078.pdf,
(accessed 10 July 2018) my translation. The german idiom ‘damaged roof ’
is used to refer to someone suffering from mental problems.
10
‘The demolition of the Palast der Republik in 2008 is rooted in the tra-
dition of tabula rasa urbanism. Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin for Paris (1922-
25) and also Oswald Mathias Ungers’ idea of a green urban archipelago in
Berlin (1977) are the artistically outstanding urban models with a history
of city planning that includes demolition, new building and reconstruction:
urbanism as curatorial practice that views buildings as objects on display and
the city itself as an exhibition. The Plan Voisin explicitly made room also for
historical buildings; once historical monuments had fallen victim to the
tabula rasa approach, they could, according to Le Corbusier, be rebuilt at any
other random location in Paris. In his urban archipelago Ungers planned—
subsequent to the destruction of entire city neighborhoods—to reconstruct
historical architectural projects unrealized until today.’ Stephan Trüby,
Heiner Mühlmann, and Wilfried Kuehn, ‘Display Architecture’, Displayer
03, 2009, 247–257, http://kuehnmalvezzi.com/media/publikationen/
Disp03.pdf, (accessed 10 July 2018).
(11)
On the other hand, the rebuilding of this palace in which objects

and subjects – war booty and otherwise – from all over the non-
West will be displayed and framed under the auspices of Humboldt
must also be seen as a re-membering, as in re-piecing together as
well as reminiscing about, and as a reinstituting of a historical
era of Prussian greatness. This greatness was also characterised
by the Brandenburg-Prussian endeavours to set up colonies on
the West African coast in the seventeenth to early eighteenth
centuries. With the establishment of the Kurbrandenburg Navy
around 1676 and the Brandenburg African Company (BAC) in
1680, the Great Elector Friedrich Wilhelm sent commercial and
military vessels to set up forts and colonies in West Africa. The
frigate Morian reached the Guinea coast in January 1681 and
facilitated the building of a fort on the land of the Ahanta peo-
ple on the coast of present-day Ghana, as well as commercial
posts for the trading of gold, pepper, ivory and people as slaves.
So did Brandenburg-Prussia enter the transatlantic slave trade,
selling an estimated 15,000 to 24,000 Africans in the years
between 1680 and 1717 over 124 trade journeys. It should be
noted that approximately 10 to 15 percent of these human re-
sources did not survive the sheer brutality and harsh conditions
of these trades. King of Prussia, Friedrich I continued the colo-
nial endeavour after the death of his father the ‘Great Elector’ in
1688, but later sold Prussia’s colonies to the Dutch West India
Company in 1717.11
11
Elisabeth Nechutnys, ‘Bradenburg’s Colonial Past’, Postcolonial Potsdam,
May 2014, https://postcolonialpotsdam.wordpress.com/2014/05/27/
brandenburgs-colonial-past/, (accessed 10 July 2018).
(12)
Ac t I V
So, what does it mean to rebuild a Prussian base of power, name it

after the brothers Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, fashion
it as the world centre for culture and cultural dialogue housing
works from the Ethnological Museum of Berlin and the Museum
of Asian Art? Did this provoke the choking? How did these arts
and artefacts, objects and subjects get into these collections in
the first place? And what does it mean to have one of the found-
ing directors, Horst Bredekamp, claim openly – as one could hear
in Lorenz Rollhäuser’s ‘Haus der Weißen Herren: Humboldt
Forum, Shared Heritage und der Umgang mit dem Anderen’
(House of White Men: Humboldt Forum, Shared Heritage and
Dealing with the Other)12 – that unlike other European cities
like London, Brussels or Paris, Berlin did not collect colonially?
Kwame Opoku have published numerous essays such as ‘Benin
to Berlin Ethnologisches Museum: Are Benin Bronzes Made
in Berlin?’, discussing the colonial contexts and dubious means
through which too many of these ‘objects’ were stolen, sold or
conned out of the African continent or other parts of the world,
and found themselves in European and North American museums.13
12
Lorenz Rollhäuser, ‘Haus der Weißen Herren: Humboldt Forum,
Shared Heritage und der Umgang mit dem Anderen’, Deutschlandfunk
Kultur, 23 September 2017, http://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/
raubkunst-im-humboldt-forum-haus-der-weissen-herren.958.de.html?
dram:article_id=391520, (accessed 10 July 2018).
13
Kwame Opoku, ‘Benin to Berlin Ethnologisches Museum: Are
Benin Bronzes Made In Berlin?’, Modern Ghana, 13 February 2008,
https://www.modernghana.com/news/157501/1/benin-to-berlin-
ethnologisches-museum-are-benin-br.html, (accessed 10 July 2018).
(13)
Bredekamp’s comments also stand in stark contrast to what

Richard Kandt, resident of the German Empire in Rwanda, wrote
in 1897 to Felix von Luschan, Head of the African Department
of the Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde (Royal Museum
for Ethnology) Berlin, about the provenance of the ‘objects’ in the
museum: ‘It is especially difficult to procure an object without at
least employing some force. I believe that half of your museum
consists of stolen objects.’14 This fact of 1897 is the fact of 2018.
Though this surpasses the frame of this paper, it is worth briefly

mentioning some very clear cases, much discussed in the past years.
The invasion and destruction of the Edo Kingdom of Benin and
the humiliation of the Oba Ovonramwen by the British in
1897 was accompanied by the mass looting of an estimated
3,500 valuable bronze statues from the King’s palace.15 These
were later taken to the British Museum or sold to museums
and individuals across the Western hemisphere. The very well-
documented correspondences of Felix von Luschan as well as
other archival materials reveal that he was fully aware of the
illegitimacy of the acquisitions, of their provenance and the blood
that was attached to his purchases.
14
Cornelia Essner, ‘Berlins Völkerkunde-Museum in der Kolonialära:
Anmerkungen zum Verhältnis von Ethnologie und Kolonialismus
in Deutschland’, Berlin in Geschichte und Gegenwart – Jahrbuch des
Landesarchivs Berlin, Hans J. Reichardt (ed.) (Munich: Siedler Verlag,
1986), p. 77 (my translation).
15
Kwame Opoku, ‘We Will Show You Looted Benin Bronzes But We Will
Not Give Them Back: Second Deafeat And Permanent Humiliation for
Benin?’, Modern Ghana, 2 October 2017, https://www.modernghana.com/
news/806847/we-will-show-you-looted-benin-bronzes-but-will-not-give-
them.html, (accessed 10 July 2018).
(14)
The throne of a king does not belong to the king, but to his people.
The Bamum people of Cameroon have had to do without their
throne ever since it was allegedly given as a gift by Sultan Ibrahim
Njoya to Emperor Wilhelm II in 1908. Ever since, the ‘Mandu
Yenu’ has been an economic and political gravitational force in
the Museum für Völkerkunde Berlin-Dahlem. A blatant question
arises: What is a gift in the context of colonialism? It is no secret
that colonialism – in all its forms and shades – was ‘a crime against
humanity’, as Macron pointed out.16 What is a gift in this context
of extreme power gradients and colonial violence? If a thief came
to your home, pointed a gun to your head and asked for you to
offer up your most valuable goods as a gift, what chance is there
for you to say no? The extortion of Makabu Buanga by Ludwig
Wolf, colonial officer Hermann Wissmann’s doctor, from the
Congolese Prince Ischiehwu is another such case, with evidences
of the extortion documented in Wolf ’s travel diary.
16
Michael Stothard, ‘Macron calls France’s colonial past a “crime against
humanity”’, Financial Times, 17 February 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/
87d6f430-f521-11e6-95ee-f14e55513608, (accessed 10 July 2018).
(15)
(16)
Ac t V
while eating the most delicious of foods out there. To diagnose the
choking, one might have to look at the entanglements of science
and race.
At the height of Germany’s colonial era in the African continent,

the Germans perpetrated what is widely regarded as the first
genocide of the twentieth century in Namibia. Between 1904 and
1908, German troops in the former imperial German colony of
South West Africa massacred – by shooting, hanging from trees,
starving to death by banishing into the desert – an estimated one
hundred thousand Hereros and Namas, leaving only fifteen thou-
sand survivors. These survivors were forced into concentration
camps, women and girls were raped, and even more people killed.
As if the killing wasn’t enough, the skeletons and skulls of the
Herero and Nama people were shipped to Germany for ‘scientific’
racial experiments.17 Even more recently, more than one thousand
further skulls were found, until the last decade purportedly
unknown to the institutions housing them, having been taken
apparently from Rwanda and former East African colonies for
Germany’s racial research.18 Due to enormous pressure from
groups within and outside of Germany, the Prussian Cultural
17
‘Namibia: Skulls of my People’, 26 May 2017, https://www.aljazeera.com/
programmes/witness/2017/05/namibia-skulls-people-170524084141
641.html, (accessed 10 July 2018).
18
‘Germany to investigate 1,000 skulls taken from African colonies for “racial
research,”’ The Guardian, 6 October 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/
world/2017/oct/06/germany-to-investigate-1000-skulls-taken-from-african-
colonies-for-racial-research, (accessed 10 July 2018).
(17)
Heritage Foundation has been forced to step up efforts to re-

search and publish information on the provenance of the skulls,
as well as to repatriate them. While Germany has started repa-
triating some of the skulls, an important consideration arises,
one that is not easily understood within Western epistemologi-
cal and spiritual frameworks. The souls of the people killed, and
whose skeletons were shipped out of the country, as well as the
soul of their nations, will not be healed just because the skulls
were sent back. The healing commences only when the prove-
nance is cleared, which is to say, only when one can put a name
on each skull. The spirits of the dead will linger and seek abode
until they are named and laid to rest in their homes. The chok-
ing persists as bones are unpacked, cleaned and debated upon,
while the ghosts of the assassinated hover in a wondering state
of anchorlessness.
(18)
Ac t V I
Spirits inhabit
The darkness that lightens, the darkness that darkens,
The quivering tree, the murmuring wood,
The water that runs and the water that sleeps:
Spirits much stronger than we,
The breathing of the dead who are not really dead,
Of the dead who are not really gone,
Of the dead now no more in the earth.
Listen to Things
More often than Beings,
Hear the voice of fire,
Hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind,
To the bush that is sobbing:
This is the ancestors, breathing.
—Birago Diop, Spirits
One must acknowledge that the readiness of some Western mu-

seums to send back the human remains – skeletons and more –
to the previous colonies is a great moral and ethical gesture towards
humanity; finally a recognition of their humanness. After centuries
of objectification of other humans as tools, resources, utensils and
labour that enabled slavery, colonialism and racism, these museums
and other scientific institutions seem to have realised that it was and
is improper, unethical, immoral, illegal to have used other human
beings for their experimentations, for their purposes of constructing
otherness, for their goals of dehumanising fellow human beings.
Or have they? It is important that we remind ourselves that other
(19)
humans were treated in this way under the guise of promoting

Western civilisation, Christianisation and ‘modernity’.
Let’s assume that the days when you would go to an ethnographic

museum and see the skull of your great-grandfather are over.
Let’s assume that morality and ethics permit the skulls to be
locked up in boxes and stored in cellars, but not kept in the open.
Let’s assume that one day, when their provenance has been properly
sorted out, all these humans will be laid to rest alongside their
people. All of this because it has been finally understood that
Africans, Latin Americans and Asians too have subjecthood and
possess subjectivity. Since Western institutions now recognise that
these human beings are not objects but subjects, who once upon
a time possessed personhood, agency, consciousness and realness
within their societies, these supposed ‘objects’ must be sent back.
Yet what many Western museums and institutions wrongly and

forcefully harbouring many so-called objects from the non-West
do not understand, or have not yet recognised, is that most of the
so-called objects have never been and will never be objects. The
objectification of these ritual and spiritual beings, historical carriers,
cultural entities, orientations and essences is in line with the de-
humanisation and objectification of humans from the non-West.
If the skeletons have been delivered from objecthood, it is about
time that the so-called objects also be freed from the bondages
of objecthood, in which they have been detained ever since they
were taken away from their societies as captives, as were humans
as slaves. Understanding these so-called objects as subjects neces-
sitates a radical shift from Western understandings of subject-
hood, personhood and community, as well as a drastic shift from
a Western understanding of art, authorship and society, and subse-
quently a profound reconfiguration of what it means to be human.
(20)
Firstly, to understand the subjectivity of the so-called objects, one

must be able to understand that some of them are indeed the
ancestors of and for some of us. Not representations of ancestors,
as might be the case with a painting in a church or an effigy of
Jesus or a portrait of one’s great-grandfather – no – rather, some
of the so-called objects must be seen as incarnations, embodiments
or personifications of our ancestors. The transformation from a
life of flesh to a life of wood or metal or clay. The corporealisation
of some of those who have passed over to that place of yonder.
Indeed, one must see some of these so-called objects as the yonder.
In this case, how do the ‘objects’, that we now begin to see contain
subjects, differ from the skulls that are currently being repatriated?
They too have personhood, agency and consciousness. I for one
do not have any interest in seeing my ancestors, in whatever form
– skeletons, wood or otherwise – in a museum.
Secondly, to understand the subjectivity of the so-called objects,

one must be able to understand that some of them are indeed
ritual entities that too possess subjectivity. As such they contain
the possibility for healing, mediating between wo/men and gods,
and conscious of the dynamics of communities as they protect
individuals in society. The so-called objects have feelings and
desires; they hunger and thirst, and this is why they are fed, given
sacrifices, prayed to and appeased in various ways, to avoid them
shedding their wrath on us. If agency is the capacity to act and
make choices, then the so-called objects also possess agency, as
they determine, act upon and wield power over individuals and
societies, and most especially hold perspectives for their societies.
As Alain Resnais and Chris Marker pointed out in their 1953
classic Statues Also Die, the placement of these ritual beings in
glass vitrines in well-tempered museums in the West is a form
of murder.
(21)
Thirdly, to understand the subjectivity of these so-called objects,

one must be able to understand that some of them were created
or emerged within traditions or understandings of arts that stand
at a yawning gap from Western traditions of artistry. In Tlilli,
Tlapalli: The Path of the Red and Black Ink, Gloria Anzaldúa writes:
‘My people [...] did not split the artistic from the functional, the
sacred from the secular, art from everyday life.’19 Where Anzaldúa
was heading to here was a differentiation of what she called an
‘invoked art’ – an art invested in performance ritual – from the
non-West, and Western artistic practice. Anzaldúa points out that
invoked art is dedicated to the validation of humans, whereas
most Western art is dedicated to the validation of itself. Invoked
art, she writes, is communal and speaks to everyday life. Anzaldúa
thus argues that in Indigenous cultures, art-making aligned
aesthetics with spiritual, functional and social contexts. She points
out that making art for art’s sake, or for the purposes of mastery,
as is common in Western cultures, leads to the objectification of art.
Anzaldúa believed, just as her people did, in art’s capacity to make
change, to heal, to mend, to validate humanity. The difficulty for
Western museums to recognise these qualities of the so-called
objects as subjects lies then in the sheer discrepancy in perceptions
of what art is and can do. In this light, subjects from Africa, Asia,
Oceania, and Native American cultures, lying captive in ethno-
graphic museums around the world are condemned to objecthood
until they are repatriated and rehabilitated to subjecthood.
19
Gloria Anzaldúa, ‘Tlilli, Tlapalli: The Path of the Red and Black Ink’,
in Rick Simonson and Scott Walker (eds.), The Graywolf Annual Five:
Multicultural Literacy (Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 1988), p. 30.
(22)
Ac t V I I
the choking, one might have to look at the politics of hunger
and toxicity.
One of the weapons implemented by the Germans during the

Herero and Nama genocide was the weapon of starvation. Those
who survived the severe military attacks were sent into the desert
without food and water. In Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño
Famines and the Making of the Third World, Mike Davis states that
in the later part of the nineteenth century, ‘millions died, not
outside the “modern world system”, but in the very process of
being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political struc-
tures.’20 He explores how colonialism and capitalism in British
India and other British colonies increased rural poverty and
hunger while economic policies exacerbated famine during the
El Niño-Southern Oscillation-related famines killing between
thirty and sixty million people due to the Malthusian economic
ideologies of the colonial governments. Similarly, in Cormac Ó
Gráda’s Famine: A Short History, he expatiates on the history of
famine in relation to political and economic histories, for exam-
ple in Mao’s China, Stalin’s Ukraine or the 1943 Bengal famine.
With regards to the latter, one of the worst famines of all times,
Rakhi Chakraborty in ‘The Bengal Famine: How the British en-
gineered the worst genocide in human history for profit’ writes:
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the

20
Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001).
(23)
Winston Churchill, the hallowed British War prime minister

who saved Europe from a monster like Hitler was disturbingly
callous about the roaring famine that was swallowing Bengal’s
population. He casually diverted the supplies of medical aid
and food that was being dispatched to the starving victims to
the already well supplied soldiers of Europe. When entreated
upon, he said, ‘Famine or no famine, Indians will breed like
rabbits.’ The Delhi Government sent a telegram to him paint-
ing a picture of the horrible devastation and the number of
people who had died. His only response was, ‘Then why hasn’t
Gandhi died yet?’21
Hunger, in the context of colonialism, has always been one more

tool in the efforts to dehumanise, de-motivate, de-spirit and torture
the colonised. An engineered hunger was a way to strip subjects
of their subjectivities, in order to expose them as bare objects.
These same methods of objectification used on humans were

and are still being exercised on the so-called objects in Western
museums. It is very common that people in many non-Western
cultures bring food of all kinds and make sacrifices to their an-
cestors. Just as it is normal to see people pour libation to their
ancestors. If one acknowledges that the so-called objects have
feelings and desires, hunger and thirst, then one must consider
a discourse of starvation when one thinks of them in the glass
boxes of museums. The hunger here is a concrete and physical
hunger, but it must also be seen as a spiritual starvation.
21
Rakhi Chakraborty, ‘The Bengal Famine: How the British
engineered the worst genocide in human history for profit’,
Yourstory, May 2017, https://yourstory.com/2014/08/bengal-
famine-genocide/, (accessed 10 July 2018).
(24)
Another means of elimination and dehumanisation adopted in

cases of extreme power abuse and oppression is the use of toxic
gases. So the relation with the gasification of humans comes in
as a parallel.
The fumigation of objects in museums to eliminate woodworms

or moths, for instance – that is to say to take away all life so as
to certify and reiterate the objecthood of what has been made
an object. The museum transforms our ancestors into dead wood
without any trace of life.
It is said that around 90 percent of the so-called objects harboured

by many ethnographic museums have never been displayed and
most likely will never be seen. This is in part because in the huge
storage spaces they have been banished to, these beings have been
gassed with arsenic and a cocktail of other gases, in an effort to
sustain them and eventually make them immortal.
(25)
(26)
Ac t V I I I
Got to survive inna disyah ghetto, yeah

Roots natty roots
Dread binghi dread
Remember that I and I are the roots
Roots natty roots
Dread binghi dread
Whoa, I and I are the roots
Some are leaves, while some are branches
But remember I and I are the roots
Some are dry wood
Fe catch up the fire
Whoa, look at that
—Bob Marley, Roots
One of the many complaints that people who come from societies
that have lost spiritual beings, historical artefacts or ancestors to
Western museums make is that they feel an extreme sense of
deracination and a loss of bearings. Many of the Benin Bronzes
for example are carriers of historical accounts. Whenever some-
thing special happened in the society, the Oba asked his guild of
artists to record the event by making a sculpture. This is to say
that without these historical scripts in the forms of artworks, the
society loses its past, and its history is bound to be narrated by the
scripts and languages of those who plundered the Benin Palace.
This sort of deracination has been said to have led in many cases
to waves of rural-urban or Northern migration, as humans do
not want to inhabit spaces devoid of their histories.
(27)
If we agree with Anzaldúa that such spirited and living artworks

have the potential to validate humanity in certain societies, then
a loss of such beings which serve as coordinates of existence,
coordinates that aid in one’s navigation through life and society,
produces as a consequence disoriented societies with extreme
psychogeographic problems. A society that has lost its spiritual
base is a de-rooted society. Though the physical spaces of dwelling
might still be inhabited, their deprivation of gods, mediums and
deities leaves them in a state of divine barrenness, which is a form
of deterritorialisation. Divinity and spirituality are territories which
once taken away leave gargantuan cavities that can only be filled
by restituting, re-instituting and rehabilitating the spiritual and
sacred beings. What is the psychological burden of a people
which has had to exist for more than a century without their
sacred throne?
(28)
Ac t I X
Don’t let them fool ya

Or even try to school ya!
—Bob Marley,
Could You Be Loved
the choking, one might have to look at rhetoric, at propaganda
as pedagogic method, and the politics of commodification.
As the debates surrounding the legitimacy of the so-called objects

from Africa, Asia, Oceania and Native American cultures in
Western museums get louder, and as the pressure to repatriate
them to their places of origin intensifies, some museum directors
have sought to come up with smart-ass concepts that might
make one misunderstand Marley as having sung, ‘Don’t let them
fool ya / Or even try to screw ya!’ instead of ‘school ya!’. Again,
it seems there is a thin line between ‘schooling’ and ‘screwing’.
The reasons given by the colonialists to set up the colonial enter-
prise around the world was often related to setting up or instituting
a universal knowledge, which was synonymous with Western epis-
temology. The excuse was to bring civilisation to the uncivilised.
To liberate them from savagery. To free them from false gods and
introduce them to the one and only jealous God with a capital G.
While the colonial soldiers, merchants and priests paved their
way on these missions, telling people to give up their false gods,
others like Felix von Luschan were loitering in the metropole
waiting for the seized and stolen ‘goods’ to be sent over. The
schooling in the Western epistemology came hand in hand
with a screwing of Indigenous knowledge and ways of being.
(29)
It is thus no wonder that as the air gets tighter people like

Hermann Parzinger have come up with ‘wonderful’ concepts
like ‘shared heritage’. In his by now notorious 2016 ‘manifesto’,
‘Shared Heritage Is a Double Heritage’, Parzinger spells out
what his concept is all about.22 It sounds so well intentioned
and full of goodwill. As full of goodwill as the words of a spin
doctor about to sell you a political or economic agenda you would
tend to be against. As full of goodwill as the words of a 419 or
Feyman, who earnestly promises to double or triple your money,
if only you would give him 100,000 euros.23 As full of goodwill
as trying to sell to those once colonised the idea that their gods,
ancestors, mediums, historical entities and arts, which were for
a large part forcefully or cunningly taken from them, are now
humanity’s heritage; that they belong to the world. Indeed, ‘shared
heritage’ seems to be the new star in the planet of Feymania.
Let’s then take a look at Parzinger’s concept of ‘shared heritage’

through a detour into a few key points from his manifesto-like text.
22
Hermann Parzinger, ‘Geteiltes Erbe ist doppeltes Erbe’, Frankfurter
Allgemeine Feuilleton, October 2016, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/
shared-heritage-geteiltes-erbe-ist-doppeltes-erbe-14481517.html,
(accessed 10 July 2018).
23
‘419’ (four-one-nine) refers to the paragraph in Nigerian law which regu-
lates fraud-related crimes. Consequently, four-one-nine has become a term
used to refer to fraud and fraudsters. See Stephen Ellis, ‘The Origins of
Nigeria’s Notorious 419 Scams’, Newsweek, May 2016, http://www.newsweek.
com/origins-nigerias-notorious-419-scams-456701, (accessed 10 July 2018);
Dominique Malaquais, ‘Anatomie d’une arnaque : feymen et feymania au
Cameroun’, Les Études du CERI, n. 77, June 2001, https://www.sciencespo.fr/
ceri/sites/sciencespo.fr.ceri/files/etude77.pdf, (accessed 10 July 2018);
Sarah Sakho, ‘Feymania, l’arnaque à la camerounaise’, Slate Afrique, December
2011, http://www.slateafrique.com/1775/feymania-arnaque-cameroun,
(30)
First of all, he writes:
‘We manage the cultural assets of humanity together. So we should

also share them with the nations that we once subdued as colonies.’24
While it is good intentioned to share the cultural assets at hand

with the former colonised, the first question that arises is: Who
gives you the mandate to manage the cultural assets of humanity?
What does it mean to talk about the cultural assets of humanity
that your nation once took from people who at the time were not
even considered human? How is this sharing supposed to happen
and under which power dynamics? Are nation states the right
mediation or communication partners in such a venture?
When the Afo-A-Kom, a deity of the Kom people of Cameroon,

was found in the collection of Furman Gallery, New York in
1973 after it was stolen from Cameroon in 1966 (allegedly
bought for $100 and sold on to a New York art dealer), the
gallery requested $60,000 from the government of Cameroon.
The cultural attaché of the Cameroonian Embassy in the US,
Thaddeus Nkuo, made a strong plea for the repatriation of the
Afo-A-Kom: ‘[It] is beyond money, beyond value. It is the heart of
the Kom, what unifies the tribe, the spirit of the nation, what holds
us together. It is not an object of art for sale, and could not be.’25
But still the government was not ready to go the extra mile to get
it back to Cameroon. Eventually, Furman Gallery sold the Afo-
A-Kom to a businessman, who returned it to the Kom people.26
24
Parzinger, ‘Geteiltes Erbe ist doppeltes Erbe’ (my translation).
25
John H. Merryman, Albert E. Elsen and Stephen K. Urice, Law,
Ethics and the Visual Arts (Alphen aan den Rijn: Kluwer Law
International, 2007), pp. 364-365.
(31)
Nowadays, with African nation states headed mostly by stooges of

the West, with minimal interest in cultural heritage, many African
nation states have become an even worse or careless force to reckon
with. Also, from a historical point of view, it is hardly the nation
that one should be negotiating with, in cases where the kingdoms
– no matter how small they might be these days – still exist. That
is to say, if the kingdom of the Kom still has a legitimate chief,
why limit negotiations to the nation of Cameroon, and since the
Benin Kingdom, founded in 1180, still has an Oba, why negotiate
with the nation of Nigeria that is barely 104 years old?
Next, Parzinger goes on to write:
‘At the heart of shared heritage is the idea that the cultural heritage
is merely kept by the museums, but in principle is considered the
property of all humanity. However, this principle can only apply
under the condition of legal acquisition.’27
As many before me have stated, the problem is not the idea of

sharing heritage per se.28 The issue is about who calls the shots.
26
Alessandro Chechi, Anne-Laure Bandle, Marc-André Renold, ‘Case
Afo-A-Kom – Furman Gallery and Kom People’, Platform ArThemis, Art-
Law Centre, University of Geneva, February 2012, https://plone.unige.ch/
art-adr/cases-affaires/afo-a-kom-2013-furman-gallery-and-kom-people,
27
28
Regarding this polemic, see Kwame Opoku’s writings about looted cultural
objects, available in their entirety here: https://www.toncremers.nl/category/
dr-kwame-opoku-writings-about-looted-cultural-objects/. See also certain
interventions of Berlin Postkolonial geared towards the development of a
‘culture of remembrance’ regarding the role of colonialism in the cultural
construction of contemporary Germany.
(32)
Who gets to choose which museums may determine and declare

what humanity’s cultural heritage is and who gets to ‘host’ it?
Further, who has the right to determine what a museum actually
is, and under whose conditions this so-called property of all hu-
manity is stored and displayed? It goes without saying that the
Benin Bronzes were never made to be presented in glass boxes in
well-tempered rooms. So how can this property of all humanity be
a shared heritage, if the host considers themself omniscient and
claims to know best how this heritage should be kept? Most
importantly, what is a legal acquisition and what is shared heritage
when one’s partner is on the other end of the barrel of a gun?
Referring to Germany’s brutal suppression of the Maji Maji

uprising of 1905–7, Parzinger stresses the need ‘to work through
the Maji Maji uprising with scientists from Tanzania and narrate
this in the Humboldt Forum. This path may be difficult, thorny
and not risk free; but it is mandatory for the Prussian Cultural
Heritage Foundation and its state museums.’29 Fair enough.
It is indeed the duty of German institutions to narrate their brutal
histories of colonialism, which is an all-too-often ignored chapter
of German history. This history of colonialism is an entangled and
shared history, which should be told from multiple perspectives.
The telling of this story will not be done by inviting, once in a while
for a brief time, a colleague from Tanzania, but rather by acknowl-
edging that a sustainable structure must be built in which both the
descendants of the former coloniser and the colonised will be repre-
sented within the thematics, the personnel, and the audience of the
programme. However, one must continue to be careful about any
further instrumentalisation of the so-called objects in ethnological
museums as surfaces on which all kinds of histories are projected.
29
(33)
According to Parzinger:
It is conceivable to enter into a much closer cooperation with

the museums of the countries of origin and exchange stocks
temporarily for temporary exhibitions, one way or the other,
which is of particular concern to our colleagues in Africa.
The Humboldt Forum could be the epicentre of such a novel
relationship with the world. [...] an equal partnership in a
particular case may well include the return of individual
objects, if they are proven to have been illegally acquired.
Because shared heritage can only ever be as good as the
corresponding provenance research, and a maximum of
transparency about the acquisition circumstances is [...]
an indispensable prerequisite for any cooperation.30
The most fascinating thing about Feymania is the packaging.

The fine gold lookalike with which faeces can be beautifully
packaged is an art of its own. The idea of the Humboldt Forum
as the epicentre of a relationship with the world is a narrative
that is at least five hundred years old. It is the aftershock of an
old fantasy that saw Europe at the centre of the world and its
colonies at the peripheries. While the repetition and representa-
tion of fantasies doesn’t make them any more real, the repetition
and representation of violence does amplify violence. And as we
all know, sometimes the aftershocks of a quake can be deadlier
than the quake itself. Oh and by the way, transparency without
further qualification is just… transparent.
One can’t fail to notice Parzinger’s over-stressing of temporality

in his proposal of a possible temporary exchange of stocks for
30
(34)
temporary exhibitions. Who gets to determine how long this

temporary exchange could be? And how come we are talking
about the host loaning the works to the country of origin instead
of the other way round? The return of ‘objects’ should not be an
exception, but rather the norm. Then at that point, after the return,
one could start talking about shared heritage, wherein the ‘coun-
tries of origin’ could decide to loan some of the so-called objects
to Western museums, in exchange for a handsome remuneration.
It is interesting that Parzinger goes further to propose his concept

of ‘shared heritage’ and the Humboldt Forum as a solution to the
‘clashes of civilisations’, the recent rise of xenophobia in Germany
and Europe despite increasingly multi-ethnic populations.
He writes in this regard:
What we are currently experiencing is not just a consequence of

poverty and lack of prospects. Education is one of the crucial
weapons against prejudice and extremism, and that’s what muse-
ums and cultural institutions in general can do to combat isolation
and xenophobia: they have the potential to give people tolerance
and respect for other cultures. This is perhaps the most important
mission of the Humboldt Forum in the new Berlin Palace.31
Education as weapon? What kind of education by the Humboldt

Forum would help fight xenophobia? Education about the history
of Prussia’s greatness as a monarchy? Education about the collection
of Germany’s war booties from its former colonies, labelled as
Prussian Cultural Heritage? Education about the Christian cross on
the Humboldt Forum? The education of othering that is insinuated
by putting all non-Western cultures under a single umbrella?
31
(35)
Maybe instead of becoming a place where isolation and xeno-

phobia are combated and where tolerance and respect for
other cultures are practiced, the Humboldt Forum could turn
out to be the place where the supremacy of Prussia, whiteness,
colonial dominance and the monotheism of Christianity will
be celebrated and commemorated, by those who were meant
to learn the opposite. As for those of us born and bred in the
colonies, as well as those Germans of colour, the way the
Humboldt Forum sounds in Parzinger’s depiction, it will be a
place where we are reminded of times when we were dehuman-
ised, othered, humiliated and subordinated. So, education as
weapon? As the mighty Fela Kuti would have said: ‘Teacher
Don’t Teach Me Nonsense.’
What Fela meant to say is that what is considered good sense

by the one, is not the good sense of the other. The field of play
has changed, and not only do we have to change the language of
‘education’, we also need to change the curriculum. Radically so.
‘Shared heritage’ as it is proposed today belongs to the old
curriculum. The curriculum of the metropole. The yearning for
a nucleus in a decentralised world.
In this light, two further anecdotes are worth mentioning.

Firstly, after giving an interview on the Humboldt Forum in the
German newspaper Die Zeit,32 among the reams of hate mail
that came my way I received a letter from a German medical
doctor who had travelled the African continent for forty years.
32
Werner Bloch & Bonaventure Ndikung, ‘So etwas wie Unterwerfung’,
Zeit Online, January 2016, http://www.zeit.de/2016/ 02/humboldt-forum-
documenta-kurator-bonaventure-ndikung, (accessed 10 July 2018)
(36)
He wrote that in his travels around Africa, especially in Cameroon,

he hadn’t seen one institution worthy of the name ‘museum’.
His concern was that if this African heritage were to be repatri-
ated, where would it be housed? And wouldn’t it be destroyed
by Islamists or other barbarians? He went on to say that I should
invest my energy in ousting corrupt African leaders and building
museums before wasting my time advocating for repatriation.
This too is part of the old language of education and the old cur-
riculum. Needless to mention here, before the Europeans set foot
on the African continent, people had been making, exhibiting
and preserving their cultures for thousands of years. Some of the
bronzes, masks and other beings taken away were between eight
hundred and more than one thousand years old. Who says one
needs a Western museum to accommodate them? After the age
of the colony and imperialism we will all need to find new ways
and spaces – in form and in content – to accommodate this her-
itage, rather than have it assimilated within a Western paradigm.
Secondly, when the Deutsche Historische Museum held Deutscher

Kolonialismus, its first exhibition on the colonial history of Germany
in 2016–17, I received an invitation to be part of a panel discussion
with Paul Spies and Neil MacGregor, amongst others. When I
accepted the invitation on the condition that my participation
would be a speechless one, and that every question on the podium
directed to me would be answered by a performance from the
audience, I was disinvited. Language as we know it, especially
colonial languages, can no longer carry our concerns. Language
as we know it, and as used by those trained in the prestigious
academies of Feymania, cannot advocate for us. Our bodies have
to speak for us. Our bodies are impregnated with our burdens. It
is through the phenomenological and through performativity that
we will speak and manifest the agendas of the new curriculum.
(37)
(38)
Ac t X
You wan damé you mimbe wi,

you wan soulé you mimba wi
—Lapiro de Mbanga, Mamba Wi
A much too sidelined conversation around issues of ethnological

museums and heritage from other parts of the world is the eco-
nomic question. As Lapiro de Mbanga rightfully put it in his song
‘Mamba Wi’, directed at the political and economic elites, ‘You wan
damé you mimbe wi, you wan soulé you mimba wi’ – ‘If you want to
eat think of me, if you want to eat think of me.’ The Humboldt
Forum is said to be a more than 600 million-euro project with a
yearly budget of circa 60 million euros. It is estimated that roughly
3.5 million people will visit the museum each year. The Quai
Branly by comparison receives 1.4 million visitors per year and
the British Museum 6.7 million visitors. If one considers this
in addition to advertising, merchandising, and other means of
commodification, the maths is easy.
‘Shared heritage’ must be dissected from an economic perspective.

‘You wan damé you mimbe wi, you wan soulé you mimba wi’. If this
much money must be made from our ancestors, spiritual beings
and historical vessels, ‘shared heritage’ must also mean having
them in Cameroon, Nigeria, Mexico, Iraq or Egypt, and having
people from all over the world pay visa fees and air tickets to
fly to these places, pay hotels and food, pay entrance fees to see
the throne of Sultan Njoya, the Benin Bronzes, the headdress of
Montezuma, the Ishtar Gate or the Nefertiti Bust.
This is also a matter of economy.
(39)
(40)
Ac t X I
On the Sanctification of Humboldt
the choking, one might have to look at processes and strategies
of sanctification, beatification and canonisation. As usual in such
a context, Alexander will take too much space from Wilhelm.
In Andrea Wulf ’s The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of

Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science, we are told that
the Prussian polymath, naturalist and explorer Alexander von
Humboldt transformed the sciences, revolutionised physical geog-
raphy and meteorology, and dedicated his life to understanding
the Earth and the cosmos. That Humboldt was a genius is almost
an indisputable fact. In his eloquent speeches and vivid writings,
he exposed European readers to the realities of colonialism and
slavery, as well as to the human and ecological degradations he
encountered in the New World. In another recent publication –
one of many that pop up like mushrooms – Rüdiger Schaper’s
Alexander von Humboldt: Der Preuße und die neuen Welten [The
Prussian and the New World] we will learn that Humboldt was a
humanist and stood against slavery. His diaries and other note-
books were found, and in these documents, we are told, one can
see that he was the best Prussian. A Prussian who was against
the empire and who simply wanted to explore the Americas.
Humboldt’s shining credentials of identifying two thousand new
plant species, discovering the magnetic equator, being the first
European to explore and map the Casiquiare, the Orinoco and
the Amazon rivers, or the first to conduct experiments on electric
eels are widely known and celebrated.
(41)
One must acknowledge also that in comparison to his contempo-

raries, Humboldt was progressive, as he criticised the social and
political systems in America, and his critiques of colonial society
in Spanish America were used as an ideological base for some
resistance movements.33
While there is a discourse in Europe that we have to revive

Humboldt’s legacy, to many people in the world, especially in the
Americas, Humboldt was and still is omnipresent. Humboldt-
Toiyabe National Forest, Humboldt Mountain, Humboldt
ranges in China, South Africa and Antarctica; Parque Nacional
Alejandro de Humboldt, Humboldt Falls, Humboldt Glacier,
Humboldt Bay, the Humboldt River, the Humboldt Sink…
These are just a few of the many traces of Humboldt around
the world. But what should also be discussed is the politics of
naming. What does it mean to name a plant, river, mountain or
animals after Humboldt? What were these called before? What
knowledge is lost when a name is changed? One of the strongest
tools of coloniality is the ability to name. The power of nomen-
clature and taxonomy. How does unnaming lead to deterritori-
alisation and disorientation? This too is a reality of the colonised.
While the myth of an innocent, pacifist, abolitionist Humboldt

is cultivated and disseminated, we must also remember that his
travels through and information on the colonies (maps, political
essays, data collected about agriculture, geology, manufacturing,
zoology, botany, and meteorology) were very important both for
his contemporaries and the next generation’s efforts to invade
and occupy the colonies. In more direct terms, it is also known
33
Sandra Rebok, ‘Alexander von Humboldt’s perceptions of colonial
Spanish America’, Dynamis, no. 29, 2009, pp. 49-72.
(42)
that in 1804 Humboldt landed in the US after five years in Latin

America, where he spent a week in Washington with President
Jefferson, Secretary of State James Madison, and Treasury Secre-
tary Albert Gallatin, feeding them valuable information about
the Spanish colonies he had just explored. It is thanks to this
information from the anti-colonialist, pacifist Humboldt, and to
the explicit advice he gave to Jefferson that it was worth fighting
for the land between the Sabine and Rio Grande rivers, that what
is today Texas was colonised and annexed. While Humboldt told
Americans that slavery was a ‘disgrace’ and that the oppression of
Native Americans was a ‘stain’ on the nation, he didn’t deem it
necessary to emphasise this to Jefferson.34 There is also little evi-
dence of Humboldt critiquing the Spanish Kingdom for their
roles in transatlantic slavery and colonialism, as he always bore
of gratitude towards King Carlos IV (1788–1808) for granting
permission for his expedition through the American colonies.
While the myth of an innocent, abolitionist Humboldt is cultivated

and disseminated, one should still listen attentively to the likes of
Mary Louise Pratt, when she writes, ‘Humboldt’s eye depopulates
and dehistoricizes the American landscape even as it celebrates its
grandeur and variety.’35 It is also important to scrutinise Humboldt
34
Nathaniel Rich, ‘The Very Great Alexander von Humboldt,’ The New
York Review of Books, October 2015, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/
10/22/very-great-alexander-von-humboldt/, (accessed 10 July 2018).
35
Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Humboldt and the Reinvention of America’ in René
Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini, American Images and the Legacy of Columbus
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 592. This view has
though been contested by Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert in ‘A “Romantic”
Encounter with Latin America’ in Raymond Erickson, Mauricio A. Font, and
Brian Schwartz (eds.), Alexander von Humboldt: From the Americas to the Cosmos
(New York: Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies, 2004), pp. 41–55.
(43)
with regards to the politics of knowledge generation and dissem-

ination – with regards to authorship. As Margarita Serje points
out in ‘The National Imagination in New Granada’,36 Humboldt
was also a controversial figure when it came to where he got his
information from and how, who he credited in his writings and
who he didn’t. Serje points at the 1887 article in the celebrated
Papel Periódico Ilustrado in Nueva Granada devoted to Alexander
von Humboldt. Like many chronicles of the era, this one com-
plained about ‘the ingratitude of foreigners who forget to acknowl-
edge the merits of people’ in their work. The chronicle stated
that in Santafé (Bogotá), Humboldt met more than a dozen
Native natural scientists who helped him by providing local and
practical knowledge on the country, its topography, mines, pro-
duction and climates. However he failed to mention these scien-
tists in his writings. Specifically, the case of Francisco José de
Caldas, a criollo 37 scientist and politician, aka El sabio Caldas,
who invented a method for measuring altitude through boiling
water, without the use of a barometer, as well as early ideas on
plant geography. Both these concepts were used by Humboldt
without acknowledging or referencing Caldas in his writings.
Serje also points out how Humboldt’s aesthetic and scientific

representation of nature and landscape, as well as his political
representations, were inscribed in the consciousness of the new
nations in the Americas.
36
Margarita Serje, ‘The National Imagination in New Granada’, in
Raymond Erickson, Mauricio A. Font, and Brian Schwartz (eds.),
Alexander von Humboldt: From the Americas to the Cosmos (New York:
Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies, 2004), pp. 83–95.
37
Criollo refers to the white descendants of the Spanish colonists.
(44)
Humboldt’s dramatic depiction of the tropical American

landscapes […] was actually a re-enactment of the notions
the criollos had developed about their “new world” and about
the way they had occupied its territory. This re-enactment was
performed by disembedding landscapes and peoples from
their own historical and geographical continuity to place
them in the context of modern natural (Universal) history.38
Serje also argues that in his efforts at ‘reinventing’ America, as

Marie Louise Pratt put it,39 ‘Humboldt inscribed on the scenic im-
ages of the American tropics a set of colonial notions about land-
scape, culture, and history, granting them scientific and aesthetic
legitimacy.’40 By drawing from the imagination of the criollos, who
had imposed a certain vision of nature, geography and cartograph-
ical knowledge from the metropole on to the land, Humboldt
legitimised colonial constructs, for example of hierarchical spaces.
38
Serje, ‘The National Imagination in New Granada’, in Erickson, Font,
and Schwartz (eds.), Alexander von Humboldt, pp. 84–85.
39
Marie Louise Pratt, ‘Alexander von Humboldt and the reinvention of
América’, in Imperial Eyes: Travel writing and transculturation, (London and
New York: Routledge, 1992), pp 109–140 . ‘Alexander von Humboldt
reinvented South America first and foremost as nature. Not the accessible,
collectible, recognizable, categorizable nature of the Linneans, however, but
a dramatic, extraordinary nature, a spectacle capable of overwhelming human
knowledge and understanding’. [...] ‘three images in particular [...] combined
to form the standard metonymic representation of the “new continent”:
superabundant tropical forests (the Amazon and the Orinoco), snow-capped
mountains (the Andean Cordilleras and the volcanoes of Mexico), and vast
interior plains (the Venezuelan llanos and the Argentine pampas).
40
(45)
Another epistemic violence Serje points to is that in Vues des

cordillères et monuments des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique,
Humboldt writes about a ‘natural’ distinction between biogeo-
graphical strata – the highlands, tierra fría, with cold and tem-
perate climates, and the low- or hot lands, tierra calientes – as
well as cultural differences between the highlands and lowlands.
These distinctions, imported from the European idea that civili-
sations develop in temperate, ‘rational’ regions, still stand as
ethnographic and social knowledge of the region, maintaining
the constructs of social orders.41 Biogeographic stratigraphy
is transformed into caste stratification. According to Serje,
Humboldt’s Geography of Plants naturalises one of the cornerstones
of the colonial order of things: its geopolitical imagination.
Finally, while the myth of an innocent, pacifist, abolitionist

Humboldt is cultivated and disseminated, one shouldn’t forget
that Humboldt’s work was first of all facilitated by the colonial
structures in place at the time. During his 1799 visit to Madrid
before heading off on his Spanish American expedition, with the
help of politicians and scientists like Mariano Luis de Urquijo
and Gonzalo de O’Farrill y Herrera, Humboldt obtained a
personal interview with King Carlos IV, which led to the vast
royal endorsement that enabled his travel to Spanish America.42
41
Alexander von Humboldt, Vues des cordillères et monuments des peuples
indigènes de l’Amérique (Paris: Librairie Grecque-Latine-Allemande, 1816).
42
(46)
Ac t X I I
When someone is in a choking fit, circular culture demands that

one is hit hard on the back to kick out the piece stuck in the trachea.
For the Humboldt Forum to get out of the choking, the kicking out
would have to involve an urgent study of provenance, a matter-
of-fact dealing with the repatriation and rehabilitation of the so-
called objects in their collection, an apologetic confrontation of
and with its entangled colonial histories, as well as the acknowl-
edgment of the thoroughly erased GDR histories and identities.
For the Humboldt Forum to get out of the choking, the kicking
out would have to involve a rigorous reconception of the under-
standing of what a museum is supposed to be and do. Who is and
what is the museum, and what are its goals? ‘Nihil de nobis, sine
nobis’, as they say. Within the process of beatifying Humboldt
one must narrate the multiple histories and facets of his being,
as related to his position within the history of colonialism and
to the imaginary geographies and geopolitics of his time, as well
as to the politics of epistemology.
For the Humboldt Forum to get out of the choking, the kicking
out would have to mean listening to other voices. Listening to
the whispers in the corners. Listening to the voices that do not
occupy the epicentre. Dismantling the epicentre as a whole.
So what are we to do with concepts and spaces like the Humboldt

Forum and other ethnological museums in the twenty-first century?
(47)
I would like to finally think of such concepts and spaces in terms

of queering and queerness. Perhaps it is the queering of the
Humboldt Forum and others that could deliver such institutions
from the perils of their own violent histories.
At the beginning of Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of

Queer Futurity, José Esteban Muñoz writes:
QUEERNESS IS NOT yet here. Queerness is an ideality.

Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch
queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a
horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer,
yet Queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled
from the past and used to imagine a future.
The future is Queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring
and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and
feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now
is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and
now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then
and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures
of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal
transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures,
other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.
Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond ro-
mances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness
is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough,
that indeed something is missing. […] Queerness is essen-
tially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence
on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.43
43
José Estaban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
(New York: NYU Press, 2009), p. 1.
(48)
I would like for us to replace every ‘we’ in Esteban Muñoz’s quote

with ‘Humboldt Forum’. I would like to think of ways in which
it could be possible to queer Humboldt by looking for, imagining
and enacting futurities of the then and there. Ways of dreaming
new and other pleasures, ways of enacting other ways of being in
the world. Ways of propelling ourselves beyond romances of the
negative, in order to acknowledge that this world is not enough.
I would like for us to think of the body as the primary museum.

If a museum is a space in which knowledges are kept and dissem-
inated, then the body is that quintessential space of cognition and
experience. How then does this primary museum of the body en-
counter the secondary museum, which tends to be those spaces in
which ‘objects’ are ‘conserved’? How does the secondary museum
reflect on or influence the primary museum? If the secondary mu-
seum becomes a site of concern, of insult, of epistemic violence; a
site of the erasure of histories, a site of hubris… then what impact
does that have on the beholder, the visitor, the citizen, the human?
Queering the Humboldt Forum should therefore imply a radical

renegotiation of the encounter between the primary and sec-
ondary museum, which must involve questioning the limited
understanding of the museum in currency today. The museum
must be discharged and liberated from the burden of its norma-
tivity of whiteness, maleness, straightness, Western- and anthro-
pocentrism, and freed from its onus of trying to recount a single
narrative or a linear history. The museum today, Humboldt
Forum and others, must be able to negotiate to and fro between
the norms through which dominance of various kinds is con-
structed and perpetuated, and become fully conscious of the
ways societies are constituted through the exclusion, silencing
and mis- or underrepresentation of a majority of their subjects.
(49)
Queering the museum means detaching from these norms,

delegitimising the marginalisation and subordination of others.
The concept of the museum has to be more fluid; it will have
to remain in flux and to resist any rigid understanding of what
a museum is or can be. The museum needs to be perpetually
reconceived and rearticulated.
As much as this might sound like a dream, it is such a dreamscape

that we should be able to enact and navigate… or as Toni Cade
Bambara said, ‘The dream is real, my friends. The failure to realize
it is the only unreality.’44
44
Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters (London and New York:
Vintage, 2011), p. 126.
(50)
Listen to things
More often than beings,
Listen in the wind,
To the sighs of the bush;
This is the ancestors breathing.
Those who are dead are not ever gone;

They are in the darkness that grows lighter
And in the darkness that grows darker.
The dead are not down in the earth;
They are in the trembling of the trees
In the groaning of the woods,
In the water that runs,
In the water that sleeps,
They are in the hut, they are in the crowd:
The dead are not dead.
Listen to things
More often than beings,
Listen in the wind,
To the bush that is sighing:
This is the breathing of ancestors,
Who have not gone away
Who are not under earth
Who are not really dead.
(51)
Those who are dead are not ever gone;

They are in a woman’s breast,
In the wailing of a child,
And the burning of a log,
In the moaning rock,
In the weeping grasses,
In the forest and the home.
The dead are not dead.
Listen more often

To Things than to Beings,
Listen in the wind to
The bush that is sobbing:
This is the ancestors breathing.
Each day they renew ancient bonds,

Ancient bonds that hold fast
Binding our lot to their law,
To the will of the spirits stronger than we
To the spell of our dead who are not really dead,
Whose covenant binds us to life,
Whose authority binds to their will,
The will of the spirits that stir
In the bed of the river, on the banks of the river,
The breathing of spirits
Who moan in the rocks and weep in the grasses.
Spirits inhabit
The darkness that lightens, the darkness that darkens,
The quivering tree, the murmuring wood,
(52)
The water that runs and the water that sleeps:

Spirits much stronger than we,
The breathing of the dead who are not really dead,
Of the dead who are not really gone,
Of the dead now no more in the earth.
Listen to Things
More often than Beings,
Listen in the wind,
To the bush that is sobbing:
This is the ancestors, breathing.
—Birago Diop, Spirits
(53)
This essay is dedicated to those who just Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
went, but are never gone: Cecelia Kein Those Who Are Dead Are Not Ever Gone:
Mofor and Tah Ngu Mofor. On the Maintenance of Supremacy,
the Ethnological Museum and the
Acknowledgments Intricacies of the Humboldt Forum
has been published in English,
One never writes alone. Every writing, French, and German.
at least in my case, is a collective process
that might be signed by one, but that First published by
one must imply and embody the many. South as a State of Mind
The many people, beings, things and Summer/fall 2018, tenth issue.
circumstances that engage in conversations, www.southasastateofmind.com
quarrels, advices, lending ears especially © Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
in the unholy hours of the night, copy 2018. All rights reserved
editing, fact checking, proofreading,
translating, publishing and much more Proofreading by Ines Juster
unfamiliar to the living. Elena Agudio, Design by Archive Appendix
Pamela Akwen, Antonia Alampi, Jasmina Printed in Italy by Bianca & Volta
Al-Qaisi, Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock, Bona
Bell, Marleen Boschen, Federica Bueti, ISBN 978-3-943620-94-8
Pia Chakraverti-Wuerthwein, Binta Diaw,
Olani Ewunnet, Chiara Figone, Marina Published by
Fokidis, Raisa Galofre, Natasha Ginwala, Archive Books
Anna Jäger, Cornelia Knoll, Saskia Müllerstraße 133
Koebschall, Kelly Krugman, Maria-Gracia 13349 Berlin
Latoudji, Nathalie Anguezomo Mba mail@archivebooks.org
Bikoro, António Pedro Mendes, Kamila www.archivebooks.org
Metwaly, Gwen Mitchell, Abhishek
Nilamber, Johanna Ndikung, Amiri Ndikung,
Mahalia Ndikung, Beya Othmani, Solvej
Ovesen, Elena Quintarelli, Benedicte
Savoy, Pius Bejeng Soh, Theresia Lum Soh,
Kenneth Soh, Cynthia Soh, Marleen
Schröder, Jörg-Peter Schulze, Lema Sikod,
Lili Somogyi, Jorinde Splettstößer, Jorgina
Stamogianni, Monika Szewczyk, Adam
Szymczyk, Mirabel Tengi, Jonas Tinius,
Marlon van Rooyen, Sunette Viljoen,
Laura Voigt, Elsa Westreicher, Johanna
Wild, Archive Books, South as a State of
Mind, SAVVY Contemporary, and the
many who are never gone.
Those
The very strange thing about choking is that one can choke
even while eating the most delicious of foods out there. Maybe,
especially with such foods, as the greed to devour that delicacy
rapidly – with little focus on mastication, more on consuming –
might lead to the diversion of a piece from its track towards Who Bonaventure Soh
Are
the oesophagus into the trachea... Bejeng Ndikung
Dead
say co-opted, which is to say ingested, seem to have collectively
missed the track to the oesophagus and got stuck in the respira-
tory tract. They have been stuck there for as long as the history Are On the Maintenance of
Not
of mass collections, acquisitions and looting, for as long as the
ruthless and ongoing extraction of cultural property has occurred Museum and the Intricacies
in the former colonies outside of Europe. of the Humboldt Forum
A twelve-act essay on the maintenance of supremacy, the ethno-

logical Museum and the intricacies of the Humboldt Forum.
Ever
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung was born in 1977 in Yaoundé, Cameroon.
He is an independent art curator, art critic, author and biotechnologist. He is
Gone
founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary Berlin and editor-
in-chief of SAVVY Journal for critical texts on contemporary African art. He was
associate professor at Muthesius University Kiel, and is currently guest pro-
fessor in curatorial studies at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. He was curator-
at-large for documenta 14, and was a guest curator of the 2018 Dak’Art
Biennale in Senegal. As part of the Miracle Workers Collective, he will curate
Finnish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019.
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qxp_cover new 12/11/18 21:05 Pagina 1

The institution of the ethnological museum or world museum

A twelve-act essay on the maintenance of supremacy, the ethno-

Archive B ooks AB pamphlet 1

Not Museum and the Intricacies

Let us afford ourselves the luxury of making a couple of supposi-

The institution of the ethnological museum or world museum

The coughing caused by the choking throes of the ethnological

These hits and punches have come in a multitude of forms and

They could do this, e.g. by returning without any further delay or

Thirty years after the fall of the Wall, Germany is building a

Architecture as tool for the erasure of history – or, construction

On the other hand, the rebuilding of this palace in which objects

So, what does it mean to rebuild a Prussian base of power, name it

Bredekamp’s comments also stand in stark contrast to what

Though this surpasses the frame of this paper, it is worth briefly

At the height of Germany’s colonial era in the African continent,

Heritage Foundation has been forced to step up efforts to re-

One must acknowledge that the readiness of some Western mu-

humans were treated in this way under the guise of promoting

Let’s assume that the days when you would go to an ethnographic

Yet what many Western museums and institutions wrongly and

Firstly, to understand the subjectivity of the so-called objects, one

Secondly, to understand the subjectivity of the so-called objects,

Thirdly, to understand the subjectivity of these so-called objects,

One of the weapons implemented by the Germans during the

Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the

Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001).

Winston Churchill, the hallowed British War prime minister

Hunger, in the context of colonialism, has always been one more

These same methods of objectification used on humans were

Another means of elimination and dehumanisation adopted in

The fumigation of objects in museums to eliminate woodworms

It is said that around 90 percent of the so-called objects harboured

Got to survive inna disyah ghetto, yeah

If we agree with Anzaldúa that such spirited and living artworks

Don’t let them fool ya

As the debates surrounding the legitimacy of the so-called objects

It is thus no wonder that as the air gets tighter people like

Let’s then take a look at Parzinger’s concept of ‘shared heritage’

First of all, he writes:

‘We manage the cultural assets of humanity together. So we should

While it is good intentioned to share the cultural assets at hand

When the Afo-A-Kom, a deity of the Kom people of Cameroon,

Nowadays, with African nation states headed mostly by stooges of

Next, Parzinger goes on to write:

As many before me have stated, the problem is not the idea of

Who gets to choose which museums may determine and declare

Referring to Germany’s brutal suppression of the Maji Maji

It is conceivable to enter into a much closer cooperation with

The most fascinating thing about Feymania is the packaging.

One can’t fail to notice Parzinger’s over-stressing of temporality

temporary exhibitions. Who gets to determine how long this

It is interesting that Parzinger goes further to propose his concept

What we are currently experiencing is not just a consequence of

Education as weapon? What kind of education by the Humboldt

Maybe instead of becoming a place where isolation and xeno-

What Fela meant to say is that what is considered good sense