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Monica Udvardy Decries Looting in Africa

Monica Udvardy is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, Women's Studies Affiliated Faculty, and member of the Women's Studies Steering Committee, University of Kentucky.

A flood of African artifacts that have been stolen from their original owners has myself and my co-author/colleague, Linda Giles, calling on museums, collectors and the US government to reverse the flow and return them to the countries and the people to whom they belong. This summer, news coverage of our research appeared in USA Today, on the National Geographic News website, in the Sacramento Bee, in various places on the website of our national academic organization, the American Anthropological Association, as well as in local metropolitan newspapers.

We believe this media attention stems from an emerging awareness that the illicit global traffic in cultural property is wreaking irreparable harm on the cultural and historical heritages of entire nations. According to Interpol estimates, this illicit trade is worth $4.5 billion annually, making it the third largest illegal industry after the drug trade and arms smuggling. Interest in the West for African art/artifacts is at an all time high and growing. As I recently noted in an interview with the American Anthropologist Association's publicist, "Because of this, whole nations' entire archaeological heritages are literally being raped." Research conducted on this trade as it affects the Kenyan peoples with whom I and Giles work appears in the current issue of American Anthropologist and will appear in the December, 2003 issue of Cultural Survival Quarterly, the world report dedicated to the rights, voices and visions of indigenous peoples.

Both Giles and I have worked extensively in Kenya and Tanzania, I studying elements of kinship, secret societies and religious beliefs as they relate to gender among the Mijikenda peoples, and Giles working on elements of spirit possession among the Swahili people. We have learned firsthand how the memorial statues that the Mijikenda people carve to honor their deceased (called vigango) are stolen, then bought cheaply by a single American dealer/collector, sold at great profit to wealthy art collectors in the West, and later donated to museums in the US.

Unlike the concern about archeological artifacts in Iraq, these four-to-nine foot sculptures are part of a living culture. Ancestral spirits continue to play an important role for most Mijikenda and are believed to influence the activities of the living. Hence, the theft of these carvings has a tremendous impact on their living descendants, who believe that through their removal and disturbance, they are offending the spirit of the ancestor they incarnate. Their disappearance leaves families fearful of retribution and suffering.

In 1985, during a period of my field research among the Giriama people of the Kenyan coastal interior (one of the nine peoples collectively called the Mijikenda), I photographed a man (see Figure 1) with two vigango statues. Within a month both were stolen. Almost 15 years later, in 1999, I gave a paper about the meaning of these statues on a panel at the African Studies Association annual meetings in Philadelphia, PA. Subsequently, Linda Giles discussed the African artifacts in the collection at the Illinois State University at Normal, Illinois, her home institution. As she illustrated her talk with slides, I recognized among the artifacts shown, one of my informant's stolen statues! We have since located my informant's other statue in the museum collection of Hampton University, in Virginia, which owns some 99 African vigango! From their accession records, we have learned that such private collectors as Andy Warhol, Gene Hackman, Linda Evans, and Powers Boothe are among those who have purchased vigango and later donated them to museums.

We are withholding the art dealer's name for legal reasons, but among the many things we find appalling is that this man has single handedly created a market for this particular sculpture. In our American Anthropologist article, we call on the UN to close loopholes in existing legislation and for academic communities and museum directors to deter the traffic. We also question the ethics of the intertwined relationships between museum personnel and private dealers in non-Western objects. And we decry the gross economic disparity between the African people and the hundred-fold mark-ups benefiting those who trade in their material culture.

The illicit traffic in non-Western cultural property is an insidious form of Western imperialism and is facilitated by processes of globalization. Whether you are traveling in the non-Western world, or visiting gift or home accessory stores in Lexington, don't buy artifacts that appear to be old, or which you are told are "authentic" or have been used recently. Like Mijikenda memorial statues, such objects should be left to members of the cultures who made them, and to their ancestors.