Muthoni Thangwa

Tag: museums

  • The Museum Scandal Nobody Wants to Talk About!

    How Museums Launder Looted Heritage and Get Away With It

    The New York Times recently carried the headline: “Met Returns Buddhist Painting Taken During the Korean War.” It sounds noble at first glance. It isn’t. The painting, stolen from a South Korean temple, was only returned after quietly sitting in the Met’s collection since 2007. That temple, at the time the piece “went missing,” was under the control of the United States Army.

    This isn’t restitution; it’s housekeeping. A museum caught with an object it should never have touched in the first place, now performing moral theatre because the evidence is finally too loud to ignore.

    The framing of the headline is twisted on multiple levels. The language alone reveals the rot. Met might be anybody, except one of the world’s finest art museums. It quietly normalizes a neo-colonial worldview where Western museums remain the unquestioned custodians of other people’s heritage. Institutions in Europe and America are still practicing colonialism, unapologetic and ongoing, where the institution is protected at all costs, even when the objects inside were acquired through violence, coercion, or outright theft.

    The media, instead of interrogating this, often reinforces it. When looted objects appear in Western museums, headlines say they were “taken” or “went missing”: passive, harmless verbs that wash the blood off the story. But when those same museums lose objects, as the Louvre did recently, the wording changes instantly. Suddenly the objects are “stolen.” Theft is only theft when it inconveniences the powerful.

    The Korean War ended in 1953. That is not ancient history. By then, Interpol had already existed for nearly thirty years, loudly pledging to protect cultural institutions from theft. What it never pledged, then or now, was to hold museums accountable when they were the ones benefiting from those thefts.

    This is how museums continue to enjoy a strange low vibration kind of ethical exceptionalism. They insist on operating under “high ethical standards,” yet quietly exempt themselves from those same standards when it comes to acquiring or keeping looted objects. And for decades, they have fueled the illicit trade directly. Every time a museum pays a staggering sum for a questionable piece, it rewards the thieves, incentivizes fresh looting, and strengthens the criminal networks behind it. These transactions aren’t neutral; they are the financial engine and the immoral agency that keeps stolen heritage circulating through the global market with the veneer of legitimacy.

    Museums rarely “discover” that an object is stolen through their own provenance research. That is a myth they like to tell. In reality, they are usually caught. It happens when scholars, curators, or experts walk through an exhibition and immediately recognize a piece that should never have left its homeland. Only then do museums suddenly “offer” to return it; framing the act as generosity rather than compliance. By that point, the damage is done. The looter has already been paid, the illicit network has already profited, and the museum has already enjoyed years of prestige from displaying the object under its protective institutional umbrella. Restitution becomes a PR exercise, not an ethical stance.

    In the debate on repatriation, one of the fiercest forms of resistance has always been around reparations. Not the philosophical kind; the practical kind. Communities whose heritage was stolen are expected to receive their objects back quietly and gratefully, even though the theft deprived them of generations of cultural, spiritual, and economic value. And when museums finally return these objects, they rarely come with restoration budgets, conservation funds, or even basic support. Nothing to repair the harm. Nothing to acknowledge the decades, sometimes centuries, of damage. The institution that was caught handling stolen goods simply hands back the item, untouched, unfunded, and unaccounted for.

    They fail or refuse, to disclose where it was bought, from whom, or through what chain of transactions. Every step in the chain of thieves is trackable, yet the museum treats it as irrelevant, as if a simple handback absolves them of all responsibility. And all the while, the authorities remain silent, letting the system operate unchecked.

    The most disturbing part is that these are not isolated incidents. They are routine. Museums like the Metropolitan are repeatedly caught with looted objects, and each time it is framed as an unfortunate oversight rather than a systemic failure. But let’s be honest: once should be enough. A single proven case of handling stolen heritage should trigger a complete audit, accountability measures, and structural reform. Instead, the pattern continues; quiet acquisitions, louder scandals, and no meaningful consequences. The repetition isn’t accidental; it’s the system working exactly as it was designed.

    What we are dealing with is not a series of unfortunate mistakes. It is an ecosystem built on entitlement, denial, and the steady laundering of other people’s histories. Western museums have spent decades positioning themselves as guardians of the world’s culture while quietly benefiting from the very violence, chaos, and colonial extraction they claim to condemn. Returning a few objects under pressure does not absolve them. Offering apologies without accountability does not repair the harm. And repatriation without restitution is simply another way of maintaining control.

    If museums are sincere about ethics, then the standard is simple: full transparency, full audits, full cooperation, and full compensation. Anything less is performance. The world is no longer fooled by polished statements and symbolic gestures. Communities know what was taken, how it was taken, and what that loss has cost them. The question now is whether these institutions are finally willing to confront their own history, or whether they will continue to hide behind the same tired narratives while the truth keeps surfacing, object by object; scandal by scandal.

    The era of unchallenged ethical exceptionalism is ending. It is time for museums to decide whether they will evolve, or be exposed, repeatedly, by the very history they tried to bury.

  • She Spoke German without History

    She thought there are Africans who look upon colonisation with nostalgia!

    I thought I had heard it all—until, in 2024! We were in Germany as part of the MuseumLab programme, a curated platform that brings together African and European heritage practitioners for dialogue, collaboration, and critique on museums and the heritage sector in both continents. 

    During one session, a young African woman spoke proudly of her German heritage. That made me physically wince. However, what followed cut even deeper: she stated that some people in Cameroon recall the German colonial period with nostalgia. The room stiffened with various reactions. Some looked at the floor; others started searching in their bags, as if for lost treasure, while a number stood and headed for the coffee table. The discomfort was palpable. Her words bruised my spirit, as if I had lived through that colonial experience myself. I looked at her for the first time – looked at her.

    Many wild thoughts were running through my mind, scrambling around like restless feet on a tin roof. But one kept rising above the noise: I wanted to lock this African somewhere, to isolate her, but to give her light, sunshine, until she could think again. It wasn’t disdain. It was heartbreak. Because what she had just said was not an opinion, it was evidence of brainwashing. Evidence of historical amnesia, of how colonisation not only stole land and bodies but rewrote memory itself.

    It was a painful reminder of how deeply manufactured memoryhas burrowed into our consciousness, convincing some among us that the oppressor brought order, when in fact he brought rupture. Romanticizing colonization is not just a travesty, a betrayal of historyandancestors, it is also forgetting oneself, in the quest to be like ‘those others’. It speaks to the danger of a people who no longer recognise the chains that still shackle Africa culturally, economically and socially. Such people have trained their minds to call the chains bracelets.

    The speaker came to Germany as a child. It was clear that the country doesn’t teach any African history. Fair enough – until recently, the history that was taught in Kenyan schools was often stripped of its messiness and violence. Children were told of explorers who ‘discovered’ mountains and rivers that Kenyan communities had interacted with for millennia.  But here, the silence felt heavier.

    I wondered what takes root in a historical vacuum? How do people, like that speaker, Africans raised in Europe, without the tools to interrogate or process historical facts presented through the lens of someone else?. People who speak with certainty, but from a place of omission. Her nostalgia for German colonization didn’t seem rooted in malice. It sounded almost pitiful, like it came from an emptiness, an absence where something vital should have been.

    As she spoke, I watched the room. No one said a word. Not the Germans, not the Africans. There was no applause, no challenge, only a silence so heavy it felt complicit. This was the saddest part. Because silence, in moments like this, is not neutrality – it is endorsement. The presenter, who had spoken of cassettes as if they were some prehistoric discovery, may have walked away thinking she had delivered a successful talk. She may have believed she had represented the African voice with clarity. But the truth was quieter, and more haunting: the Africans in the room decided not to engage. She had gone too far, too far from truth, too far from self, for any meaningful recourse. And we, out of weariness or protection, chose not to waste precious hours trying to bring her back.

    We were visiting African heritage practitioners; she was going to remain in Germany. We could not save her, and we knew it. Her mind had already been claimed by another story, one we could not rewrite in a single afternoon. So we chose to save ourselves. The irony is that even the Germans remained silent. The organisers had probably anticipated a spirited resistance, at least some reaction. As for the Germans, I’m still not sure what was expected of them. And I’ve always wondered what, if anything, was said among them once the event ended. If silence held any discomfort. Or if it, too, was just routine.

    Colonialism does not simply vanish over time – it mutates, hides in school curricula, reappears in street names, and sometimes, finds voice in those it once oppressed. What happened in that room was not a debate about historical nuance; it was the echo of a violent erasure. And when we fail to teach African children their own histories, whether in Europe or in Africa, we raise generations fluent in the language of their colonisers, but illiterate in the truths of their nations and people.

  • Who Owns the Past? The Case for Returning Africa’s Stolen Heritage

    One of the most significant and enduring debates in heritage and patrimony management today pits African, Asian, and Middle Eastern institutions against some of the most prestigious museums in Europe and North America. At the heart of this controversy lies the ownership and location of material heritage — including human remains, ritual objects, jewellery, sacred art, and items of practical utility — that were removed, often forcibly or under dubious circumstances, during periods of colonial conquest and control.

    Some of these objects carry immense cultural and spiritual meaning — like Egyptian mummies or ancestral remains — while others are of staggering monetary value, such as the gold regalia looted by the British from Kumasi in the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) in 1874. Yet all of them are maternally priceless. These objects were once imbued with meaning in their communities of origin — not merely as museum pieces, but as living elements in cultural, spiritual, and familial systems.

    Today, African countries are striving to reclaim their histories — to understand and own their past on their own terms. A critical part of this involves the return of cultural artefacts removed under the shadow of violence, exploitation, and erasure. Whether stolen, “borrowed,” or questionably acquired, these objects were taken at a time when colonial powers believed Africans to be primitive and incapable of sophisticated thought or expression.

    African institutions are now asserting that while Europe is free to hold its opinions about African peoples, it does not follow that it should hold onto our heritage. These cultural artefacts — created, used, and revered within African value systems — belong back home, where we can care for them with the dignity and intention they deserve.

    Yet pushback has been fierce. In 2002, eighteen major museums — including the British Museum (London), the Louvre (Paris), the State Museums of Berlin, the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam), and the Guggenheim (New York) — issued a statement titled The Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums. It argued that the objects in their collections had become part of the institutions’ identities, and by extension, part of the cultural heritage of the countries that now house them.

    But this logic is flawed. How can, for instance, a ritual object created for the veneration of African ancestors become part of English cultural heritage — unless, implausibly, the English also embrace ancestor worship? An object of religious significance cannot simply be decontextualised and then reinterpreted within a culture that does not share its foundational belief system. Cultural objects are not inherently meaningful in isolation; they draw power from the living systems of thought, belief, and practice that birthed them.

    The notion of “universality” touted by these museums is equally questionable. If universality excludes the vast majority of Africans, Asians, and Middle Easterners — many of whom will never afford the cost or receive the visas to visit these museums — then what universe is being referenced? One that conveniently omits those whose histories these objects represent?

    And even if some argue that culture is dynamic — that these objects may no longer serve their original function — their value remains immense. Their return would not only strengthen collections in African museums but also boost cultural tourism. Imagine a future where a visit to the Nairobi National Museum includes viewing artefacts long held abroad, amplifying Kenya’s appeal beyond its beaches and wildlife. It would be a game changer.

    Some institutions are setting an example. In 1999, the Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta returned a 3,300-year-old mummy — thought to be Pharaoh Ramses I — to Egypt. This act was not just symbolic. It affirmed that honouring the rightful custodians of cultural heritage is possible. But it also triggered panic among Western museums, which feared that widespread repatriation could dismantle their prized collections.

    Still, the winds of change are blowing. The path forward must involve more than legal wrangling or high-minded declarations about “shared heritage.” It must include sincere dialogue, inclusion of formerly silenced voices, and a recognition that some things — sacred things — cannot be owned out of context. They do not “belong” to museums that stripped them of their meaning. Nor are they “safer” in Europe, as some argue. Cultural objects don’t just survive in vaults — they thrive when they live within the systems that created them.

    As a final thought, one must ask:
    If all the objects currently held in the British Museum were returned to Kenya, how many Kenyans would make their way to our National Museums to see them?

    That question matters. Because restitution is not just about objects. It’s about memory, dignity, and reawakening the public to what is — and has always been — rightfully ours.

    This article was first published by the East African Standard in 2007