When I enter an ethnological museum, I expect something simple: stories about objects. Masks, figures, vessels—things that have traveled a long way before ending up in climate-controlled display cases. I want to know who made them, which village they came from, at which festivals they were danced, or which deities they served.
Today museums often tell a different story. It is less about the objects than about a moral judgment of the people who brought them to the West—often my great-grandparents, who have long been dead. Museums no longer merely explain things; they explain themselves and stage guilt in dramatic form.
Even the old term ethnological museum has become suspect. In Germany, the word “Volk” now carries a slightly uncomfortable connotation. So new names have been invented—world cultures, dialogue spaces, transcultural platforms. Strangely, these terms often evoke exactly the associations they are meant to avoid. It is a bit like standing in a supermarket in front of a package labeled Schaumküsse. You read the word, but at the sight of the chocolate-covered sweet, the thought involuntarily jumps somewhere else.
Something similar happens with modern provenance research. It promises to satisfy curiosity: Where do these objects come from? Who made them? What purpose did they serve? How were they treated? Yet the answers often remain meager. In essence, one learns that beyond an almost insurmountable wall lies a continent—Africa—a place that in museum texts seems as distant as a medieval land of plenty.
To reach it, one must leave the tourist paths and fight through a dense mass of ethnological literature and museum-pedagogical self-reflection. Only someone with a stubborn, almost unreasonable curiosity makes it through. And when you finally arrive, there is neither milk nor honey. But there are masks, figures, and altars so enigmatic that they practically invite you to seek out the people who once lived with them.
Before I reached this “continent behind the wall,” I had spent years in museums, seminars, and books—many of them astonishingly self-absorbed. Their authors were less interested in the objects than in the discourses about them. Everything took place on this side of the wall. Exhibition catalogues named collectors and artists inspired by African masks, but the names of the people who had actually made and used those objects almost never appeared.
In 2002 I met two people who had broken through that wall: Petra Schütz and Detlev Linse, two lawyers from Cologne. While others spent their holidays on Mediterranean beaches, they traveled to one of the poorest regions of West Africa, the border triangle of Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire. Here live the Lobi—a people, or perhaps a small people, who resisted both Islamization and colonial administration.
We met at the Hotel Hala in Gaoua. Stuffed hunting trophies decorated the walls, relics from a time when European big-game hunters seemed to have passed through only yesterday. In the mornings we sat on the veranda and watched women marching along the roadside in a line—upright, almost in step—carrying bundles of firewood weighing thirty or perhaps forty kilograms. They had gathered it twenty kilometers away at dawn and were now bringing it to their kitchens or to the market.
Our guide, who spoke Lobiri and Birifor, translated for us. After breakfast and a polite invitation to coffee or Coca-Cola, we set out “into the field,” as ethnologists call it.
“The field” consisted of scattered villages with isolated compounds. Our guide announced us to the chef de village, and we presented gifts: kola nuts, black tea, and sugar. Then we were taken to the village fetish priest or to the local carver.
First there were negotiations. A ritual session had its price: a white chicken cost about 1,500 CFA francs—a little more than two euros. A black chicken was more expensive.
Then we crawled into a hut whose entrance was barely a meter high; inside it was only slightly higher. One could not stand upright. In the stuffy air lingered the sweet smell of fresh sacrificial blood, while flies buzzed incessantly. In the half-darkness one saw light falling through a small opening in the roof; cockroaches darted across encrusted statues.
Later the Musée du quai Branly reconstructed such a hut. A film shows a fetish priest casting cowrie shells, invoking the earth spirits, and consulting the oracle; beside it, in glass cases, stand the sculptures attributed to the carver Tyohepte Pale. Once they had stood in a hut on an altar next to his house. What the museum does not say: many of these figures had been stolen in a nighttime raid—a detail that is rarely told.
When I showed the son of Tyohepte Pale a photograph of the display case in the Quai Branly, he remembered. He had been ten years old at the time. His mother heard noises in the courtyard and saw three men with bicycles carrying something out of the hut. They were statues from the household altar. She woke her husband. But it was too late: the thieves had already secured their loot. The brave woman grabbed one of them by the leg to stop him from running away. But he kicked her in the face. Blood flowed, her nose swelled—fortunately it was not broken.
The raid had a prehistory. The Swiss art historian Piet Meyer had written the book Art and Religion of the Lobi, which accompanied an exhibition at the Rietberg Museum. The book became popular among collectors. In it Meyer mistakenly described Tyohepte Pale as a forger. Perhaps he did carve for tourists as well. But above all he worked for fetish priests in the surrounding area. The controversy made him famous and attracted tourists who wanted to see his carvings—and to take his sculptures home with them as souvenirs from the land of the Lobi. In this way Tyohepte was able to earn a little extra money.
For me, something decisive crystallized here: a museum displaying “looted art” without knowing it; an art historian who turned a carver into a tourist attraction; a destroyed altar; an injured woman—all compressed into a story that might later be reframed as a tale of victimhood.
When I saw fragments of the altar in the Quai Branly, I thought about writing to the museum—not to report a theft, but to document the provenance of figures that had not been made by a single carver but had developed over three generations. The son of the carver, who continues the family tradition, told the story with remarkable calm. Where I had expected trauma, there was none.
When I asked him whether he and his family would like to have the figures back, he replied:
“The statues were too weak, otherwise they would have prevented the theft. In that moment they gave their last strength. They were dead. Who wants to bring a corpse back into their house? For me the figures would have no value anymore.”
Compared with the media spectacle surrounding “African looted art”—for example the famous Benin Bronzes—this event seems banal, insignificant. Unless one deliberately searches for examples meant to confirm fashionable prejudices: that everything was stolen or acquired under colonial conditions.
Reality, however, is far more complex.
I tell these stories to make visible the many-layered connections that lie behind the wall between Europe and Africa—connections that continue to have effects today. Two amateur ethnologists, driven by curiosity, passion, and perhaps also by a certain helplessness familiar to anyone who encounters Africa directly, broke through that wall in their own way.
Through them—and through objects, people, and stories—one gains a glimpse of the lifeworlds that remain invisible behind Western museums.
This blog is intended as a small supplement to the provenance research that has become so popular in recent years.