When I enter an ethnological museum, I expect something simple: stories about objects. Masks, figures, vessels—items that have traveled far before ending up in climate-controlled cases. I want to know who carved them, which village they came from, at which festivals they danced, or which deities they served. Today, museums often tell a different story. It’s less about the objects than a moral judgment on the people who made them—usually great-grandparents long dead. Museums no longer just explain things; they explain themselves, staging guilt in dramatic form.
Even the old term „Völkerkundemuseum" has become suspect. The word „Volk" now carries a faintly uncomfortable connotation in Germany. So new names were invented—world cultures, dialogue spaces, transcultural platforms. Strangely, these terms often trigger the very associations they aim to avoid. It’s a bit like standing in a supermarket in front of a box labeled “Schaumküsse.” You read the word, but seeing the chocolate-covered sugar, your mind involuntarily jumps elsewhere. Read more.
The same applies to 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 are often meager. Essentially, you learn that somewhere beyond an almost insurmountable wall lies a continent—Africa—a place that in museum texts feels as distant as a medieval land of plenty.To reach it, one must stray from tourist paths and navigate a dense stew of ethnological literature and museum-educational self-reflection. Only those with persistent, almost unreasonable curiosity manage to break through. And when you finally arrive, there is neither milk nor honey. But there are masks, figures, and altars so enigmatic they practically invite you to understand the people who lived with them.
Before reaching this “continent beyond the wall,” I had spent years in museums, seminars, and books—many surprisingly self-absorbed. Authors were less interested in objects than in the discourses surrounding them. Everything took place on this side of the wall. Catalogs listed collectors and artists who inspired African masks, but the names of those who actually made or used the objects were almost never mentioned.
In 2002, I met two people who had pierced this wall: Petra Schütz and Detlev Linse, two lawyers from Cologne. While others vacationed on Mediterranean beaches, they traveled to one of West Africa’s poorest countries, to the border triangle of Burkina Faso, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast. Here live the Lobi people—a society that resisted both Islamization and colonial administration.
We met at the Hotel Hala in Gaoua. Stuffed hunting trophies lined the walls, remnants of a time when European big-game hunters apparently visited only yesterday.Mornings, we sat on the veranda, watching women march along the country road in single file, backs straight, almost in step, carrying bundles of firewood—thirty, maybe forty kilograms. They had cut it at dawn twenty kilometers away and were bringing it to their kitchens or the market. Our guide, fluent in Lobiri and Birifor, served as translator. After breakfast, and a polite invitation for a coffee or Coke, we set off “into the field,” as proper ethnologists call it.“The field” consisted of scattered villages with isolated homesteads. 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 carver.
Negotiations came first. A ritual session had a price: a white chicken cost about 1,500 CFA francs—just over two euros. A black chicken was more expensive.Then we crawled into the hut, the small entrance barely a meter high, the interior only slightly taller. One could not stand upright. The cloying smell of fresh sacrificial blood hung in the air, flies buzzing endlessly. In the dim interior, light filtering through a small roof opening revealed cockroaches scuttling past encrusted statues.
Later, the Musée du quai Branly recreated such a hut. A film shows a fetish priest casting cowrie shells, chanting to awaken earth spirits, consulting the oracle, with nearby vitrines displaying the sculptures once on these altars. What the museum omits is that many figures had been stolen during a nocturnal raid—rarely mentioned in the narrative. When I showed a photo of the vitrine to Tyohepte Pale’s son, he remembered. He had been ten at the time. His mother heard noises in the yard, saw three men with bicycles tampering with the altar, and woke her husband. But it was too late: the thieves had already secured their loot. One thief was briefly grabbed at the leg, but she was kicked in the face. Blood flowed, her nose swelled, but luckily it was not broken.
The raid had a backstory. Swiss art historian Piet Meyer had written Kunst und Religion der Lobi, accompanying an exhibition at the Rietberg Museum. The book, popular among collectors, had mistakenly labeled Tyohepte Pale a forger. Controversial as it was, the book made him famous, attracting tourists to admire his carvings.For me, the experience crystallized something crucial: a museum displaying “looted art,” an art historian turning a carver into a tourist attraction, an altar destroyed, a person injured—all condensed into a story reframed as victimhood. When I saw fragments of the altar at the Quai Branly, I considered writing to the museum—not to report theft, but to document the provenance of figures created over three generations. The carver’s son, continuing his family’s tradition, recounted the story with remarkable detachment. Where I expected trauma, there was none. When I asked if he wanted the figures back, he said:
“The statues were too weak; otherwise, they would have prevented the theft. At that moment, they had given their last strength. They were dead. Who wants a corpse back in their house? The figures would have no value for me.”
Before the media spectacle of “African loot”—like the famous Benin Bronzes—this event seems banal, insignificant. Unless one searches for examples to confirm “woke” prejudices: that everything was stolen or acquired in a colonial context. Reality, however, is far more nuanced. I tell these stories not to accuse, but to illuminate the complex connections behind the wall separating Europe from Africa—connections that continue to resonate today. Two amateur ethnologists, driven by curiosity, passion, and the helplessness familiar to anyone engaging with African culture, pierced the wall in their own way. Through them, and through objects, people, and histories, one finally glimpses the lives and worlds that too often remain invisible behind museum glass. This blog will be continued as a little add-on to the popular so called "provenance researches" of the last years.