With the Caribbean Community leading the global fight for the U.S. and European nations to pay reparations for the trans Atlantic slave trade, African governments and tribal leaders are also beginning to team up with the Caribbean to force former colonizers to return artifacts of significant cultural and religious importance back to the African continent.
For example, in recent weeks, leaders of the Pokomo people of Kenya have stepped up demands for the British Museum to return the Ngadji, a huge tribal drum which, for decades, had functioned as a symbol of authority and social order.
For years, the Ngadji has been hidden away in a special area of the British Museum while pressure mounted on British authorities to return the symbolic drum to the Pokomo. Museum officials claim that the Ngadji was gifted to the facility by Sir Alfred Hollis in 1908, so in effect it was not stolen or pillaged by white British colonizers during that era.
With anger rising in the Pokomo community and in neighboring Uganda, which is also a victim of stolen artifacts, the Pokomo is getting ready to reach out to Caribbean governments through the umbrella CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC) for help in increasing the pressure on the arrogant stance of the British. The museum in the past has advanced flimsy arguments that the drum would be better preserved by its facility and exposed to thousands of gawking visitors every year rather than being in possession of a remote people in a remote region along the Tana River in Kenya. The British have also stoutly refused to return it despite approaches by Pokomo leaders. The absence of the Ngadji is linked to the belief that it has stripped the Pokomo of who they were, as the elderly with links to its present and past are dying out.
Only one Pokomo leader, Mkidjo Baiba, has had the privilege of seeing the drum in more than 100 years and that was back in 2013. “Only one man has seen it and has touched it in more than 100 years and it was quite an emotional experience,“ said Dr. Makorani Mungase who with other scholars and activists is leading the effort to recapture the Ngadji, to the AmNews at the weekend.
“We cannot rest on our laurels and allow other people to have our artifacts. I will go to all lengths possible to get Ngadji back because it is not an item which is supposed to stay where it is. It is of importance to my people and of greater importance than the museum. It is of no value to them. The value to us is immense. To them [it] is cowhide. That is the Picasso of my people. Therefore, it is priceless. With all the support we have on the ground and in Caricom, I believe we will get it home,” he said.
He said the Brits also have some smaller, less significant drums in a “ramshackle and dilapidated state,” so it would be unthinkable for the Pokomo to have voluntarily surrendered the much larger and symbolically important Ngadji to anyone outside of the community as it is possessed and held only by the royal king. “The other ones are simply trinkets. They have to acknowledge it is ours. It belongs to only one person and one community. [At] one point, the British were talking about joint ownership. That point is not for discussion, not the ownership of it. We now have to tell the international community that this person has taken my property and does not want to give it back. The royal nation will go to all lengths to get it back,” said Mungase. “They have no valuable use for it. It is like a fire attracting the moths.”
Even closer collaboration is being planned with the Caricom commission and other reparatory justice movements across the globe as a showdown with a still imperialistic British Museum leadership looms in the coming months.
