Review essay: Meyer, A. & Savoy, B. 2023. Atlas de l'absence. Le patrimoine culturel du Cameroun en Allemagne. Berlin, ed. Reimer

Abstract

Before the publication of the book ‘Atlas de l'absence. Le patrimoine culturel du Cameroun en Allemagne’ (Meyer & Savoy 2023), no one could have imagined the sheer scale of Cameroon's cultural heritage held in public collections in Germany: some 40,000 artefacts. Faced with this immense corpus, acquired under often unequal conditions, the authors raise not only the paradoxical problem of the glaring lack of museographic documentation in Germany – scientific publications, catalogues, museum guides and systematic inventory lists – but also that of loss, amnesia or progressive memory loss in Cameroon. Between 2019 and 2023, a so-called “reverse history of collections” approach was systematised, aiming at a decolonisation of German-centred archival knowledge, coupled with research into provenance based on the relatively resilient oral traditions in Cameroon. The result is an argument that has epistemologically reconnected the collections with a sometimes chaotic set of intertemporal and intercontextual archival data, but which is vulnerable to a lack of specialisation in fundamental research on ancient African arts, considerably limiting or watering down the ethnographic counter-argument. 

Keywords: cultural property; translocation; public museum; Cameroon; Germany.