|
Museum returns stolen kigango
14/09/2006 10:55 - (SA)
Springfield - The Illinois State Museum sent a memorial, known as a "kigango", back to its original owners in Kenya on Wednesday.
A Kenyan official believed it was the first time a museum had returned a stolen African artifact to its rightful owners.
The story began 20 years ago in Kenya with one family's grief. Now it would end where it began, but this time with the family celebrating the return of a stolen memorial to a dead relative.
Suleiman Shakombo, Kenya's minister of national heritage, said: "I commend them for this bold and unprecedented initiative, the first of its kind indeed."
The kigango was one of two erected by Kalume Mwakiru to honour his dead brothers.
Dealers can get $5 000
Mwakiru's family had suffered a series of misfortunes - the death of livestock, bad harvests, illnesses, and nightmares - and he believed honouring his brothers would end the family's problems.
The 1.3-metre tall kigango was a post with a vaguely human shape, decorated with blue paint and strips of cloth. But, in 1985, two years after the memorials were erected, someone stole them.
Experts said thieves could sell them to Kenyan souvenir shops for perhaps $50. The shops then would sell them to art dealers for several hundred dollars. The dealers could get $5 000 from American collectors.
Anthropologist Monica Udvardy, who had traced the memorial's path, said this particular kigango wound up in a California art dealership and was purchased by actor Powers Boothe, who donated it and seven others to Illinois State University.
University closes museum
The university closed its museum and transferred its collection, including the kigango, to Illinois State Museum in Springfield in 2001.
Udvardy and fellow anthropologist Linda Giles said nearly 300 of the memorials called "vigango" when talking about more than one - were owned by American museums.
There was generally no way to figure out where they originated or whether they were stolen or somehow obtained legitimately. But, Mwakiru's family was lucky.
Udvardy, while doing research in Kenya, had photographed Mwakiru standing alongside the memorials just before they were stolen. She knew they had been taken and, years later, spotted one during a slide presentation at a conference on African studies.
With Udvardy's photo as proof that they had once owned the kigango, Mwakiru's family stepped forward to ask the Illinois State Museum to return it.
Mwakiru, who died in 1987, was terribly upset after the two memorials were stolen.
|
News
