A Lending Museum: The Movement of Objects and the Impact of the Museum Space in the Grassfields (Cameroon)

all photos by author unless otherwise noted

The Grassfields region of Cameroon is home to many museums. In a region that is known for its prolific, well-studied, vibrant arts and cultures, museums have been a part of the cultural landscape for nearly one hundred years. The earliest examples are the Musée des Arts et Traditions Bamoums and the Foumban Palace Museum, both of which opened in the 1920s.¹ Since their creation, other kingdoms throughout the region have been constantly building, opening, and renovating museums.² Many kingdoms in the Grassfields have independently invested in their museums or sought financial support from NGOs. In 1999, the Centro Oreintamento Educativo (COE) initiated a project that has played a pivotal role in the renovation or development of four such palace museums: the Mankon, Baham, Bandjoun, and Babungo Museums.³

COE is a nongovernmental organization based in Barzio, Italy, that seeks to support the arts and culture in developing nations around the world. According to the project website, the Grassfields region was selected as a focus for this COE initiative because it is an area “where the heritage is the richest and where the dangers of dispersion and decline of the objects of art are therefore more numerous.”⁴ Having narrowed the search to the Grassfields region for this reason, the art historian attached to the project, Jean-Paul Notué, chose five kingdoms from a field of nearly two hundred to participate in the museum project, only four of which fully realized the completion of building a museum.⁵ He selected them based upon four criteria: “the presence of a significant heritage; the willingness of the traditional authorities to allow the study and social enjoyment of the objects belonging to the heritage of their communities; the degree of the desire and wishes of the place to have a modern and suitable museum; the commitment of the traditional authorities to put an appropriate building at the disposal of the project and on schedule” (Notué and Triaca 2006b:15).

The objects in these Grassfields museums are multidimensional: they function as indicators of heritage; they embody personal histories and memories; they represent the pride and prestige of the kingdom and its people; and the individual objects work as part of a larger whole to communicate reimagined narratives of kingdom, tradition, and history. Yet some of the objects in Grassfields museums gain added meaning outside of the museum space. All of the Grassfields museums organized by the COE loan objects to the public so that these items may fulfill ritual functions. As such, these so-called living museums function as storerooms, lenders, conservators, educators, and protectors and arbiters of culture and heritage. This policy means the museum objects will remain functional in ritual settings. The “traditional” meanings of these objects are retained through their continued functionality, but never again can this meaning be viewed as a singular, or necessarily primary, meaning. Notué stresses that prior to their inclusion in the museum, the value of these works could have been “religious, social, political, mythical, or economic, or more than one of these together” (2006:63) and the act of moving these objects to the museum space makes them increasingly multifaceted.

In this article, I will examine various types of objects and their layered meanings from two museums located in the Anglophone Northwest Region of the Grassfields⁶: the Mankon Museum and Babungo Museum. The focus will be on the movement of objects to and from the museum sphere and the ways in which the works of art are affected as they move in and out of the museum and ritual spheres in the kingdom due to the lending policies of the museums. Specific instances when works are borrowed from the museum will be examined in detail, as well as groups of objects that are loaned in the event of annual festivals. In each case, the ways in which objects are used and understood elucidates the complexity of the object, as well as the complex nature of the museum space itself.