Selling Authenticity in the Bamum Kingdom in 1929–1930

Note: Due to a last-minute copy-editing error, this article went to press with the ethnonym "Bamum" spelled (inconsistently) "Bamun." Fine’s preferred spelling is "Bamum," and we have changed all electronic versions of the issue of the journal to reflect that. This is the version of record.

In February 1930, Eugène Pittard, the director of the ethnological museum in Geneva, sought to expand his museum’s collections in an unusual manner. Instead of sponsoring an expedition to Africa or acquiring objects from former missionaries, instead of buying from established dealers in ethnographic specimens or the newer galleries that specialized in l’art nègre, Pittard wrote to an African man in Africa, a Bamum man named Mosé Yeyap (Pittard 1930) (Fig. 1).¹

Yeyap was the head of the relatively new artisanat in Foumban, a school and artists’ cooperative founded in 1927, and he was known as a key figure for collectors seeking to acquire works of art from the Bamum kingdom. Pittard’s letter explained that he “would like to assemble … as true a picture as possible of the population of which you are a part, that is to say of the material life of this population. I am sending you by the same post [a list of] the kinds of things that would be the most interesting to have” (Pittard 1930). Pittard explained pointedly, “I insist on one point: Our intent is to have the oldest objects; those which have not been subjected to European influence.” He then listed for Yeyap the kinds of objects he had in mind: “sculpted wood masks, statues, sculpted horns, etc. … sculpted drums with carved animals or other designs. Miss Debarge [a physician known both to Pittard and Yeyap] showed me drawings on paper that you made of sculptures. Is it possible to have these sculptures themselves?” (Pittard 1930).

Pittard’s letter, of course, epitomizes how European arrogance and fantasy informed the collection of African art in the first decades of the twentieth century. Pittard condescendingly and absurdly schooled Yeyap about Yeyap’s own culture and, by privileging his desire for “the oldest objects,” those supposedly untouched by “European influence,” Pittard revealed his adherence to the chimerical “ideal” of African cultures as isolated in time and space.

In a fascinating twist, however, we also have Yeyap’s response to Pittard. Yeyap answered back:

I thank you for honoring us by wanting to show our country in the Geneva Ethnographic Museum. I myself am especially interested in what characterizes the tribe to which we belong. I try to give back to our people a taste for all the works of decoration with which our fathers decorated their houses. I am sending by the same post a number of drawings done by the students of the artisanal school. I will endeavor to search for very old objects, but because they are rare and precious to us, I will wait to send them ...

(Yeyap 1930).²

Yeyap did not challenge Pittard head on. Instead, his letter adopted and reflected back some of Pittard’s points of view— such as the idea that older Bamum objects were particularly “rare and precious”—while also subtly shifting the discursive terrain. Instead of making available older objects, Yeyap offered to provide Pittard with newer works from the artisanat, such as drawings.³

The exchange between the two men provides a concrete example of how African actors, in this case Mosé Yeyap, were enmeshed as coproducers in the elaborate fantasies about authenticity and African objects that Europeans and North Americans were so eager to spin in the first decades of the twentieth century (Osayimwese 2013). These fantasies, of course, have been a significant factor in shaping art historical scholarship and the preferences of individual and institutional collections of African art in Europe and North America. Although art historical discourse has paid more attention to how and why such fantasies were projected onto Africans and objects from Africa, this article, by examining a group of works from the Bamum kingdom from the late 1920s, centers the field of inquiry on the strategies African actors...