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German Lost Art Foundation Berlin Branch Office
The Linden-Museum Stuttgart and the German Lost Art Foundation will begin a research project on cultural heritage from Cameroon on 1 November 2025. The subject of the research are important holdings in Germany’s five largest ethnographic collections: the Linden-Museum Stuttgart, the Ethnologisches Museum der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, the Staatliche Ethnographische Sammlungen Sachsen (SES) with its museums in Leipzig and Dresden as well as the Museum am Rothenbaum – Kulturen und Künste der Welt (MARKK).
The main focus is on cultural belongings from four Cameroonian communities, the Bakoko, Bamum, Duala, and Maka, whose heritage was absorbed by these institutions during the German colonial era (1884-1919). The objective of the research project is to identify related objects across the different institutions and trace their history accordingly. This should also become a basis for future restitutions.
The project is funded by the German Lost Art Foundation with a sum of almost 1 million Euro. It will run for three years and focus on circa five hundred royal or power objects such as thrones, sceptres, or swords – symbols of sovereignty which the German colonisers had removed from the source communities. In cooperation with experts from the Cameroonian communities and researchers from the university of Dschang, the university of Bertoua, and the National Museum of Cameroon, the reconstruction of the provenance of the objects will be attempted. In the process, perspectives and narratives from the people of Cameroon will play an important part: In “community hubs”, that is local meeting points in Duala, Fumban, Edea, and Atok, permanent locations for dialogue are planned so that descendants of non-royal families can also have their say. At the end of the project, the findings will also not be presented in Stuttgart to begin with but in Cameroon, so that access is given to the local population.
This community-oriented approach does not take the activities of (European) “collectors” as its starting point but the source communities, focusing on their experiences. The project is intended to result in an image database and a multi-language publication accompanying the objects. Research results and images will be published online. The results form the basis for the content of a large exhibition which is subsequently planned for display at the Linden-Museum and in Cameroon.
The period of German colonialism in the area of today’s Cameroon lasted from 1884 to 1919 and was marked by oppression and excessive violence against the population, which also led to plunder. Overall, more than 40,000 objects from Cameroon are held by German museums today, with a large part acquired by violent appropriation during the colonial era. Most of these collections have never been the subject of scholarly research. The Linden-Museum in Stuttgart has the largest collection of cultural goods from Cameroon in Germany. It still retains over 8,000 objects, even though half of these collections were destroyed in World War II.
