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Sacred totems returned to Kenya
BU official is link to ambassador
By Marcella Bombardieri, Globe Staff | June 26, 2007
It is said that coastal Kenyan villagers, the Mijikenda, have been plagued for decades by the theft of their sacred memorial totems, plucked brazenly from family lands and sold to Western art collectors. The villagers believe that tragedy befalls those who lose their totems, called vigango.
Yesterday, Boston University played a key role in the rare return of nine vigango to the Kenyan ambassador in an emotional handoff at the United Nations. The Kenyan government plans to try to find the rightful owners.
Charles Stith, the former US ambassador to Tanzania who runs BU's African Presidential Archives and Research Center, hopes the move will encourage US museums to return the hundreds of vigango they now possess. The artifacts have been collected in the past by such celebrities as Andy Warhol, Gene Hackman, and Linda Evans.
"This is a huge fight, and we are at the very beginning of turning it around," said Connecticut art dealer Kelly Gingras, who realized the value of the statues when she Googled them. "Nobody owns these except the families. Are you going to buy my grandfather's tombstone?"
The story starts with a colorful Manhattan couple who collected art in their spare time for their Park Avenue apartment. Jay Presson Allen, who died last year, was a pioneering female screenwriter who adapted "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" for stage and cinema and the musical "Cabaret" for the big screen. Her husband, Lewis M. Allen, who died in 2003, was a Tony-award winning Broadway producer responsible for the musical "Annie."
The family first traveled to Kenya in the early 1970s so Jay Presson Allen could research a movie project, said the couple's daughter, Brooke Allen, a literary critic. The movie was never made, but the family made friends in the country and returned many times.
Brooke Allen said she believes her parents bought the nine vigango on one of their trips in the 1980s and had no idea that the totems were stolen or considered sacred. They were displayed in the Allens' living room.
When Allen decided to sell her parents' art collection, Gingras initially appraised them as worth $8,000 to $10,000 apiece, Allen said. But then she Googled the word vigango and found a trove of websites.
"I was like, 'Oh, my gosh, there's no way I can sell them,' " Gingras said.
As soon as Gingras told her what the totems were, Allen agreed they should be returned. For four months, they tried to reach Kenyan authorities.
Finally, someone told them to call Stith, who frequently brings former African presidents to visit BU. He happened to have an appointment to meet the Kenyan ambassador the next day.
Stith ruled out exhibiting the vigango at BU before sending them home. "They are treated as objects of art by people outside the continent, but these are sacred objects," he said. "We are compelled to treat them as what they are."
Elaborately carved wooden totems, 4- to 6-feet tall and depicting an abstract male form, vigango (the singular term is kigango ) pay tribute to deceased male elders who belonged to a semisecret fraternal society, according to a 2003 paper in American Anthropologist, which sounded the alarm over looting.
They aren't supposed to be disturbed, even if the family moves away. Families have attributed death, crop failure, and even insanity to curses brought on by the theft of vigango.
But Ernie Wolfe, the dealer who brought many vigango into the United States and wrote a 1986 book about them, said the anthropologists have mischaracterized them.
He said they have no sacred value once a family leaves the land. Families are often grateful to sell them for extra cash, he said.
"I think it's fairly ridiculous," said Wolfe, owner of the Ernie Wolfe Gallery in Los Angeles.
"They are allowed to fall down in the forest, or they're burned in slash and burn agriculture," he said.
Despite Stith's concerns about displaying the vigango, Kenyan Ambassador Peter Ogego, said they will go on exhibit at the Nairobi Museum.
There's a good chance the family who owns them can be found, since each clan uses its own design, he said.
Coincidentally, the Illinois State Museum and Hampton University Museum in Virginia has just returned a pair of them after two anthropologists traced the Kenyan owners.
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