The lecture focuses on an object from Cameroon housed in the Berlin Ethnological Museum. The Bamoun kingdom throne, which Berlin museum catalogs call "Mandu Yenu", "rich in pearls", is 1.74 m high, made of a wooden core covered with a fabric woven with glass pearls. It arrived in Berlin in 1908, as a diplomatic gift from the Imperial Government of Cameroon to Kaiser Wilhelm II. Two years earlier, however, the director of Berlin's museums had asked a colonial officer to suggest that the Bamoun chief offer his throne to the German emperor. It was a time of imperialist competition for collections, against a backdrop of international competition with the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro and the British Museum.
Who owns the throne? The first position is that "to give is to give", and that restitution would be tantamount to writing history in reverse. But in a context of colonial violence and asymmetry of power - Cameroon was one of the few German colonies - can we really speak of a gift? Today, this object is particularly contested in Berlin. Certainly, by being displayed in a museum, the object loses its political function as a throne, but it is also local craft practices that are affected, since, with this model in Berlin, Cameroonian craftsmen can no longer continue to develop their art locally. One solution would be to make a copy of the throne and return the original, but could a copy in a Berlin museum resolve these concerns about belonging?
