Who does it really belong to? The Mandu Yenu throne is part of the collection of the Ethnological Museum Berlin.
Image: Dietrich Graf/SMB
Forty thousand objects from Cameroon are in German museums. Much of it is colonial spoils of war, as an anthology edited by Bénédicte Savoy suggests. Historical truth is more complicated.
Dhe Kamerun Hall is one of the largest exhibition rooms in Berlin’s Humboldt Forum. Right at the entrance is one of its main attractions, an elongated wooden drum in the shape of an imaginary animal from the Cameroonian grasslands, which, according to an object plaque, was “collected around 1906 by Hans Glauning”, a German colonial officer, and a year later by the Ethnographic Museum in Berlin was “acquired”. Numerous other objects from the west and north-west of Cameroon follow, including doorposts, stools, wooden statues, an elaborately carved boat prow, royal pipes and necklaces, which were also “collected” by Glauning and other officers of the German Schutztruppe at the beginning of the last century and then sent to Berlin reached.
The showpiece of the hall is the Mandu Yenu, the throne decorated with animal and human figures made of glass beads and cowrie shells, which the Bamum king Njoya “gave”, as the museum text puts it, to the German Emperor Wilhelm II in 1908, apparently for the word to avoid “given”. Glauning was also involved in this gift as a personal friend of Njoya.
