ECAS 2013

In the last quarter of the 19th century, Henry M. Stanley explored/visited the Eastern Africa, the Great Lakes region, and the Congo River Basin. He did so first as a newspaper special correspondent, then on account of King Leopold II. Concurrently, French expeditions, in particular by Marche, Compiègne, and Italian born de Brazza, as well as traders, missionaries and travellers penetrated from the Atlantic Western Coast inwards. All of them collected pieces for themselves or on commission.

This paper will concentrate on Henry M. Stanley's Collection of African Art (mostly statues, and weaponry), as : (i) he assembled, and kept it; and (ii) it was auctioned in London, in 2002. Analyzing how Stanley gathered the collection, as well as how it was marketed and dispersed during the auction help reveal the various trends at work:

- The historical shifts in the perception of legalities while constituting a collection in the late 1800s compared to nowadays and their legal impact;

- The lack of attention paid by the collectors on the grey areas of their collecting ;

- how history and the flow of time inherently are turning grey collections into white, and debatable, gatherings;

- Shifts of gaze and attention to the criteria of what makes a collecting process satisfactory.

Quite apart from the cultural factors at work in nowaday collecting, analysing these trends helps to assess and quantify how time becomes the best and unavoidable filtering agent of any "Art" Collection.

The ethical issues surrounding the publication and photographing of African art objects, a concern of all fieldworkers since the 1960s, has been borne out by the number of those objects later found in Western collections. In recent years scholarly interest has shifted to the trajectories which lie between these disappearances and reappearances. This paper traces a group of Idoma masks and figure sculpture documented by the author 25 years ago in a Nigerian village which have now turned up in Paris, LA and elsewhere. It compares their first and second careers and proposes an explanation of their movement from one to the other, which includes among other things, their inclusion in the author's SOAS PhD thesis, but also the impoverishment of rural Nigerians by the IMF's Structural Adjustment Programs.

In the fall of last year, I was invited to assess a collection of Cameroonian art that a private collector was offering to museums for sale. The material - all from western Cameroon - was amassed over the course of 5 years by an American medical doctor. This gentleman, in the course of his medical activity in Cameroon, had been struck by the "discovery" of "ancient" Tikar bronzes and set up to acquire the "monopoly of the culture" as a form of cultural and monetary investment. Since the amassment of over 8,000 objects, the collector has proceeded to hire scholars form African and the US to write the story of the unacknowledged ancient civilization, now mainly in his possession. This paper analyzes the how this collection was built and the following attempts to prove its legitimacy and value. In particular I will focus on the crucial role of local middlemen and lawyers in creating a compelling myth, and the shrewd decision to manipulate history and visibility through scholarly publications and political alliances in Cameroon. While the collection is still lingering in a large warehouse in the US, this story is emblematic of the attempt of inventing historical legitimacy and value for material created expressly to satisfy a market demand.

In this paper I propose a comparative perspective on the 'communicating-vessels-system' frame in relation to two shadow trade networks: rural diggers of ancient sites in Southern Mali and street vendors of tourist art and counterfeited brands in Rome. Farmers-diggers of the Baniko region represent the first link of the illegal trade of Malian antiquities (terracotta statuettes and bronzes). The social organization of these networks underlies hierarchical relationships based on economic dependence of diggers from local middlemen and urban antiquaries as well as a compartmentalized division of labour nourished by urban merchants. In a specular manner Senegalese street vendors in Rome are actors 'from the ground' of the international circulation of tourist art and 'fakes'. Nevertheless, in most of cases, they seem having room to manoeuvre because of a large choice of wholesalers, suppliers and little 'bosses' assuring the fragmentation of the sources of information (and consequently of power), and a diversified range of clients (shop keepers, weekly petty traders, peers, individual customers, etc). My aim is to demonstrate that the 'communicating-vessels-system' ruling these networks is all the more rigid since the nature of 'illegal' items is based on a monopolized management of knowledge and information on the whole chain. In particular I explore degrees of hierarchy in the links of these trade chains showing that hierarchy is directly proportional to the size of 'strong' and 'weak' links of the chain, to degrees of economic dependence in trust relationships, and to stylistic constraints.