“German-Cameroonian relations are good and are maintained within the framework of regular contacts at government and parliamentary level.” This is what the website of the Federal Foreign Office says. At the end of the article about the relationship between the former colonial power Germany and the former “protected area” Cameroon follows the somewhat strange note that no guarantee can be given for the correctness and completeness of the information. But the ministerial caution does not even seem exaggerated, because at the moment there is a lot of crunching in the diplomatic framework: the German embassy in Yaoundé is being confronted with the accusation of “structural racism”.
Albert Gouaffo, professor of German studies and intercultural communication at the University of Dschang, raised this accusation. Three scholars from his Cameroonian team were scheduled to attend a conference that the Five Continents Museum, the former State Museum of Ethnology in Munich, was planning to complete a provenance research project on the collection of Max von Stetten, the commander of Imperial German troops in Cameroon. But the German embassy complained that a dean did not have a birth certificate, apparently had doubts about the willingness of a scientist to return to her home country after the end of the conference, and rejected the visa applications. The fact that Cameroon, like more than a hundred other countries, is considered a high-risk area does not seem to have played a role.
Colonial policy slap in the face
Bénédicte Savoy, one of the leading voices in the field of the restitution debate and the decolonization of European museums, complains that the “restrictive visa policy of Germany and the EU” is once again counteracting research on objects from colonial contexts. In fact, the situation is paradoxical: the German state, in the form of its passport and visa office in Yaoundé, prevents Cameroonian scientists from attending a conference on German-Cameroonian history, which a German museum organizes and that the German state, in the form of the center for cultural property losses, supports and promotes.
Bénédicte Savoy called the justification for the message “questionable” on Twitter. Deutschlandfunk Kultur quotes from one of the rejection notices and speaks of a “colonial-political slap in the face” for the scientists from Cameroon. But the slap in the face also hits her German colleagues, because an adequate scientific approach to colonial history is hardly possible and makes little sense without the participation of scientists from the former colonial areas. The researchers from Cameroon will now only be able to take part in the conference via video feed.
The Max von Stettens collection, which also goes back to brutal punitive expeditions under von Stetten’s command, comprises around two hundred objects. The best-known of these is the so-called “Blaue Reiter Post”, a richly decorated house post that the artist group “Blauer Reiter” included in their almanac in 1912. How von Stetten came into possession of the post, what its carving motifs mean, who created it for whom – almost nothing is known about all this, even a hundred and ten years later.
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