Goethe-Institut hosts dialogue on African art restitution
When the Goethe-Institut’s scheduled screening and discussion of Ghanaian film director Nii Kwate Owoo’s You Hide Me documentary comes off on August 7, 2024, at the German Cultural Centre’s Cantonments premises in Accra, guests will have the opportunity to see more than the 16-minute award-winning film.
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They will also see excerpts from the filmmaker’s coverage of the recent return of looted Asante kingdom treasures from the Fowler Museum at the University of California in Los Angeles, United States, and Victoria & Albert (V & A) and British Museum in the United Kingdom.
The material, stolen by British colonisers in the 19th century, is now on display at the Manhyia Palace Museum in Kumasi.
Nii Owoo says looking back on his 1970 documentary about the stolen priceless African artworks stashed away in secret, underground vaults in foreign museums and his call for them to be handed back, he feels exonerated by the recent return of items from the US and UK.
Seen as controversial and ahead of its time then, You Hide Me focuses on the plunder and concealment of rare African art in wooden boxes and plastic bags at the basement of the British Museum.
“I was the one who first sounded the alarm about the stolen works and the issue of restitution. I was the first to stir debate about the issue through You Hide Me,” Nii Owoo proudly says.
Looted artefacts
A section of the narration by Nii Owoo in You Hide Me states: “How can the governments of independent African states explain to the generation now growing up that they cannot see their cultural heritage in their own countries? We the people of Africa and of African descent demand that our works of art, which embody our history, our civilisation, our religion and culture, are immediately and unconditionally returned to us!”
He felt it was necessary to follow up and document the return of some of the stolen works from the US and UK. The Goethe-Institut sponsored him and his film crew twice to Kumasi to capture the return process. The idea is to edit the Kumasi footage into another documentary tentatively titled You Can’t Hide Me.
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Nii Owoo is excited that people of Asante ancestry will see, first-hand, how creative their forebears were.
He also sees the partial return of the stolen art pieces, under whatever conditions for now, as a worthy tribute to the current Asantehene as his predecessors also tried to bring back such items but were not successful.
According to Goethe-Institut’s Cultural Programmes Officer, John Owoo, the support to facilitate filming of the arrival of the looted artefacts formed part of the German cultural outfit’s ongoing collaboration with local artists and filmmakers.
This idea of returning looted African art is being talked about all over Europe and other places. All countries which have some of the plundered stuff are part of the discussion. Germany also has a substantial quantity of those items.
“I was in a museum in Hamburg, Germany, in 2023, where they were exhibiting artefacts due to be returned to Benin State in Nigeria. They were stuff originally picked up by some British folks, which eventually ended up in Germany,” John Owoo said.
Apart from Nii Kwate Owoo, also due to be part of the Goethe-Institut’s screening and discussion programme are economist/writer Ivor Agyeman-Duah and art historian Prof. Benedicte Savoy from the Technical University of Berlin, Germany. Archeologist Dr Gertrude Aba Mensah Eyifa-Dzidzienyo will be the moderator at the 7 p.m. free entry event.
Prof. Benedicte Savoy is an authority on the pillage of art treasures by colonisers. Her book, Africa’s Struggle for its Art- History of a Postcolonial Defeat, contains a chapter dedicated to You Hide Me. She invited Nii Owoo to Berlin in June 2023, where he led a discussion on the content of his film at the Archival Assembly #2 Festival in Berlin.
launch
Nii Owoo will be back in Berlin in September this year for the launch of a 4K resolution version of You Hide Me. In his view, though many in Ghana don’t seem to know about You Hide Me, it is still an important tool in campaigns around the world for the return of artworks pillaged from Africa during the colonial era.
One of Nii Owoo’s immediate pursuits now is to have You Hide Me, which won the Best Short Documentary Film trophy at the Paris International Short Film Festival in 2020, translated into some African languages.
He has started with a Twi version with help from Prof. Kofi Agyekum of the University of Ghana, Legon. That version will hopefully be launched in Kumasi before other Ghanaian languages are dealt with.
“I’m determined to do what I can in filmmaking and leave that as my legacy,” says Nii Owoo, who has over 50 years of experience in the film production arena.
