Germany returns two indigenous masks to Colombia

Germany handed over to Colombia on Friday two masks of the indigenous Kogi people that had been in the collection of a Berlin museum for more than a century, in another step toward returning historic artifacts as European nations reassess their colonial past.

The wooden “solar masks”, dating back to the mid-15th century, were handed over to Colombian President Gustavo Petro at the presidential palace in Berlin. The authorities of the Berlin museum maintained contact for several years with Colombia, which last year officially requested its return.

“We know that the masks are sacred to the Kogi,” who live in northern Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said at the handover ceremony. “May these masks have a safe journey back to where they are needed and where they remain today as a bridge between people and nature.”

Petro celebrated the return of the masks and expressed the hope that more pieces can be recovered.

Konrad Theodor Preuss, who was curator of the predecessor of the current Ethnological Museum in Berlin, bought the masks in 1915 during a long study trip to Colombia in which he accumulated more than 700 objects. According to the body that runs the museums of the German capital, he did not know its age or that its sale was prohibited.

“This restitution is part of how we rethink our colonial past, a process that has started in many European countries,” Steinmeier said. “And I applaud the fact that Germany is playing a leading role in this.”

Governments and museums in Europe and North America are increasingly trying to resolve ownership disputes over objects looted in colonial times.

Last year, Germany and Nigeria signed an agreement to pave the way for the return of hundreds of statuettes known as the Benin Bronzes, removed from Africa by a British colonial expedition more than 120 years ago. Nigerian authorities hope other countries that have the artifacts will follow suit.

Hermann Parzinger, head of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees the Ethnological Museum and others in Berlin, said the context is particularly complex in the case of the Kogi masks.

They were not “robbed in a violent context,” and Colombia had long been an independent country, he stressed. Preuss bought them from the heir of a Kogi priest, who “apparently had no right to sell these masks”—so the purchase “was not entirely correct.”

“But there is another aspect to this discussion of colonial contexts, which is the rights of indigenous peoples,” Parzinger said. A 2007 UN resolution says that artifacts of spiritual and cultural importance to indigenous groups must be returned, she noted.

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