PreserveCast: Come along with us as we explore the broad world of preservation and the work being done to preserve, interpret, and save our past in a 21st century world. From aquaculture to historic foodways to forensic modeling, we're talking weekly with experts from across the globe. This is your host, Nick Redding. Welcome to Preservecast. Did you know that the Campaign for Historic Trades, which is powered by Preservation Maryland, is the sponsor of three registered apprenticeship programs? The campaign also hosts workshops across the nation, maybe even one in your backyard. Visit historictrades.org to learn more and find a way to learn a trade. This is Nick Redding, your listener at PreserveCast. Today, we have one of those topics that I just love to bring to PreserveCast because It was new for me and if it's new for me, I hope it's new for some other listeners out there. ⁓ And it's just so exciting to dive into something like that and learn from a different perspective. We're going to be talking about a new book out called Africa's Buildings, Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage. And we're going to be talking with the author, Dr. Itoha Osaemese, who is a professor ⁓ and of history and art and architecture and urban studies at Brown University, where she is an affiliate faculty in Africana studies at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. ⁓ And she's also the author of Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany and the editor of German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies. ⁓ And what a absolute pleasure to have the opportunity to sit down and talk with her. and ⁓ understand more about ⁓ this really important topic. Before we dive into it though, ⁓ we love to get to know the people that we're talking to. ⁓ this is an interesting perspective on preservation. And I think it's made more interesting because of your background as well, ⁓ which is an important part of the story. comes through in the book. ⁓ And I would love to get to know you. Tell us a little bit Ito about where you grew up and how that shaped your interest in the work that you do today. Absolutely. Thank you for that introduction. I'm super excited to be here. So I have a little bit of an unusual background. I was born in Nigeria, southwestern Nigeria specifically, in a city called Ibadan, which is one of the oldest kind of indigenous West African cities. ⁓ And my parents were from two different countries. My father was from Nigeria and my mother was from Barbados in the Caribbean. And that really sort of, of course, inflected, inflects my own sort of history, my interest and so on. So was born in Nigeria. I went to school there until I was about 13 years old in several different parts of the country. And then when I was 13, my family moved mainly for economic reasons to Europe. And so I went to high school in Vienna in an international school, English speaking, but I did learn German there. So German is more or less my second language. And then from high school in Vienna, I went to college in the United States. I went to Bryn Mawr College just outside of Philadelphia. and then graduate school at Rice University in Houston, Texas. And then I completed my schooling with my PhD at the University of Michigan and Arbor. ⁓ so very per, you know, itinerants, suppose you could say upbringing. ⁓ I've been in the U S for many years now, but I consider the United States, Barbados and Nigeria all to be my homes. yeah. I mean, well, I want to read that book. Right? Like, no, I'm not even joking. Like, that just sounds like a really fascinating sort of series of experiences, you know, because Rice University and Vienna, I probably couldn't be more different. ⁓ So and obviously that, you know, shapes all of this. During all of those varied experiences was architecture and art and history. always a passion, always an interest? Did you kind of know like this is where I'm headed or were you on the path to become something else and then took a detour? Yeah, no, it was always where I was headed on various levels. First of all, as I said, I grew up in the city that was like a historical city. And then within that city, I grew up on a college campus. And so in other parts of the world, not in the United States primarily, in other parts of the world, college campuses, are basically cities in which the professors live, the students live, staff members live. They're kind of like gated communities. So I grew up on one of those and it was a designed college campus, designed sort of in the mid 20th century by a famous British architects couple, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew. And so the house I grew up in, I mean, I didn't know it at the time, but I always thought, okay, well, certainly my experience living on this campus, growing up on this campus, the kinds of buildings around me, very different from the historical city outside of the gates and hedges of the campus. So I always knew there was something unique about that. Of course, later on, I found out all about the architects and all of that. So that really, I think, is the beginning of my story of becoming interested in the built environment, just living. in a place that was very intentionally designed. ⁓ And even as a young child, that was evidence to me. And then I had an uncle sort of in my early teens who was an architect. So it's kind of the stereotypical architecture, architect origin story. I knew someone, I liked playing with blocks and building things. This is all actually all true for me. So my uncle he'd gone to MIT and he was the only person I knew who actually had studied architecture and he designed his own house and I thought it was like a modernist house like all white flat roofs. This is in Nigeria, right? And it was an amazing house. And so I was inspired by that. You know, I used to ⁓ sort of ⁓ for my mother's birthday, I would like make models of like a you know, built out of cardboard for her as a birthday present when I was little. So, I mean, generally, I was probably headed in that direction. I ended up going to college to study chemistry, Okay, so there is, because I was going to say it seems like a more clear version of this than we normally get, you know, sometimes people are like, ⁓ well, first I did this thing and then I found my way. This seems very straightforward, except for this diversion to chemistry. Right. So I knew I wanted to study architecture, but it seemed that it was primarily a second degree. And I do think it is largely a second degree, even though you can study architecture as an undergrad, you still need a graduate degree in architecture. ⁓ so what I decided to do with the encouragement of my parents, they were like, well, you do really well in chemistry in school. Why don't you go study chemistry? I was like, OK, sure, I'll go study chemistry. So I went to college to study chemistry. I was taking all those chemistry classes, you know, the scary ones, organic chemistry and things like that. And, you know, I was doing okay in them, but I wasn't enjoying them. And I was taking all of these history of architecture courses as electives just for fun. And eventually, like by sophomore year, I realized I pretty much had the full major in the history of architecture. And I really did not like my chemistry classes. So I called my parents, because I was an international student. My parents were in Austria and Vienna, and I was here in the US and just outside Philadelphia. And I said, you know, I'm going to switch majors. And they said, why? said, well, you know, I really don't like this chemistry thing. And they said, but you're doing OK. And I said, yeah, but imagine how much better I would do if I actually enjoyed what I was doing. So that was the beginning of like, you know, ⁓ yeah, the kind of pathway towards becoming an architectural historian. I I knew just like a little tiny piece of this, having read the book. I mean, you refer obviously growing up in Africa, but this level of detail paints an even greater picture and it makes more it makes even more sense about why you wrote what you wrote. Right. I mean, because like it comes through that like this is like almost the perfect book for you to write in a way, right? Because it's like you are going to all these different places where this takes place in the book. ⁓ And so you've seen it from so many different perspectives. just, it really comes through and it's wonderful in that way. For people who obviously haven't read the book yet, we'll put a link in the show notes where you can pick it up. I was telling Ito before that ⁓ one of my major pet peeves with academic presses oftentimes is there's not enough good photography and this one you blew it out of the park like there's just beautiful ⁓ color photography which is rare to see and it's in you know there's a bunch of it and it really ⁓ illustrates in a way a book that is is so ⁓ visually important to understand what you're talking about particularly if you're not familiar with it ⁓ and so it's wonderful pick up a copy of it we'll put the links in the show notes ⁓ for people who aren't familiar with it though ⁓ You know, we're obviously talking about cultural displacement and displacement of architecture of Africa's actual buildings. ⁓ Where did the impetus come for writing this book on the heels of the other ones that you wrote? Where did this all come together? Right. That's a good way to frame the question because it does come on the heels of, you know, previous work I'd done and other books I'd written, which were about sort of the history of know, colonialism as it intersects with the built environment, ⁓ looking at, you know, the buildings that colonial empires, let's say the German colonial empire, the British colonial empire created in their colonies across Africa in particular. So that's kind of my previous work and thinking about how their experience on the African continent may have and certainly did, in fact, inflect, you know, developments in architecture back at. home in Germany and in Britain. So that's sort of my earlier work. And as I finished up that earlier work, I started to think about the contemporary moment and to think about what are the legacies of this colonial past, ⁓ the material cultural legacies in our built environment of this colonial past. And one of those legacies, which became very clear to me mainly through my teaching, ⁓ because I teach classes on, I teach a variety of classes, but one of the classes that I teach quite regularly at all of the different universities I've taught at is a course introducing students to the history of African architecture, African built environments, African urbanism. And I've always struggled in that. course because it's very difficult to find ⁓ images to illustrate my lectures. you talk about that. think in the book where you're like, thought you kind of made me even like chuckle where you were like, I'm using like lonely planet pictures like absolutely, you know, and that's that's just kind of wild when you think about the the amount of information that's out there on everything nowadays. Right. mean, humanity, like, ⁓ you know, like emerged on the African continent. Why is it that we don't have, you know, visual illustrations of this very old continent's, you know, built environment, right? And so, you know, a lot of my colleagues they have beautiful pictures of ancient Greece or whatever it is or contemporary, I don't know, modernism in France or something, right, that they show in their lectures. But it was very difficult for me to find images to just really bring home and clarify for students what we're talking about. And when I did find images, they tended to be images of fragments of buildings that were in these images came from museum catalogs and museum collections here in the US and also in Europe. And I used to ignore them because that's not useful to me necessarily as an architectural historian. We tend to talk about entire structures, not little pieces of building. Right. guess in like in like a North American context would be like, you know, you're talking about Georgian architecture, but you're going to just show people a chair rail. Exactly. Exactly. That's really not useful. mean, it's useful for certain types of discussions. But if you're talking about, you know, the built environments and architecture, the entire building spaces, places, little fragments of chair rail are really not helpful. So for many years, I ignored these images. And as you said, I resorted to like lonely planet and just, you know, people's travel blogs, anything I could find that would have even a contemporary picture of historical buildings from the African continent. ⁓ And then eventually I realized there's something going on with this. So why is it that I keep finding these fragments, fragmentary elements of buildings in these museum catalogs and so on? ⁓ And then just, you know, gradually I put two and two together and realized this was actually ⁓ a kind of outcome of colonialism, right? And an outcome of the fact that, you know, many European colonial empires actively collected, you know, pieces of material and visual culture. And in fact, included in that would have been pieces of architecture and buildings, right? And as well as everyday objects and anything you could imagine, know, ⁓ know, you know, plant samples, seeds, everything, they collected everything during the colonial period and brought them back to, you know, to Britain, to France, to Germany, to Italy, to all the colonial empires, right? And then these, these objects now constitute one of the major parts of any collection in any museum in these places, including here in the United States. Of course, the United States did not directly colonize any place on the African continent, but was connected to the colonial empire, obviously, through its connection to Britain, and then also through just actively sending people. scholars, museologists, historians, ethnographers to the African continent as well to explore it and in the course of exploring to collect objects and bring them back to be displayed in museums. And so again, I put two together and finally realized that what I was seeing was actually one of the major material legacies of colonialism and that no one had really thought about these objects, which tend to be displayed in museums as, know, if it's an art museum, it's kind of like a work of art. You know, if it's an anthropological museum, it's just like, you know, a thing, an object related to a certain culture, right? But you don't really get in the museum labels and in the catalogs and so on, an understanding that this came from a larger building or object. And so that's really what this book is about. It's about tracing what turns out to be a pretty large quantity of African architectural heritage that is now in museums ⁓ in the United States. I focused on the United States and several countries ⁓ in Western and Central Europe. Yeah, and I feel like when you talk about it in terms of dismemberment is a term that you use. ⁓ It strikes and it kind of paints it in a slightly different picture than just collecting. ⁓ That was term that definitely resonated with me throughout the book ⁓ and in the way that you kind of describe this. And it makes sense, right? It's like back to that chair rail example. It's like ripping something out of a building. It is a dismembered piece and you actually define dismemberment and kind of get into that. I also thought it was really interesting and this is early on and you know in these conversations here on a podcast we can't get into every last detail the book the whole point is to pick up the book and read it and get people to buy it but one of the interesting things is you kind of define you know you're like okay well what is African architecture and I love that because you really kind of paint a very clear picture you know almost through defining what it is and ⁓ and you know it's it's You know, it's unfortunate that you have to define it in these terms, but you're like, there is no such thing as African architecture, first off, right? Because you're talking about a continent. And when I sort of thought about it that way, too, I'm like, yeah, I've never heard someone say North American architecture. Right? Because then that's like absurd. Yeah. Because the architecture of Utah is very different from the architecture of Maine. Right. ⁓ even in indigenous societies, was extremely different, the longhouses versus a wigwam or whatever you might be dealing with. ⁓ And so, I mean, yeah, for people who are just listening to this and aren't familiar with the argument that you're making here, how do you define African architecture? How do you, you know, sort of the 101 course that you teach on this, how do you even get them to start thinking about this? Right, right. Yeah, no, you've already sort of answered the question to some degree and given some examples. So I would define African architecture as anything ⁓ built by people of African descent. And I tend to think about African architecture not just as limited to the continent, but also to the... including the diaspora. I don't get into that much in the book, but I do think you can trace continuities. And there people who have done that, trace continuities between certain types of buildings that were built, let's say, in West Africa historically. And then when you look at the buildings constructed by enslaved people, let's say, in the southern colonies in the United States, there are certain similarities and also in the Caribbean. It is quite, it can be quite a large kind of category, but if we are to restrict it just to the continent, just for, you know, for pragmatic reasons, as you said, it's really just a label that we can use to help ourselves try to kind of delimit things geographically. ⁓ Because as you said, the continent is huge, you know, they're over 50 countries, you know, and, you know, there are different cultures and within each country, there are multiple ethnic groups and histories and, you know, former kingdoms and so on. And, you know, in the past, there was a tendency, especially among art historians, but also anthropologists, to really try to sort of define each ethnic group, historical ethnic groups. you know, kind of way of building and say, okay, the people of, you know, who are known as the Dogon people, for instance, in central Mali, you know, the Dogon people, this is their architecture, right? And yes, it's useful to think in that way, but it also creates problems because it tends to give the impression that, you know, Africa and African architecture and African history is frozen in time and that there haven't been changes over time. and that these ethnic groups are the same as they were hundreds of thousands of years ago or something like this, right? Which is obviously false, right? ⁓ So yeah, I would define African architecture broadly speaking as anything built, let's say, ⁓ by Africans, for Africans, on the African continent. can just make that a pragmatic ⁓ distinction. ⁓ And it doesn't have to be things that are designed by professionals at different points in the history of the African continent and different parts of the African continent. They were professionals who, whether they're Masons who were in guilds, who passed down knowledge about building from generation to generation. So yes, they have been professionals, but there are also just like anywhere else in the world, buildings that are vernacular and were designed by regular people and of course were still valuable and had kind of traditions and technologies that were well understood, right? So it includes vernacular structures, includes professionally designed structures, it includes ⁓ spaces around the structures. ⁓ So I have a quite broad definition ⁓ of African architecture. I also wanna say that there's a tendency, I think, in popular culture to think, and I'm frankly, among scholars and academics, to assume that when one is talking about Africa, one is really talking about sub-Saharan Africa. You talk about that in the book. And that is always, it's almost like, it seems like it's become like a gotcha question, where it's like, people are talking about African architecture, and then someone say, yeah, but the pyramids. Exactly. it's like, well, no, not yeah, but I mean, it's just it's all it's that's the continent if you're talking about the continent. Exactly. Exactly. So part of what I wanted to do in this book was to really look at the entire continent and this history of the displacement and, you know, intentional removal of parts of its material culture, which goes way back, right? I focus, let's say on the 18th, 19th, 20th century, but Really this goes way back even to you know, the Roman Empire in Africa, right? Right you talk about this term and I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it right because I've only ever read it I haven't said it out loud. What is spolia? Spolia. Yes. Yeah, and this I mean maybe give people an idea just because that's kind of it's an interesting component of the book and you you talk about it throughout different phases Right, right. So spolia is a Latin word I believe and it refers to ⁓ you know pieces of mainly buildings, but artifacts that have been removed from ⁓ one place and one structure and transported ⁓ to another structure. And this term comes up in the Roman period and throughout sort of ⁓ Western ⁓ history. This is a term that is seen in historical sources. ⁓ And Spolia in the sort of Roman period was really understood as a ⁓ way of impressing upon a people that they had been conquered, right? So you would remove ⁓ elements of their material culture in order to kind of prove that you had conquered them and in order to kind of ⁓ convey a sense of superiority over the conquered culture. Now, spolia can also refer, it can also be more neutral, right? And folks have used it in more neutral terms just to describe anything, any part of a building, part of an object removed from one place and incorporated usually into a later structure that would have been built with, let's say, a capital from a Roman column or something like this, right? So that's how we typically think of spolia. And spolia is a term that was used in sort of historical ⁓ museums and museum catalogs to refer to pieces of buildings that were ⁓ removed. But over time, that term came into disuse and we start to see a term ⁓ replacing it, which is the fragment, architectural fragment. ⁓ Now, Arguably, spolia still kind of, if you understand the sort of origins of the term, it still denotes a certain type of violence, right? Because it's usually a military occupation that leads to spoliation of a place and a structure. But architectural fragment makes it much more neutral, right? It just implies, ⁓ it's just a piece of a building. There's no sense of the processes through which that building or that that fragment came to be in the museum or in a collection. Yeah, that was for me was like almost a takeaway for like just just how important language is when we're talking about these things and terms. You talk about this in terms of like sculpture versus carving. Absolutely. That comes up multiple times. And it's something that, yeah, why is why are these items when they come from the African continent called carving versus sculpture? Yeah, no one has really been able to give me a good answer. No one can give me a good answer for that. And so, I mean, the conclusion is that there must be some sense that there's something, you know, kind of ⁓ difference by definition about work that come that is made by Africans or is, you know, comes from the African continent and therefore we must call it. something different, even though when we look at it, we look at the kind of activity, the kind of ⁓ skill that is involved. It is sculpture, right? So whether it's a wood, what people typically call wood carvings, it's really wood sculpture, right? ⁓ And so, yeah, language is extremely important. And I make a point throughout the book of thinking about language and pointing out where language has been used to the detriment of African history and to the detriment of our understanding of what actually happened historically. And I'm curious, do you think that, back to this definition of African architecture, is the displacement of this heritage ⁓ responsible for this sort of more fluid definition, this this amorphous definition, or was it the fluid amorphous definition of it that enabled the displacement? Like which comes first or do they come together? I think the displacement creates the amorphous definition because, you know, obviously in the communities that created these buildings and places and objects, they knew exactly what they were and they knew what each component was, what its function was. It had a name, right? And so it's in the process of displacement. One of the really interesting things about writing this book was really ⁓ reading these ⁓ diaries by these explorers or by collectors or museum officials who went on these missions throughout the African continent. 19th century, even into the 20th century, reading their firsthand words and understanding that, in fact, despite the suggestion otherwise, in most cases, people were not willing to give up their objects. And so it required a lot of subterfuge and violence and just really bad tactics. to get these things from people, even when things were purchased, right? They were often purchased under a threat of force, right? And so thinking about that and about the way in which that's an act of violence and a story that's really hidden, that's something that really had an impact on me and that I tried to ⁓ to communicate in the book. And that explains why people, you know, once these objects got back or were transported to the US or to Paris or wherever, ⁓ they often had very little information accompanying them. Because if the person who, you know, first quote unquote collected or a term I like to use is dismembered them, had to do this under the cover of night, with a flashlight or like, you know, a torch, you know, because the people actually refuse to sell or to give, you know, this person their stuff. ⁓ Then they had to do it very quickly. They weren't able to get a lot of information and we lose all of that contextual information. You know, what part of the building was this? Well, how was it used? You know, where exactly was it located? We lose all of that information because of the... the process in which these things were actually collected. So I do think it is, you know, it's the process that leads to this, you know, lack of understanding really, and lack of context and sense the lack of context is really, it's very apparent once you read the book and then you kind of remember when you visit a museum or you see something like this. And I've oftentimes wondered, as somebody who's interested in architecture and things like that, like, well, what... What was this? Like, it's really pretty, but what was this? And I'm curious, you know, to ask like, what impact this had, this displacement had on our understanding of architecture or our understanding of these communities. That's like too broad a question. I don't know how you could possibly answer that. But do you have like specific examples of where there are like misunderstandings, ⁓ very specific ones? as a result of this? Like, are there ones that really kind of jumped out at you? ⁓ That's a good question. I would give the example of a door that is located in the British Museum. And you can go and see it today. It's right there. It's considered one of the most important sort pieces of artistic and material heritage. It tends not to be understood as architecture, but I define it as such. ⁓ From the Yoruba-speaking people of Western Africa, primarily what is now Nigeria, also Cameroon and the Republic of Dupenene and those kinds of areas in West Africa. And this door ⁓ was taken from a palace in Southwestern Nigeria. ⁓ and put on display at a World's Fair, the 1924 Wembley exhibition in London, in England. ⁓ And that door, you know, it's today in the museum, it's presented as, you know, a door. But when I look at it, and it's because of, you know, my sort of architectural training, architectural knowledge, architectural background, what I see is much more than a door. To me, a door really implies just the panel that kind of swings back and forth, right? But when you look at this object on display in the museum, you realize it's not just the panel, the door panel that swings back and forth, but it's the entire kind of structural framework of the door. So the lintel above, the posts on either side, the threshold or lintel below, it's the entire. It's an entire assembly, right, which was structural. And the question then becomes, how did they remove this entire thing without really compromising the building? Because again, it's not just the door panel, but it's the structure that connects the door and its panel to the rest of the building. So that started me thinking. And I realized when I noticed that one of the patterns in terms of types of objects that are very present in these collections in the US and in Western Europe are doors from various parts of the African continent. And more often than not, it's not just the door panel, but it's the structural components around the door panel ⁓ that are included. And so for me, that's a real fundamental misunderstanding, right? of how buildings work and also of what was entailed in the removal of a work from one place to the other. Famously, ⁓ today, if you go to the British Museum and you look at this door, it says that the door was given by the king of this particular, the chief really of this particular village or area in Western Nigeria. And so that it came to the museum with his permission. And that is true as far as we can tell. But looking into the archives of the British Museum, I read letters that went back and forth between the British Museum and local British officials on the ground in the 1920s in this region of Nigeria. And they had put in a request, right? It wasn't just that the king woke up one morning and said, hey, you want my door and everything that holds it up from my palace. But actually, they had put in a request, right? And asked the king if he would ⁓ lend them this door to put on display at the exhibition, because the door was sculpted by a sculpture that had come to the kind of ⁓ become visible in the region and that the British were starting to understand was a really, you know, very high quality sculptor. ⁓ His name was Olowe of Ishe and he sculpted many veranda posts and door columns throughout this region. He was sought after by elite people in this region to work on their houses. And so he had become famous and the British had noticed that and they wanted this door to put on display in the exhibition as an example of kind of indigenous West African artwork. And so the letters really show that Yes, it was a request. The king or the chief ⁓ responded and said that he would, in fact, he didn't want to lend it. He would give it to them on the condition that his name was ⁓ attached to this object and that it was stated that he had given it to them ⁓ without any sort of financial ⁓ exchange. That didn't really happen until recently. ⁓ And even today, believe it's not his actual name is not stated as a donor of this object, but rather it says, you know, the king of this place, you know, you know, gave this this to to to the museum. And I compare that to the other labels throughout the museum where, you know, this was donated by X, Y, Z, you know, with a particular name at a particular time. So he remains sort of an anonymous donor, which is not what he asked for ⁓ at all. And then behind all of that, there's a whole discussion about the kind of economy of gift giving in a colonial context, right? Did he really have much choice in ⁓ this particular instance? ⁓ And so, yeah, I think that's a good example. Yeah, no, mean, and that's just really great depth and information there. ⁓ And the kind of information and storytelling you can expect from the book, ⁓ which again, we'll put in the link for the show notes so people can grab a copy. ⁓ something that struck me as you were telling that story ⁓ is that in that particular account is that ⁓ that's just one door. And it kind of gives you an idea of the scale of the loss and the stories and the challenges with the multitude of objects that were taken. Because we're talking about not in the hundreds or the thousands, we're probably talking about in the millions of objects. And each one of them has a story like that behind it. And that's the richness of history. there's just to every object, to every incident, there is just this complex story behind them all. ⁓ But I think that's important to remember when you're seeing that object in a museum, that there is a long story behind it. did not just arrive there. ⁓ I'm curious, know, you obviously, as you kind of draw to the conclusion of the book, it's sort of like recommendations looking towards the future. At this point, with it all, you know, having been removed, ⁓ what is the process for perhaps taking some of it back? I mean, obviously, in some cases, this happens here in the United States. We have ⁓ NAGPRA, the Native American Grave Repatriation ⁓ Act, ⁓ which ⁓ allows ⁓ tribal entities to reclaim ⁓ their ⁓ objects, funerary objects, and the remains of people that were ⁓ excavated and taken and removed to collections. ⁓ Does that hold some type of promise for what could happen ⁓ with these objects? And if it did, where would they then go? And how would that even happen, particularly in objects where maybe you don't know the exact provenance? Exactly. Great question and one that a lot of people are kind of racking their brains to try to come up with some solutions and there are no perfect solutions. do think NAGPRA can offer a model for repatriating and restituting these African architectural elements and just African material culture more broadly speaking, of which according to some estimates, 90 to 95 % of the material culture of the African continent now resides in museums outside the African continent. So that's really problematic. That is really problematic if that is the case. And to your point, the scale of the loss and the the different kind of layers of loss need to be understood better. And I just wanna say a few words about that before turning back to the NAGPRA model. And so in terms of what this does, people tend to think, it's just some objects, why do we need to bother with this? But what folks need to understand is that if 90 to 95 % of Africa's material cultural heritage resides outside of the continent. How is it that Africans are meant to be able to know their own heritage, understand it, and build for the future? And so lots of people have made the argument, and I made the argument in this book as well, that this has really caused a disruption in cultural memory across much of the African continent. folks don't have access to their own history because history is embedded in objects, especially in societies, some of which existed on the African continent, that were not literate and did not write down their histories. Objects offer ⁓ a different way of memorializing history. And so there's a disruption in knowledge about history. There's a disruption in knowledge about how to make things, and how our ancestors had made things and the technologies they had used. So contemporary artists don't have this kind of knowledge of our traditions because we don't have access to them because the examples are not available on the continent. So that's just one sort of level of the... the ramifications of the kind of loss that folks tend not to think about. And then there are also economic ramifications. ⁓ African material cultural objects are very valuable these days in these museum collections. They've been traded back and forth and their value has risen and people pay to go see them in museums, right? But the originating communities do not benefit from this. And so there's a sense that you know, could we kind of recalibrate the global economy by repatriating some of these objects or maybe the majority of them back to the continent where they could be in museums and people pay, you know, to come and see them and tourist economies will be revitalized on the continent because people will no longer need to go to the Louvre to see African works, but will go to the African continent. So that's just, you know, something I wanted to put out there and something I talk about in the book. And I think the NAGPRA model can offer some ideas for how this can work pragmatically. Now with NAGPRA, my understanding, and I've seen it at work here in Rhode Island at Brown University. We have an anthropological museum, the Hafenraffer Museum. And for decades, the Hafenreffer Museum has been in dialogue with indigenous communities around our region in New England and beyond ⁓ in terms of ⁓ repatriating, returning, ⁓ preserving ⁓ objects from Native American ⁓ communities. Now, I don't see why that same kind of approach could not be taken up by ⁓ by ⁓ really by state and federal and the federal government here in the United States. If there was a policy that was put into place that said, if any museum comes across and acquires knowledge that objects in their collection were acquired through illicit means, then that museum needs to engage in a dialogue. with the originating communities ⁓ and decisions need to be made about repatriating or about what those communities ⁓ would like to happen with these objects. So right now, the onus in the museum world is on communities to reach out to museums and say, hey, you have our stuff. We would like our stuff back. And for decades and decades and decades, When communities have done that, nothing has happened. But more recently, museums have become more open, I'd say in the last decade, to hearing these claims, to researching provenance, and potentially returning objects. I think the onus needs to be on the museums, not on the communities, who don't know what the museums have. These lists and these inventories are not out there. People don't know what elements of their heritage have been taken away. So how can we expect them to request things that they don't know that you have? Right. So, yeah, I would I would suggest that some kind of policy, a broad policy along the lines of not pro could be really helpful here in the US. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, it's it raises just a lot of questions about responsible and ethical, you know, collections and how you curate these things. And, you know, we're obviously talking extensively about African heritage as a component of this. But we've run across this before with period rooms in the United States where they went to take an entire room out of a building in North Carolina and display it in New York City. then interest change and now it's just in a collection somewhere in a back room and it might be more meaningful. elsewhere. yeah, it raises just a lot of big picture questions about how you do this and how you do this ethically and how you engage people. ⁓ And I think those are questions that are, you well raised in this book. ⁓ You know, and I'm always interested in traditional skills to ⁓ the work of our organization is very focused on trying to ⁓ create a pathway for people who want to do traditional building techniques here in the United States. ⁓ And I think it was interesting that you pointed out that the loss of this fabric has created sort of a vacuum for people to continue to do these skills. And I'm curious that if that could be a component as well of bringing these things back and then allowing people in those communities to try and figure out how to recreate these objects. And I don't know if that's been a component of the conversation as well. Yeah, I think it should be a component of the conversation. I think as you said, there's been such a significant loss in knowledge. know, one example would be this, the whole kind of question of how to build sustainably, right? And specifically the use of earth as a sustainable material. And I think that if, you know, and then other types of kind of natural materials in place of let's say concrete and steel, and then also how to build in an environmentally ⁓ friendly and sustainable way. And I think that if we had access, and I say we because I see myself as part of obviously an African community, ⁓ if we had access to some of these objects, these traditional skills and traditional knowledge, ⁓ could be research, we could gain a better understanding of traditional knowledge and traditional skills and perhaps see how those skills and knowledge could be applied today and could be very useful again in the construction of environmentally friendly structures, environmentally sustainable ways of living ⁓ and so on. Yeah, I mean, obviously looking to the past for answers to the future is is an important part of life and civilization. ⁓ you obviously, you bring up some really interesting concepts and topics in this book. Again, the book for listeners is Africa's Buildings, Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage. We have been speaking with Dr. Itoha Oseyem Ese, and ⁓ we've been ⁓ really diving into this book, which is the culmination of several different ⁓ academic pursuits and efforts that she has put forth in her work. ⁓ And just a great opportunity to sit down, really enjoyed this. ⁓ We again, we'll put a link in the show notes so people can pick it up. ⁓ We're looking forward to seeing what you write next. Before we go, we generally ask people who join us if they have a favorite historic place or building a place that they could return to time and time again that really speaks to them. Yeah, my favorite place, historic places change over time. Currently, my favorite place is the Newton enslaved burial ground in Barbados. ⁓ It's the largest and earliest known intact ⁓ burial site for enslaved people in the Americas. And as I said before, Barbados is one of my homes. My mother is from there. I'm from there. And there's currently a new memorial that's under construction over there. But even prior to the memorial, I love places where I can sort of think about ⁓ the resistance of enslaved Africans and how they were able to resist oppression. And this enslaved burial ground is, you go there and There's just a sense of peace and it's a mound. It's kind of like an archaeological mound. And then they're building the memorial next to it. And it's just one of my favorite places right now. Well, it's a perfect place to end this conversation. Ito, it's been a pleasure to be able to have the chance to sit down with you and talk to the person who pulled this work together and looking forward to seeing what you're right next and having you back here on Preservecast. Thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you, I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to Preservecast. To dig deeper into this episode's story, head over to Preservecast.org for show notes and our collection of previous episodes. 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