Plunder and War in the Collections' History

Colonizing, invading a foreign land in order to exploit its natural resources and subjugate its inhabitants, involves the destruction of collective memories and the seizure of cultural wealth. Collections of ethnographic museums such as those of the MEG were essentially constituted in the margins of colonial conquests of European imperialist nations, between the 19th and 20th centuries. This underlying reality of museum collections is often concealed, muted by the many silences of their truncated biographies. For instance, the genocide perpetrated between 1904 and 1908 against the Herero and Nama during the German conquest of Namibia long went unmentioned in the provenance of the Namibian objects scattered throughout Swiss public collections. Similarly, the destruction and plundering of important national monuments of countries under the yoke of colonial rule are ignored in the descriptions of museum pieces in which generally only the last known owner is mentioned.