Magazines - Tribal Art Winter 2010

By France-Aimée Nguyen Huu Giao, professor at Saint-Louis de Gonzague in Paris and a freelance art critic.

Introduction
“Upon our return to the Fejej paleontological site near Lake Turkana on the Kenyan border, where a multinational team directed by Henry de Lumley was working, the cultural service at the embassy had arranged for us to visit Konso, a mountainous area in southwest Ethiopia. The fortified villages, their sumptuous architecture, their sculptures set deep into the fields at the edges of villages and in squares, and their mummification rituals—I had never seen anything like it. There is now a link between us and Konso,” Stéphane Gompertz, the former French ambassador to Ethiopia and now the director of the Africa and Indian Ocean departments at the Musée du Quai Branly, said, visibly moved. Unfolding a map of the land of the Queen of Sheba before us, the diplomat went on, “We had barely arrived at the Bureau of Culture in Konso’s capital when I was taken to a humid storage area where several hundred wooden statues were piled together. Torn from the ground by thieves, the waka funerary sculptures had been confiscated at the border by Ethiopian customs officials in 1996 and repatriated to the town of Karat-Konso. There they had been mildewing in this storage area for more than ten years. Some sculptures had been recycled and used to reinforce the prison fence. What to do with them, their caretaker asked. It is forbidden to re-erect them. It would be good if you could make a museum.”