THE STORY OF AFO-A-KOM FROM THE NORTH WEST OF CAMEROON
The Afo-A-Kom is far from the world's greatest piece of art—or even Africa's. A 5-ft. 2½in. image of a king, it is rather crudely carved in iroko wood, the torso covered with sackcloth stitched with reddish-brown beads, the face masked in copper. But the Afo-A-Kom (literally, the Kom thing) is sacred to the approximately 30,000 people who constitute the Kom kingdom, a tribal enclave in the northwestern part of the Federal Republic of Cameroon.
Last week this rather ungainly sculpture caused a flurry of
diplomatic exchanges and created an uproar that stretched from the elegant
salons of New York's art world all the way back to Laikom, the capital of Kom.
For it seemed that the Afo-A-Kom had been stolen in late 1966 from
a storage hut near the royal palace and smuggled out of the kingdom. According
to the New York Times, the statue was mysteriously spirited away by thieves
using a highly organized system of logistics that included Land Rovers, trucks
and airplanes. When he realized his loss, Law Aw, the King (also called the
Fon) of Kom was thought to be "psychologically killed," and soon
died.
The King's nephew, suspected of complicity in the disappearance of
the statue, was ostracized, and, according to one account, nearly everyone in
the country took to quarreling.
The new Fon, Bobe-Meya, had a new Afo-A-Kom carved and displayed,
as is customary, with female figures representing his wife and mother. But the
new sculpture was no substitute for the old. According to Sandra Blakeslee, a
former Times reporter living in western Africa: "There has been no peace
in the kingdom since the statue was taken out."
Then a few months ago, a catalogue of a show called "Royal
Art of Cameroon," mounted at Dartmouth College, reached Evan Schneider, a
longtime Kom scholar and a member of the Peace Corps in Cameroon. There,
resplendent in full color on the cover, was the lost Afo-A-Kom. It had been
lent to Dartmouth by its new owner, Aaron Furman, a respected Manhattan dealer
in primitive art, and it was reportedly on sale for $60,000.
Beyond Money. It was no surprise in Cameroon that the statue was
in the U.S. (The U.S. embassy had been asked to discuss the matter with the
Cameroon government in August.) But the new publicity about the sculpture
caused a stir. Last week Thaddeus Nkuo, first secretary of Cameroon in
Washington and himself a Kom, demanded its return, explaining: "It is
beyond money, beyond value. It is the heart of the Kom, what unifies the tribe,
the spirit of the nation, what holds us together. It is not an object of art
for sale, and could not be."
Embattled Dealer Furman retreated
behind his lawyer but declared that he was "not inclined to return it or
to sell it back." He had bought it for a five-figure sum from an
"impeccable dealer," probably in France, though Furman declined to
say. His story, as reported by the Times, had the intricacy of plausibility. He
had first been told by the go-between that the statue was being offered for
sale by the King of Kom. Furman paid for it, it was delivered to him some time
in 1966, then he was told that the King had changed his mind. Says Furman:
"I shipped it back, and my check to my agent was torn up. That was the
last I heard of it for six months. I got another letter saying that the King
had cooled off and was in a position to sell again. Then I bought it."
Was the Afo-A-Kom stolen? Or, as the
organizers of the Dartmouth show suggested, was it sold by the King or someone
in his family? This second theory was supported by the fact that smaller
"sacred objects" have been sold off by past Fons of Kom in exchange
for such commodities as zinc roofing and a Land Rover. Cameroon's Ambassador to
the U.S., Francois-Xavier Tchoungui, thinks otherwise: "We cannot avoid
the fact that the Afo-A-Kom was stolen," he says. "We cannot believe
that a chief could sell his own totem."
In this specific instance, the question
scarcely matters, since with all the diplomatic hassle, the statue may well be
returned to Kom, perhaps with compensation to Furman. Even so, it will leave
moot the questions that more and more agitate the art world: Can or should even
a legitimate owner sell an art object outside his own country if it is declared
a national treasure, and can an art dealer legitimately buy it, in good faith,
for mere cash?
· The lost totem: Time Magazine, Monday Nov. 5 1973
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,908145-2,00.html
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