Unpacking a colonial missionary collection: Tracking the provenance and shifts in the meanings, values and uses of legbawo, dzokawo and other items assembled by the missionary Carl Spiess among the Ewe on behalf of the Städtisches Museum für Natur-, Völker- und Handelskunde Bremen (around 1900)

In this collaborative project, a multidisciplinary team of researchers from Germany, Ghana, the Netherlands and Togo as well as priests from a Vodun shrine (in Accra/Ghana) will trace the origins of a collection of Ewe artefacts. Between 1892 and 1914, Carl Spiess, a missionary of the Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft, collected around 500 artefacts, at least half of which were sensitive and sacred, in what was then German colony of Togo and the British colony of the Gold Coast. The large number of sacred/spiritual items is based on an order to collect given to Carl Spiess by Heinrich Schurtz, the first curator of the Städtisches Museum für Natur-, Völker- und Handelskunde in Bremen (now the Übersee-Museum Bremen).

Our research aims to explore the role and place of these culturally sensitive, sacred material forms in the pre-colonial world of the Ewe in their context, and to assess the circumstances of the collection in the context of colonisation and evangelisation that led to its transfer to Bremen. The project will look at the extensive but so far understudied role of missionaries in the creation of colonial collections in ethnological and other museums. The team will carry out research on the items in the collection and archive research on the activities and writings of the Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft. We will also involve various stakeholders in Ghana and Togo through field research so as to include as many perspectives as possible. This will also address the question what the collection means for the people in Togo and Ghana today. Unpacking the past of this collection is the basis for assessing, in dialogue with the societies of origin, what the future trajectory of the collection might be and to assess the question of restitution.

© Übersee-Museum Bremen