Restitution
It is in the frame of the International Inventories Programme (IIP), devoted to compiling a list of Kenyan ‘objects’ held outside Kenya and the transnational discussions about restitution unfolding since 2017, that we first encountered the lions of Tsavo. While collating information and sources, we stumbled upon some articles published both in the Kenyan* and international press, referring to official gestures made by Kenya to return the lions. Since then, we have been trying to understand the nature of those assertions, and bring together the fragmented, often contradictory, information that we gathered.
During the course of IIP, our colleagues at the National Museums of Kenya stated that the lions were part of a presidential list of “Objects of National Importance” to claim back. In August 2023, during a research trip to the Field Museum in Chicago, the natural history museum which holds the lions since 1924, there seemed to be no institutional memory of gestures made by Kenya to repatriate the lions and our visit was closely monitored. We were allowed to only interview two scientists (whose names were negotiated) from the museum; the interviews had to be made in the presence of Public Relations staff, our questions were vetted beforehand and questions on restitution were explicitly forbidden. Recently, we have stumbled upon another article published in The Nation on December 5, 2023, which states that during a meeting with the National Assembly’s Tourism and Wildlife Committee “residents of the Taita Taveta County, where the Tsavo National Park is located, have joined in calls to have the two big cats repatriated”.
Beside trying to understand the chronologies of these claims, their actors and the type of language used in these discussions, we are interested in what both the material presence of the lions in the US - and their absence in Kenya - produces. This presence/absence is clearly manifested in the Railway Museum in Nairobi. A faded photocopy of an article testifying to the restitution claim is taped to outside of one of the museum vitrines.
*“Give us back our man-eaters", Sunday Nation, September 23, 2007, p. 7.