Colonial-Missionary Collections and the Entangled Lives of Asante Spiritual Artefacts

Talk with Dr Marleen de Witte, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study.

African spiritual artefacts in European colonial collections condense highly charged entanglements of colonialism, indigenous religion, Christianity, art, and heritage. Focusing on Asante shrine figures – abosom – in a Dutch missionary collection, this presentation traces their journeys from the colonial Gold Coast to the Afrika Museum, examining how their meanings, values, and powers have accumulated and transformed through successive regimes of collecting, interpretation, and display. It brings these histories into conversation with contemporary Ghanaian perspectives, which understand the abosom variously as ancestral heritage, potential channels for spiritual forces, or controversial ‘idols.’ These divergent perspectives challenge conventional museum frameworks, raising questions about the intersections and tensions between heritage and religion/spirituality and the afterlives of the colonial-missionary past.

Marleen de Witte is a sociocultural anthropologist (PhD University of Amsterdam, 2008) interested in the postcolonial dynamics of religion, heritage, and material culture in West Africa and Afro-Europe. She is currently working at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study.