A first shipment of restituted cultural objects was supposed to leave Germany for Cameroon in September 2025. Officials on both sides had called the agreement behind it a breakthrough. Representatives of the Foreign Office were due to travel to Cameroon that August to prepare the handover. Nothing shipped, and as of the most recent reporting nothing has.

Forty thousand objects, one open question

A research project run jointly by the Université de Dschang and the Technical University of Berlin, led by Albert Gouaffo and Bénédicte Savoy and published in July 2023 as „Atlas der Abwesenheit“ (Atlas of Absence), reconstructed around 41,000 objects from Cameroon now held in German public collections, more than any other country holds. The team says the real figure is higher, since some individual museums turned out to hold roughly twice what their records listed. Many of the objects were taken during military campaigns against communities that resisted German rule, among them the Nso and the Bangwa.

The comparison the researchers put beside that number is the one worth keeping. The national museum in Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé, holds about 6,000 objects. Single German museums hold more Cameroonian material than the country’s own national collection.

Scale alone does not explain why Cameroon’s process has moved slower than Tanzania’s, where the open question is a single skull and a single tooth. What scale does explain is where a misstep can hide. A missing list, or an unresolved ownership question, has more room to disappear inside 41,000 objects than inside two, and it takes longer before anyone notices it is missing.

A goddess and four years of meetings

The clearest single case is Ngonnso, a 92 centimeter wooden figure covered in cowrie shells, revered by the Nso of northwestern Cameroon as the founding mother of their kingdom, established in the fourteenth century. Who physically took it is itself contested. The Cameroonian activist Sylvie Vernyuy Njobati, in an interview with nd-aktuell in April 2026, says it was probably removed from the Nso royal palace by Hans Houben during a punitive expedition in 1902 and brought to Germany by Colonel Curt von Pavel the following year. The Ethnologisches Museum’s own account is more cautious. It names von Pavel, dates the gift to 1903, and states that the exact circumstances of the acquisition are not clear. The same museum account notes that von Pavel had led a campaign against the Bafut in late 1901 in which more than a thousand people were killed, and that he was removed from Cameroon in 1903 for ignoring orders.

Njobati’s campaign to bring the figure home ran for years before it moved anything. On 27 June 2022 the governing board of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz authorized its president to conclude an agreement on Ngonnso’s return. The museum’s own announcement said the path was clear.

Cameroon’s government then created its own restitution committee, and it set a broader condition. Returns should reach all regions of Cameroon rather than stop at one high-profile figure. What followed was a long round of meetings between museums, state governments and that committee. What did not follow was a return.

Njobati’s own assessment four years on is notable for what it concedes. She describes the process as stalled, and names the coordinated-returns condition itself as part of the reason.

The breakthrough that did not ship

From 23 June to 1 July 2025 Cameroon’s official Restitution Committee visited Germany at the invitation of the Foreign Office, meeting museums and state governments in Munich, Stuttgart, Bremen and Berlin. The blog Dekolonial Erinnern, reporting on 3 July 2025, listed what was agreed institution by institution: coastal and forest-region material at the Museum Fünf Kontinente in Munich, Ngonnso at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, the 28 Nso objects at the Linden-Museum, Tibati objects at the Übersee-Museum Bremen, and possibly two further Nso objects held by the University of Mainz. All four of Cameroon’s major cultural regions were covered. The objects were to travel together in a first wave that September.

They did not. According to the German policy outlet zwd Politikmagazin, reporting on 30 July 2026, the shipment failed because Cameroon’s government did not deliver the list of objects it wanted restituted.

Dekolonial Erinnern had already flagged the other half of the problem in the same July 2025 piece that announced the breakthrough. Two of the largest collections involved, in Munich and Bremen, are legally owned not by the museums and not by the federal government but by the states of Bavaria and Bremen, and neither had taken a decision. Bavaria could restitute directly. Bremen would first have to establish an urgent public interest. Either way the decision sits with a state government that was not the party doing the negotiating.

Money is not the constraint. The German Lost Art Foundation has roughly 2.3 million euros available for provenance research in 2026. A separate 600,000 euro fund in the federal culture budget, set aside specifically for returns from colonial contexts, had not been drawn on at all as of that July 2026 report. Since March 2026 there has been a coordinating council for returns from colonial contexts, seated at the Foreign Office, precisely so that origin states would have one address instead of many. The bottleneck is neither funding nor willing institutions. It is producing an agreed, region-balanced list on one side and matching legal releases from several separately governed states on the other.

Why Tanzania moved and Cameroon has not

Tanzania’s case has a fixed reference point everyone can argue from. Chief Mkwawa’s skull was named in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and handed back in 1954, however imperfectly. That precedent, and now the coordinating council, give the current talks a single government-to-government channel.

Cameroon has no equivalent anchor. It has one globally recognized object in Ngonnso, but the Cameroonian side deliberately declined to let one object stand in for the whole relationship, choosing instead to represent every major cultural region. That is fairer internally and a far larger administrative task. It also has to negotiate with several distinct legal owners inside Germany rather than one federal counterpart, since Bavaria, Bremen, Baden-Württemberg and Berlin each control their own museums‘ holdings. Restitution here is not a single yes or no. It is a coordination problem on both sides at once, and coordination problems do not resolve on a press release’s timeline. The same gap runs through much of this colonial history: the announcement and the transfer are two different events, sometimes years apart.

What doesn’t add up

Two things about this timeline sit strangely next to each other.

The first is how often the process has been declared solved. The Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz called the path clear in June 2022. Cameroonian and German officials called the June 2025 talks a breakthrough. Neither statement was false. Neither was followed by a single object leaving a German building. Either these announcements described more progress than had actually been secured, or something at the implementation stage keeps resetting a process that keeps getting announced as finished. What would resolve it is a joint, dated accounting of which of the 2022, 2024 and 2025 agreements both governments still consider valid, published together. No such document is public.

The second is the ownership gap inside Germany. The museums in Munich and Bremen took part in the same dialogue meetings, discussed the same returns and hosted the same 2025 visit, yet their state governments, the only bodies with the legal authority to release the objects, had taken no decision. A structure in which the government negotiating a return is not the government that owns what is being returned makes it possible to agree on almost everything in a meeting room and still ship nothing. What would resolve it is a formal restitution decision by Bavaria and, in Bremen’s case, a finding of urgent public interest. Neither is on record.

There is a third thing, smaller and easy to miss. The most detailed published account of how Ngonnso left Cameroon names a man, Hans Houben, whom the holding museum’s own account does not mention at all. The museum says the circumstances are unclear. A figure whose return has been agreed for four years still carries two incompatible acquisition stories. The file from the 1902 expedition, if it survives in the colonial records, would settle which one is right.

What stays open

Cameroon’s case is not a story of a single refusal. It is a case where a fair, region-wide process turned out to need more coordination, on both sides, than either side had built the machinery for. Four years after the Ngonnso decision that machinery is still unfinished, and a fund set aside for exactly this purpose sits untouched. Questions of who owns what, and who is entitled to say so, outlast the paperwork and run straight into identity and belonging.

If a path has been called clear this many times without a single object moving, what would it actually take to call it finished?

This piece is also available in German.

Sources

• Albert Gouaffo and Bénédicte Savoy (eds.), „Atlas der Abwesenheit. Kameruns Kulturerbe in Deutschland,“ Reimer Verlag, Berlin 2023. Figures as given in the TU Berlin press release on the project, July 2023. https://idw-online.de/de/news815052
• Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, „Ethnologisches Museum: Path is clear for returning the Ngonnso‘ to Cameroon,“ 27 June 2022. https://www.smb.museum/en/whats-new/detail/ethnologisches-museum-path-is-clear-for-returning-the-ngonnso-to-cameroon/
• Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, „Ngonnso‘: Gründungsmutter der Nso,“ Museum and the City blog. https://blog.smb.museum/ngonnso-gruendungsmutter-der-nso/
• Sylvie Njobati, interview, „Rückgabe der sakralen Ngonnso: Stockender Restitutionsprozess,“ nd-aktuell, 1 April 2026. https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/1198712.kamerun-kolonialismus-rueckgabe-der-sakralen-ngonnso-stockender-restitutionsprozess.html
• Dekolonial Erinnern, „Historischer Durchbruch für deutsche Restitutionspolitik zu kolonialen Kontexten,“ 3 July 2025. https://dekolonial-erinnern.de/historischer-durchbruch-fuer-deutsche-restitutionspolitik-zu-kolonialen-kontexten/
• Ulrike Günther, „Schleppende Rückgaben: SPK erwartet Ansprüche von Staaten,“ zwd Politikmagazin, 30 July 2026. https://www.zwd.info/schleppende-restitutionen-spk-erwartet-rueckmeldung-von-regierungen.html