Review essay: Meyer, A. & Savoy, B. 2023. Atlas de l'absence. Le patrimoine culturel du Cameroun en Allemagne. Berlin, ed. Reimer

Before the publication of the book ‘Atlas de l'absence’ (Meyer & Savoy 2023), no one could have imagined the sheer scale of Cameroon's cultural heritage held in public collections in Germany: some 40,000 artefacts. Faced with this immense corpus, acquired under often unequal conditions, the authors raise not only the paradoxical problem of the glaring lack of museographic documentation in Germany – scientific publications, catalogues, museum guides and systematic inventory lists – but also that of loss, amnesia or progressive memory loss in Cameroon. Between 2019 and 2023, a so-called “reverse history of collections” approach was systematised, aiming at a decolonisation of German-centred archival knowledge, coupled with research into provenance based on the relatively resilient oral traditions in Cameroon. The result is an argument that has epistemologically reconnected the collections with a sometimes chaotic set of intertemporal and intercontextual archival data, but which is vulnerable to a lack of specialisation in fundamental research on ancient African arts, considerably limiting or watering down the ethnographic counter-argument. Keywords: cultural property; translocation; public museum; Cameroon; Germany.