Reappropriation as a Method of Provenance Research: The Usakos Railway Workers’ Collection

This paper discusses a collaborative research project between a Swiss museum and a descendant community tied to an ethnographic collection from Namibia. As chief engineer of the Otavi Mining and Railway Company from 1903-1905, the Swiss collector Victor Solioz was more than a key player in the development of colonial infrastructure: railway construction was also directly linked to colonial violence in Namibia. What began as archival research into the collection’s provenance and appropriation history became - with the involvement of the descendants of railway workers in the Namibian town of Usakos - a project to historicise 330 artefacts that were once catalogued as ethnographic objects in the Bern History Museum. The case study helps illustrate that although Switzerland was not a colonial power, its colonial complicity is particularly evident in the history of its museum collections. Furthermore, it shows that community-building and collective reappropriation strategies can be highly productive from a methodological point of view, as they counter a paralysing absence of African biographies in museum archives with the powerful presence of a diverse community and its realisation of shared descendancy and collective memory. Throughout the project, narratives shifted, with the focus on violent appropriation broadening to include a joint investigation into the social history of the railway workers. The ethnographic collection once named after Mr. Solioz became the ‘Usakos Railway Workers’ Collection’. The project yielded a wealth of knowledge about the artefacts and a new understanding of belonging. Thus, restitution of the collection is not only the wish of the descendants, but the result of collaborative research practice.