Nine Swiss museums to investigate the provenance of over 6,300 objects from Cameroon

Nine Swiss museums have secured funding of 100,000 Swiss francs (around 91,000 pounds) to investigate the provenance of more than 6,300 objects from Cameroon held in their collections, as The Art Newspaper reports. The news was made known by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture through a press statement on 29 September 2026.

Taking part in the project are museums from Basel, Bern, Burgdorf, Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchâtel, Winterthur and Zurich — among them the Museum der Kulturen in Basel, the Ethnographic Museum of Geneva and the Historical Museum of Bern. The research will examine how the objects were acquired, their chain of ownership and the significance they have in Cameroon today.

Isabella Bozsa, a provenance researcher at the Museum der Kulturen Basel, says that similar projects in Germany have expanded knowledge about what is held in European museums and have increased interest within Cameroon itself. She stresses that the 2024 visit of a Cameroonian delegation to several Swiss museums “highlighted the urgency of research on these collections”.

The historical context is complex: Switzerland had no colonies of its own, but Swiss organisations, companies and individuals were involved in colonial systems. Missionaries of the Basel Mission, active in Cameroon during the period of German colonial rule, played an important role in building the collections of Swiss museums; other objects arrived through research expeditions during the period of the French and British mandates, while some were bought on the art and “ethnographic” markets.