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FOUMBAN, Cameroon -- It was the early 1980s, and Christraud Geary, a young German curator with an interest in Africa, was plowing through European archives when she stumbled across photographs of Cameroon taken by German colonizers in the early 20th century.
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No one had looked at them for decades. She published them. Her books found their way back to Cameroon, where they restored a lost chapter in the country's history and inspired painters in this West Equatorial African country to re-create the scenes in them.
''The photos show the palace putting itself on display," says Geary. Mostly they depict the ruler of that era, King Njoya, and his court, dressed in full regalia. The point they made was that Foumban, like Germany, was a sovereign nation with a strong leader.
That today's artists in Foumban have even seen these photos is due to Geary, the first curator of African art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Until two years ago, she was curator of photographs at the National Museum of African Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
''She's focused, intense, and convinced that African art is underappreciated," says Thomas Lentz, now the director of the Harvard Art Museums, who worked closely with Geary at the Smithsonian. ''In her quiet way, she means to change that."
Geary grew up in postwar Germany, where she discovered art history and anthropology through her family's landlady, a cultural anthropologist.
''She'd bring back 80 boxes of things from the Congo and let me look at the contents," Geary says.
It was 1969 when Geary went to Cameroon for the first time, while a student at the University of Mainz. She camped out, hitchhiked, visited missionaries, and decided that she'd focus on this country where the very terms ''museum," ''artwork," ''copy," and ''original" are entirely different from their meanings in the West, and history and myth merge until there is barely a distinction between them.
In the 1970s and early '80s she spent considerable time doing research in Cameroon. Then, on a visit in 1984, ''there was a coup d'etat with gunfire I could hear from my house," she says with a slight shiver. ''I was trapped there for three days. The cue that it was over was that the radio switched from military marches to dance music."
Not a Christiane Amanpour, in-the-thick-of-things type, she says of the coup: ''I was so horrified that I didn't return for 18 years."
When she did, it was courtesy of a Getty grant to reassess the art of the Bamoun, the people of the Foumban kingdom, and the effect of photography on that art. After the 2002 trip she returned last summer for five weeks, living in the Royal Palace compound, which sounds more luxurious than it is. There wasn't any running water, although modern bathroom fixtures indicate that there had been at one point.
Cameroon Tourism
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No one had looked at them for decades. She published them. Her books found their way back to Cameroon, where they restored a lost chapter in the country's history and inspired painters in this West Equatorial African country to re-create the scenes in them.
''The photos show the palace putting itself on display," says Geary. Mostly they depict the ruler of that era, King Njoya, and his court, dressed in full regalia. The point they made was that Foumban, like Germany, was a sovereign nation with a strong leader.
That today's artists in Foumban have even seen these photos is due to Geary, the first curator of African art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Until two years ago, she was curator of photographs at the National Museum of African Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
''She's focused, intense, and convinced that African art is underappreciated," says Thomas Lentz, now the director of the Harvard Art Museums, who worked closely with Geary at the Smithsonian. ''In her quiet way, she means to change that."
Geary grew up in postwar Germany, where she discovered art history and anthropology through her family's landlady, a cultural anthropologist.
''She'd bring back 80 boxes of things from the Congo and let me look at the contents," Geary says.
It was 1969 when Geary went to Cameroon for the first time, while a student at the University of Mainz. She camped out, hitchhiked, visited missionaries, and decided that she'd focus on this country where the very terms ''museum," ''artwork," ''copy," and ''original" are entirely different from their meanings in the West, and history and myth merge until there is barely a distinction between them.
In the 1970s and early '80s she spent considerable time doing research in Cameroon. Then, on a visit in 1984, ''there was a coup d'etat with gunfire I could hear from my house," she says with a slight shiver. ''I was trapped there for three days. The cue that it was over was that the radio switched from military marches to dance music."
Not a Christiane Amanpour, in-the-thick-of-things type, she says of the coup: ''I was so horrified that I didn't return for 18 years."
When she did, it was courtesy of a Getty grant to reassess the art of the Bamoun, the people of the Foumban kingdom, and the effect of photography on that art. After the 2002 trip she returned last summer for five weeks, living in the Royal Palace compound, which sounds more luxurious than it is. There wasn't any running water, although modern bathroom fixtures indicate that there had been at one point.
