LUANDA.- Fundação Sindika Dokolo has acquired two ancestral female Pwo masks and a rare statue representative of the male figure of the Chokwe people from private European collections .The classical works, which have been identified as looted from Angola during the civil war, will be repatriated to the Dundo Museum in Angola, their original home and where they were last exhibited.

These masterpieces, created around the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, hold historic and cultural significance for the Chokwe people. The Chokwe people inhabit north eastern Angola, the southern part of Congo (Kinshasa) from the Kwango River to the Lualaba and, since 1920, the north western corner of Zambia.

The ‘found’ pieces belonged to the Dundo Museum which held one of the most distinguished collections of ethnographic art from wooden traditional masks and wooden sculptures of the local heterogeneous Chokwe people to recordings of local folk music and a photographic collection dating to the 1880s. Located in a mining town in north-eastern Angola about 15 miles (24 km) south of the Democratic Republic of the Congo border, the museum saw many of its art works ‘disappear’ during the Angolan civil war from 1975–2002 and due to lack of archival documentation, the number of missing works and their whereabouts remain a mystery.

The recovered works have been slightly altered from their original state: on both of the Pwo masks, the cord hair has been removed and the surface of the wood has been retouched and altered to hide original carved motifs visible on the surface of the wood; this is thought to be have been done to render the pieces unrecognisable and untraceable. They were sold on to private dealers and acquired by various collectors in the intervening years.

The return of the Pwo masks and sculpture is the result of diligent research by Brussels-based gallerist Didier Claes and Parisian dealer, Tao Kerefoff, both specialists in classical African art. The works were traced thanks to several publications by noted Belgian art historian Marie-Louise Bastin (1918-2000). Her publications remain a principal and definitive source in identifying the different cultures and styles of Chokwe art and its people.

The provenance of both Pwo masks were established through photographs in her book, Art Décoratif Tshokwe: Museu do Dundo (1961). Both masks are illustrated in the book: a photograph taken of an exhibition of “Sala da Crença Animista" or “Animist Belief Room” at the Dundo Museum at the end of the 1950s depicts one of the looted masks in a line-up of 30 Pwo masks belonging to the museum collection. The Chokwe statue is documented in an essay Les Entités Spirituelles des Chokwe (The Spiritual Existence of the Chokwe) written by Bastin and published in the academic paper Quaderni Poro in 1988.

This pioneering project to recover classical works of African art enables Fundação Sindika Dokolo to advance a local and a global dialogue of the epic story of African civilizations. Inspired by his father Augustin Dokolo Sanu, a great collector of classical African art, Sindika Dokolo created his foundation to document the journey of arts and culture from Africa with the aim of empowering future generations of Africans with the knowledge of their own cultural history.

“We are honoured to be returning these symbolic works,” Mr Sindika Dokolo said. “Locating the works and negotiating their return to their homeland are the result of the strong collaboration between Fundação Sindika Dokolo and dealers Didier Claes and Tao Kerefoff.”

Before their return to the Dundo Museum, these important works will travel to Luanda where they will be exhibited at the new Currency museum as part of La Triennale di Luanda at the end of November. The occasion will also celebrate forty years of Angolan Independence.