The Afo-A-Kom is far from the world's greatest piece of art—or even
Africa's. A 5-ft. 2in. image of a king, it is rather crudely carved
in iroko wood, the torso covered with sackcloth stitched with
reddish-brown beads, the face masked in copper. But the Afo-A-Kom
is sacred to the approximately 30,000 people
who constitute the Kom kingdom, a tribal enclave in the northwestern
part of the Federal Republic of Cameroon. Last week this rather ungainly sculpture caused a flurry of diplomatic
exchanges and created an uproar that stretched from the elegant salons
of New York's art world all the way back to Laikom, the capital of
Kom. For it seemed that the Afo-A-Kom had been stolen in late 1966 from a
storage hut near the royal palace and smuggled out of the kingdom.
According to the New York Times, the statue was mysteriously spirited
away by thieves using a highly organized system of logistics that
included Land Rovers, trucks and airplanes. When he realized his loss,
Law Aw, the King of Kom was thought to be
“psychologically killed,” and soon died. The King's nephew, suspected of complicity in the disappearance of the
statue, was ostracized, and, according to one account, nearly everyone
in the country took to quarreling. The new Fon, Bobe-Meya, had a new Afo-A-Kom carved and displayed, as is
customary, with female figures representing his wife and mother. But
the new sculpture was no substitute for the old. According to Sandra
Blakeslee, a former Times reporter living in western Africa: “There has
been no peace in the kingdom since the statue was taken out.” Then a few months ago, a catalogue of a show called “Royal Art of
Cameroon,” mounted at Dartmouth College, reached Evan Schneider, a
longtime Kom scholar and a member of the Peace Corps in Cameroon.
There, resplendent in full color on the cover, was the lost Afo-A-Kom.
It had been lent to Dartmouth by its new owner, Aaron Furman, a
respected Manhattan dealer in primitive art, and it was reportedly on
sale for $60,000. Beyond Money. It was no surprise in Cameroon that the statue was in the
U.S. But the new publicity about the
sculpture caused a stir. Last week Thaddeus Nkuo, first secretary of
Cameroon in Washington and himself a Kom, demanded its return,
explaining: “It is beyond money, beyond value. It is the heart of the
Kom, what unifies the tribe, the spirit of the nation, what holds us
together. It is not an object of art for sale, and could not be.”
