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Astrid S. Klein’s THE POWER OF THE KOLA – negotiating the living is a transdisciplinary, translocal and intergenerational art project. It is conducted together with Prof. Dr. Albert Gouaffo (University of Dschang) and is based on Klein’s long-term multi-voice research activities (Volume 4: THE POWER OF TROPICAL PLANTS / THE POWER OF THE KOLA). The core of the project is the restitution and activation of knowledge, the equivalence of different knowledge systems, and the negotiation of respectful and symmetrical relationships between people and all forms of existence. In THE POWER OF THE KOLA – negotiating the living, three young kola plants (Cola acuminata) living in the diaspora in Germany, travel to Cameroon. They leave the University of Hohenheim’s tropical collection greenhouse in Stuttgart and follow an invitation to Dschang.
The kola tree and its seeds, kola nuts, are of great significance in the African continent where the plants originate. They are indispensable features of the tropical rain forest belt and the neighbouring savannahs.
Sharing kola nuts stands among other things for life, respect, balance and peace, and accompanies many important events and rituals.
In the botanical collections of the West, Cola acuminata is only seen as a tropical crop plant and a raw material.
By returning, these plants recall the many millions of plants and animals that were collected and shipped to Europe during the German colonial period. As objects of exploitation, they were renamed, researched, and also stored, distributed, and capitalised as raw materials in global botany and agroeconomy networks.
The plants’ daring and seemingly absurd journey was long in preparation and took place in March 2024. These diasporic plants fortuitous arrival in Dschang was accompanied by artistic interventions and transdisciplinary sessions at the Musée des Civilisations de Dschang, on botany, colonial economies, the restitution of knowledge, commerce, and inequality with numerous guests. After a momentous ritual act by the Magni Si (twin mothers), children from Dschang placed the three kola plants in the soil together with a further local kola tree. To conclude, this new connection activated by the diasporic plants was celebrated with a concert.
In January 2025 there will be a further event in Dschang. Then it is planned to present the project in Stuttgart and Berlin. The accompanying audio piece TO THE RED SOIL can be heard here.
We talked about the project with artist Astrid S. Klein and her project partner Prof. Dr. phil. Albert Gouaffo.
THE POWER OF THE KOLA – negotiating the living has an important place in my many years of research and artistic work on shared spaces for action against the backdrop of coloniality in our relationships and the consequences of colonial ideologies. Many serious ecological, economic, and social problems are connected with extractivism, the age of plantation economies, and the enduring coloniality of conditions in general and the history of knowledge. I believe it is of vital significance, even existential, to create symmetrical spaces for action, where multifaceted knowledge is articulated in order to initiate together urgently needed changes towards the sustainable future of all forms of life.
In this context, the project can be seen as a shared action with several facets: a departure, a welcoming, and a new connection. The action is full of meaning, is real, requiring many protagonists, and an apparent absurdity lends it a sense of lightheartedness and a utopian aspect as well. It is specific, with an element of risk, and uncontrollable. We do not know if it will succeed, what its resonance will be, and we do not know what the kola, with its own very special culture, will activate now and in the future. The kola tree grows slowly, and it gets very old and bears fruit late but then for a long time. The plants thus also connect generations.The children in Dschang who put these plants into the soil can perhaps later share the kola nuts from the trees, but also share knowledge of the plants and their diasporic history with others. And in Germany we are connected with them via the parent plant in the tropical greenhouse in Stuttgart’s Hohenheim district. This now marks a diasporic place for critical reflection on its own collection history.
There is confidence that we can manage with the energy of the kola to negotiate equal and respectful relationships, recognising a violent past and present.
It took a long time before the journey could be undertaken. To have living plants as your partners makes for a special responsibility. The first idea for the project goes back to 2015, when I invited the parent plant of the cuttings as a representative of diasporic tropical plants from the Berlin-Dahlem botanical gardens to my exhibition at the Heidelberg Kunstverein. We there came to the conclusion that this plant should next travel to Cameroon, but that did not happen.
There is confidence that we can manage with the energy of the kola to negotiate equal and respectful relationships, recognising a violent past and present.
Astrid S. Klein
Instead, in order that it could survive, it was planted in the palm house at the University of Hohenheim, and the project was paused. In 2021, I took up the project again, and we were able to grow cuttings in Hohenheim for later travel. Meeting Prof. Dr. Albert Gouaffo and our discussions about the project led to the invitation to Dschang. Two years later a framework was in place, and we could begin to plan together. Without this invitation from Prof. Dr. Gouaffo and his interest and support I would not have been able to make this project happen. I am very happy about this inspiring collaboration.
It was a particular challenge during preparation to help the botanical gardens to understand the significance of this plant journey and to gain their support. There seems to be a blind spot in Germany when it comes to the history of botany, of agricultural sciences, and to the way research has been entangled with colonial economies. Coloniality does not seem to be a particularly important issue in this respect. In addition, research that takes place in an art context and not in the canon of the natural sciences is often not taken seriously.
The practical aspects of the journey were also very complex. There are plants that may not be taken across borders, and there are extensive laws protecting endangered species. Plants need customs documents and phytosanitary certificates, they may only travel without soil, and they must stay in the freight section of airplanes. How can they survive a journey of several days? How can they be kept damp and warm? How can they manage without light? The pandemic delayed the journey, and the plants had grown and were now two metres tall. How could they be packed? There was no prior expertise for this, and we had to try a lot of things out. During the cargo flight, the plants were suddenly lost for a few days . . . and we were a bundle of nerves and lost a lot of sleep in the process.
As soon as the “white cube” is abandoned and processual, translocal, and transcultural projects are undertaken in real spaces, there are no binding conventions. The contexts, ideas and expectations are very different, and contemporary art initially plays a peripheral role.
At first I was viewed with caution, and my credibility was tested. It goes without saying that the German colonial past and its crimes are a big issue, connected with demands that the German government recognise these criminal acts. Restitution and reparation in all the affected fields are fundamentally important. As an artist, I can raise these issues and support these demands. The restitution of knowledge, such as our project addresses, is very different from intergovernmental restitution between states, however. That was, and still remains, an important matter for shared discussion.
In our preparation in Cameroon, the project grew day by day, with more and more participants. After students and other members of the university, and the invited contributors, the royal court of Foto-Dschang also sent a delegation.
In my view we succeeded in the sessions in bringing together very different participants from civil society, the world of art, the natural sciences and the humanities, beyond Anglophone and Francophone borders. The unusual non-hierarchical format and the space in the Musée des Civilisations, specifically designed for this, featuring artistic and musical interventions, were welcome and worked well. It was surprising that a lot of the things about kola culture that can be heard in the audio piece TO THE RED SOIL were not known to young listeners, and that they thought it was very important to get to know about them.
The Magni Si ritual that was conducted for the plants in the botanical garden took place with a very diverse audience and gained a lot of resonance, and the subsequent final concert was a great celebration. After the event there was a lot of enthusiastic feedback, and people asked for THE POWER OF THE KOLA to be held annually.
Yes, the whole project is designed to live on independently of us. The plants are the main protagonists and they will hopefully become large trees and thus reinforce the connection. At present it is important to look after them well. Prof. Dr. Félix Meutchieye and his team from the University of Dschang are caring for them. In the longer term it will be interesting to see how the plants from the tropical greenhouse develop in their new location and how they react to the environment. The events have led to new contacts between the botanical gardens and there is a potential new project in the pipeline.
In Germany, Prof. Dr. Gouaffo and I intend to present the plants’ journey, its significance, and the other connected themes in a performative event in the local context.
In early 2025 we want to work together to mark the location in Dschang with an information board that will present the project and this place of rememberance. A think tank on the issue of sustainability is planned with students of the University of Dschang and artists. Prof. Dr. Félix Meutchieye’s plan for a new botanical garden, which is already located on the university campus and in the process of expansion, will also be discussed. And there is the question as to how children and youth from the Lessa'art kids academy in Dschang can continue to work on ecological themes and knowledge of local plants, and perhaps assume a kind of patronage for the trees. But as is so often the case, it is is difficult to find funding for projects like this. Unfortunately there is still no independent support for the arts in Cameroon. So much more could be done, but most artists live in precarious circumstances. International art funding—such as the ifa programmes Exhibition Funding and Artists’ Contacts,
local support from the Goethe-Institut, and also from the department for international art projects at the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and Arts—thus remain essential for all sides in order to keep such special and non-commercial collaborative art projects alive. So there are many plans for the future and we are pleased about any opportunities to make projects more permanent.
I have been working for more than ten years on questions concerning the translocation of Cameroonian cultural artefacts in the colonial context from 1884 to 1919 with Germany. This includes ethnological objects, zoological and botanical culture, and also so-called human remains. This transfer took place within a context of injustice. It is important together to critically shed light on this period of massive extraction in the context of researching the German-Cameroonian colonial past. The consequences of this extractivism in both regions can be observed on a daily basis and they sustain colonial structures in the present. This is the reason why I found artist Astrid S. Klein’s request so important and why I promised her my support.
Colonialism is the history of the systematic and violent seizure of foreign territories in the name of profit. These areas are exploited with no care for ecological sustainability. This leads to the destruction of the basis for life in the colonised regions. Populations are directly affected by this imbalance in the use of natural resources, and social inequalities and injustices are cemented. Astrid S. Klein’s project is an example, a metaphor of the need for restitution of stolen knowledge of botanical diversity, and also for the redistribution of natural resources, so as to make peace, humanity, and justice realities.
Astrid S. Klein’s project is an example, a metaphor of the need for restitution of stolen knowledge of botanical diversity, and also for the redistribution of natural resources, so as to make peace, humanity, and justice realities.
Prof. Albert Gouaffo
The society of origin discovered for the first time that treasures of their flora are held in botanical gardens and herbariums in Germany as a legacy of the colonial economy. They welcomed the diasporic plants with great ceremony and used local twin-mother rituals to transform the location at the botanical gardens at the Dschang University into a postcolonial place of memory and encounter. The Magni Si, the twin mothers, always bring great joy. They are peacemakers in the Grassfields community in Cameroon and are seen as envoys of God. In the ritual, the diasporic plants were used symbolically to remember where they had been translocated to and whose well-being they had served and still serve. They also stand for millions of botanical extracts that are made profitable for medicinal purposes in research institutes without the consent of the people of Cameroon.
The great challenge was to explain the existence of the kola plant in Germany and its colonial origin. The kola nut, the seed of the kola tree, has a primarily cultural function. The kola is sold, but no one in Cameroon would have the idea of making a crop plant out if it and of cultivating it en masse. There is no such need, as the kola tree can bear fruit for hundreds of years. The idea of a diasporic kola plant was thus initially incomprehensible. It only became clear when it was put into the context of the colonial extraction of resources. Then there were connections with other agricultural plants like bananas, rubber, coffee, etc. These large plantations threaten the existence of the population, as more and more land is used for this kind of farming but the products are not consumed locally.
Albert Gouaffo, Prof. Dr. phil., teaches German literature and cultural studies and crosscultural communication at the Université de Dschang in western Cameroon. He is vice-president of the Association of Sub-Saharan Germanists (GAS). His research interests include German literature of the colonial period in Africa, German literature of the African diaspora, memory studies, and provenance research on cultural goods that were extracted during the German colonial period.
Current publications: Koloniale Verbindungen – transkulturelle Erinnerungstopografien: Das Rheinland in Deutschland und das Grasland Kameruns, 2019, Transcript-Verlag, Bielefeld; Atlas der Abwesenheit – Kameruns Kulturerbe in Deutschland, Juni 2023, Dietrich Reimer Verlag, based on the project "Reversed History of Collections" under the leadership of Albert Gouaffo (Université de Dschang) and Bénédicte Savoy (Technische Universität Berlin). www.albert-gouaffo.com
Astrid S. Klein has been working as an artist since 2005 in multi-voice and sustainable projects with protagonists from the African diasporas, the Caribbean and Europe. Her research focuses on the decentring of mindsets, generating new relationships by means of other knowledge, and the potential of shared action. Her investigations pursue connecting lines and paths that leave the "colonial library" (V.Y. Mudimbe) and permit living non-essentialist adjacency between different worlds. Klein is a Meisterschülerin of the artist Joan Jonas. Her transdisciplinary practice includes poetical and critical studies in various media and formats with public events.
Her works are presented internationally. Astrid S. Klein is a founder member of the Society for Artistic Research in Germany / Baden-Württemberg and teaches gender and cultural studies and research strategies at the HSD – Peter Behrens School of Arts in Düsseldorf.
The project was supported by: ifa – Institut für Auslandbeziehungen e.V., Ministry of Science, Research and Arts of Baden-Württemberg, quartier flottant, Goethe-Institut Cameroon.
The artist extends her gratitude to all participants:
Prof. Dr. Albert Gouaffo and team, Prof. Dr. Félix Meutchieye and team, Dr. Abdoulaye Herbert, La famille forestière (Université de Dschang), Thekla Worch-Ambara and team (Goethe Institut Kamerun), Marc Gegenfurtner (Kulturamt Stuttgart), Nina Nguedia (Musée des Civilisations de Dschang), Dr. Serge Verlain Djomo (Botanic Garden Limbé), Chantal Edie (The Forest), Dr. Lucie Mbogni Nankeng (Lessa‘art kids academy), Magni Si Peace Group, Magni Si of His Majesty the King of Foto-Dschang, Dr. Olive Fonjeu Fokou (African Women‘s Network for Community Management of Forests, REFACOF), Charles Ndamo, Rass and Ghislaine Nganmo (Love N'Live), Serge N. Ngouffo, Charly Njinkemo, Pen Boy, Mag Bila, Pchords, Jows, Alice Enowma Ncha, Dr. Salamatou (Université de Yaoundé I), Dr. Alexandra Kehl (Universität Tübingen), Dr. Helmut Dalitz, Dr. Robert Gliniars, Dr. Rhinaixa Duque-Thüs, Michael Kurz and team (Universität Hohenheim).
