Why you should become a Kenya Museum Society member
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The Kenya Museum Society (KMS) is a non-profit organization set up in 1970 to support and promote the National Museums of Kenya.
Visitors and citizens alike are encouraged to get the KMS membership. By being a member of KMS, you are helping to preserve and promote Kenyan history, culture and artifacts, while having fun at activities and events in the company of people who enjoy the same interests as you.
KMS members are entitled to free entry to all national and regional Museums, prehistoric sites and monuments around Kenya.
The National Museum of Kenya (NMK) is the custodian of Kenya’s natural and cultural heritage that manages three World Heritage Sites, twenty-one museums and over two hundred sites and monuments across the country.
Famous Artifacts Countries Want Back Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
By Debra Kelly/Feb. 2, 2021 12:53 pm EDT
All the big museums do it: They exhibit artifacts from other countries. But how many museums actually have a right to do so?
It s a difficult question to answer. In 2013, New York s Metropolitan Museum sent two statues back home after they were presented with evidence that they d been stolen from a Cambodian temple. That s great, but according to The Verge, proving that something was definitely looted, stolen, or otherwise taken illegally is tough, even though the Archaeological Institute of America suggests that up to 90 percent of classical and certain other types of artifacts have ended up in museums under shady circumstances.
by Owen Kibenge
Terrence McCabe. Credit: Bert Covert.
When locals started showing up with machine guns, AAAS Member and newly elected 2020 AAAS Fellow Dr. Terrence McCabe decided that it became too dangerous to continue exploring communities in Kenya’s Turkana county. Instead, he turned his career on the Badlands of northern Kenya and went south, where he would be happier to be more worried about lions than the guys with machine guns,” he says.
For 31 years now, McCabe – who is the Director of Environment and Society Program of the Institute of Behavioral Science and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder – has been working in northern Tanzania on several projects in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Simanjiro plains to the east of Tarangire National Park. This is a lush landscape where the Maasai, a pastoralist community, grazes their livestock alongside lions, elephants and rhinos.
Germany s new museum, the Humboldt Forum has ignited a colonial controversy. The edifice is dedicated to the two 8th century Humboldt brothers. One was a philosopher and the other a naturalist who collected specimens and artifacts from across the world. The Forum is located in the reconstruction of the ‘’Berlin Palace , a symbol of the German colonial empire.
The Forum is housing nearly 20,000 artefacts from Africa, Asia and Oceania, mostly former colonies. Due to the pandemic, its inauguration was held online with many of the experts from all over the world attending via video link. Of course it also about difficult and complex themes like colonialism and the impact of colonialism until today. It’s also about the future of ethnological collections. Here, we will argue and dispute about this. But out basic principle is: we don t want to talk about the others, we want to discuss with others and that s why we need urgently a place like the Humboldt Forum , Hartmut Dorgerloh,