Lawyers for the Gabonese authorities have requested a stay of proceedings on the opening of legal action brought in Alès (Gard) by a couple, former owners of a Fang mask. This mask was sold in 2021 for 150 euros to a second-hand dealer, who resold it for 4.2 million euros during an auction. The octogenarian couple from Eure-et-Loir took legal action to cancel the sale to the second-hand dealer. This carved wooden mask had belonged to an ancestor, a former colonial governor in Africa, whose value they were unaware of at the time, according to their lawyer.
It was only six months later that the couple discovered, while reading their newspaper, that this “extremely rare 19th century mask, the prerogative of a secret society of the Fang people in Gabon”, was going to be sold at auction in Montpellier. And discovered on this occasion its true value. Its aesthetic, while there are only around ten examples left in the world, inspired the painters Modigliani and Picasso in particular.
Gabon requests successive cancellation of sales
The catalog of the Montpellier auction room specified that it had been “collected around 1917, in unknown circumstances, by the French colonial governor René-Victor Edward Maurice Fournier (1873-1931), probably during a tour in Gabon “.
But in the introduction to the trial which opened this Tuesday, two lawyers representing the transitional government of Gabon requested that their voluntary intervention be deemed admissible. This is in order to “achieve the successive cancellation of sales of this mask, its repatriation and the consignment of funds,” argued Olivia Betoe. They also demand “a stay of proceedings” to pursue in parallel a criminal procedure launched at the Montpellier judicial court after a complaint for receiving stolen goods was filed by Gabon in September.
“Voluntary intervention is a legal tool. We can claim this mask for laudable conditions which are part of a cultural context, but that is not, today, the subject,” retorted the second-hand dealer’s lawyer, Me Patricia Pijot. During the sale, on March 26, 2022, Gabonese people vigorously protested, demanding its “restitution” to its country of origin.