In his book The Benefit of a half Gourd/Nyttan av en halv kalebass, the anthropologist Wilhelm Östberg describes the circumstances surrounding the acquisition of these Kenyan baskets as follows:
“This was during the terrible draught in 1983-84. I was on a colleting tour in the area, together with two Kenyan museum colleagues, and we got an offer to buy baskets made from the bark of the baobab tree. Such baskets are hardly made any more (…) When there was no more food to be found in the area, the old family treasures were brought out and we were offered to buy them”
Here the museum workers had at least one dilemma. Buying these baskets – would that really be the right thing to do? Should you just buy the best ones, in order to give the tax payers value for their money, or should you buy something from each family, so as to give some help to all of them?
What to do in this situation? Would it be right to haggle about prices with people who suffer, or to refuse them the possibility of solving their problems in a way they themselves have chosen?
Those baskets now are here, in the museum. The book tells us how that happened.