A judge in Texas has ordered the owner of a mysterious collection of around 1,400 African artefacts to hand over one or two valuable pieces to satisfy an outstanding legal debt of nearly $1m. The unusual order comes after the same judge in Harris County (where Houston is located), Ursula Hall, twice issued temporary restraining orders halting planned auctions of real estate agent Sam Njunuri’s African art collection just hours before they were due to begin.
The auctions had been set in motion to compensate Darlene Jarrett and Sylvia Jones, former tenants who claimed Njunuri changed the locks on the Houston property they had arranged to lease from him and took or sold their belongings while they were away on a trip in 2015. Jarrett and Jones sued Njunuri, and in 2021 a jury found in their favour. The following year, a judge ordered Njunuri to pay Jarrett and Jones $990,000 in damages. In place of a cash payment, an auction of the collection was scheduled to repay the debt.
However, the day before the planned sale date of 4 April, Njunuri filed for bankruptcy, and Judge Hall issued a restraining order to postpone the auction. The Houston Chronicle reports that the judge also halted the rescheduled auction on 25 July and ordered Njunuri to hand over one or two works valued at $990,000 to Jarrett and Jones’s lawyer, Joseph Walker, by 22 August. The order gives Njunuri a deadline of 15 August to conduct any necessary appraisals of the objects in his collection.
In the event that an appraiser concludes that no one or two pieces in the collection are worth $990,000, the order continues, Njunuri will be required to make the entire collection accessible to an appraiser for cataloguing and valuation, at his expense. (In his 3 April bankruptcy filing, Njunuri valued his total assets at between $1m and $10m.)
Njunuri had at one time intended to create a museum to house his holdings of African art, including masks, wood carvings, clay sculptures, metal statues and more. However, according to a Houston Chronicle report, he has no ownership or provenance materials for the objects, which have been housed in two rooms in a Houston office park for the past two years. Prior to the abrupt cancellation of the initial auction in April, the entire trove of around 1,400 pieces was set to be offered as a single lot with a starting bid of $4,400.
Njunuri’s collection first came to widespread attention in 2020, when local media investigations revealed that the artefacts had come into the possession of Harris County Precinct 1 commissioner Rodney Ellis and were being stored at taxpayers’ expense in a renovated warehouse in south Houston. Those revelations prompted a corruption investigation of Ellis. In 2021, a grand jury in Harris County opted not to bring criminal charges against Ellis.