London, United Kingdom – Dan Hicks is a professor of up to date archaeology on the College of Oxford who has labored on the college’s Pitt Rivers Museum for 14 years.
Pitt Rivers, in Oxford, is an establishment that claims it’s dedicated to a “decolonisation” course of. In 2020, it eliminated greater than 100 human stays from open show, together with trophy heads from India, the mum of an Egyptian youngster, and South American tsanta, or shrunken heads, objects that are thought-about sacred or secret by Indigenous peoples.
However it nonetheless holds many colonial-era objects in collections.
Hicks’ new guide, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (Pluto Press), makes a strong argument for Western museums to repatriate looted artefacts and sort out the Eurocentric narratives they had been traditionally created to advertise.
He focuses on the pillaging of the Benin Bronzes within the late Nineteenth century, following an 1897 British naval assault on Benin Metropolis, situated in modern-day Nigeria.
After the assault, hundreds of artefacts had been violently taken and ended up at among the most prestigious museums on the earth, together with Pitt Rivers.
Al Jazeera spoke to Hicks about his work within the context of the worldwide motion in opposition to racism and colonisation:
Al Jazeera: You’ve argued that the world across the museum has modified, and the museum itself should change with it. How do you view this alteration in opposition to the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter motion or associated struggles such because the Rhodes Should Fall marketing campaign?
Dan Hicks: Over a long time, the dual African-led actions of restitution and ‘fallism’ – joined by the Black Lives Matter motion because it has developed in America and Europe – have highlighted the position that artwork and tradition play in colonial dispossession and institutional racism.
Whether or not it’s Confederacy or colonisers’ statues or shows of looted artwork, these actions have proven how they helped type a worldview based mostly on cultural supremacy, and the way establishments like museums weren’t solely used to justify anti-Black colonial violence however to make it endure into the current.
Throughout Africa, we’re now seeing a dynamic second of cooperation between nations and communities to make restitution occur in dialogue with European states. France’s returns of cultural objects to its former colonies and German returns of human stays from the Ovaherero and Nama genocide to Namibia present it’s working.
Al Jazeera: The place do you stand on the UK authorities’s latest laws to guard statues from being taken down, within the context of the Colston episode and the so-called ‘tradition struggle’?
Hicks: With the pretend tradition struggle that the laborious proper is projecting, we see a return of one thing I describe within the guide as ‘white projection’.
The British sought to justify the violent army assaults launched in opposition to African kingdoms and communities with the false concept that some earlier crime had been dedicated. Within the case of February 1897, the reason for the killing of hundreds was the supposed killing of some white directors.
The pretend tradition struggle resurrects this outdated colonial trick to derail progress in direction of restorative justice within the Black Lives Matter motion. It’s an try and obscure tackling memorials of anti-Black violence by pretending it’s not human lives and our bodies which can be in danger, however stone statues.
Al Jazeera: What shocked you most whilst you had been researching the guide?
Hicks: I all the time believed what I’d been instructed concerning the Benin expedition till I began digging into the archives.
On the Pitt Rivers, we at present take care of 150 of the greater than 10,000 Benin artefacts that had been violently seized; and the reality is that the tons of of troopers, sailors, colonial directors simply took what they may for private acquire. Some had been offered inside weeks and had been displayed in museums from Berlin to London; others had been handed down via households.
So, the ‘punitive expedition’ was an unimaginable act of destruction; each the sheer bodily violence, with the Maxim machine weapons and rocket launchers, and the cultural violence of the looting, nonetheless alive in 160 museums around the globe and untold non-public collections.
Al Jazeera: What was the cultural significance of the Bronzes for the Edo area?
Hicks: It’s laborious as we speak to think about the royal, sacred city panorama of an unbroken line of Obas that reached again sooner than Elizabeth I.
The making of those lovely artworks was central to each the spiritual and courtroom lifetime of the Kingdom of Benin. The carved elephant tusks, brass plaques, sculptures and bells, ornate ivory and coral-work physique ornaments – all had been intimately linked to that historical past. That was one more reason they had been taken; to advertise British claims of sovereignty.
And museums … had been a ‘distinctive kind of weapon’ used to justify these claims.
Inside weeks these artefacts had been in show in anthropology museums which, within the Nineties, had been new establishments designed to show white supremacist narratives.
We see that clearly within the shows of skulls that instructed the racist lie of several types of people, however tradition and artwork had been additionally used to inform the same story of late Nineteenth-century Europe’s cultural superiority over Africa.
Within the Nineteen Forties, our pure historical past museums eliminated the skulls, however these cultural shows remained within the anthropology museums subsequent door.
The job for curators now could be to not simply handle questions of possession, but in addition to undo these narratives.
Al Jazeera: The dedication of French President Emmanuel Macron’s authorities in returning African artefacts has been a key turning level inside Europe. Final December, a invoice was handed that mandated the return of 27 artefacts in 2021. Might one thing related occur in Britain?
Hicks: The developments in France are extremely welcome, however just the start.
The Macron report was solely written two years in the past and already we’re seeing a unanimous choice by the French meeting.
The scenario within the UK is a bit completely different to the French one. Our nationwide museums shouldn’t be the only real focus for restitution as a result of solely 8 p.c of the objects seized in 1897 are within the British Museum; the remaining are in 150 establishments, together with 45 within the UK.
We have to concentrate on regional museum trusts and college and native authority museums. Lower than one p.c of the tens of millions of objects taken from Africa below colonialism are on show within the UK.
These establishments are additionally not topic to the identical authorized constraints as nationwide museums. And alter is occurring within the areas – for instance with the choice by Jesus Faculty, Cambridge, to return the one Benin Bronze they’d.
Restitution will not be one thing that occurs in a single day, however dialogue is now giving technique to motion. The Brutish Museums concludes by describing the 2020s as a decade of returns. Issues are undoubtedly altering. However it’s now time for UK museums to step up, and to be held accountable for his or her responses to repatriation.