The Brutish Museums, page 2
Special thanks must go to the leading scholars of Benin 1897, Felicity Bodenstein in Paris and Staffan Lundén in Stockholm, for their help and encouragement. Special thanks are also due to Nana Oforiatta Ayim, Michael Barrett, Ines de Castro, Philippe Charlier, Victor Ehikhamenor, Mark Elliott, Sandra Ferracutti, Monica Hanna, Frédéric Keck, Anne Luther, Sharon Macdonald, Sarah Mallet, Nick Mirzoeff, Wayne Modest, Chris Morton, Ciraj Rassool, Anthony Richter, Mike Rowlands, Bénédicte Savoy, Olivia Smith, Adrenele Sonariwo, Carole Souter, Jonas Tinius, Laura Van Broekhoven, Onyekachi Wambu and William Whyte, and very many more who have helped to shape this book in different ways.
The opportunity to contribute to the Symposium on Art, Law and Politics at King’s College, Cambridge in March 2019, at the kind invitation of Sarah Rabinowe, Mary-Ann Middelkoop, Luise Scheidt, Honor May, and Freya Sackville-West, was also an important milestone in the development of the book.
The research for this book was supported by an Art Fund Headley Fellowship.
* * *
A note on the black-and-white photographs interspersed in this text is necessary. They are from the album-diary of Captain Herbert Sutherland Walker (1864–1932) of the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles), who was a Special Service Officer in the Benin Expedition. A recent accession to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, these photographs are offered without captions and copyright-free, as a reminder of the commonalities between two mnemonic regimes of taking and visuality: the taking of objects and the putting of some of these on display in museums, and the taking of photographs. This book seeks to intervene with these modes of appearance, in which taking is turned from a moment in time into an ongoing duration. The aim is to bring British colonial violence and present into view and into focus, so that we can begin the process of cultural restitution. By digging where we stand.
Preface to the Paperback Edition
I guess the pushback against The Brutish Museums was to be expected from right-wing pundits. Expected or not, with all the dreary tedium that would accompany any gang of pub bores, each reminiscing with deep and lengthy regret about a time that never was, their lacklustre attack-pieces and rambling hit-jobs duly arrived. From Melanie Phillips’ Substack (non-paywalled content) to Michael Mosbacher’s hot take in The Spectator, and to David Aaronovitch’s column in The Times, the book has been criticised, more often more for its tone than for its message, by the usual suspects.1 Yes, as each such piece is published, in the small hours a chaotic mob of egg-avatar-name-bunch-of-numbers fascist accounts predictably use the reply function to squirt their bile towards my Twitter profile for a day or two. But mainly the recurring thought has been: Who knew when the fake ‘culture war’ came it would be so badly written?
(There have been tons of incredibly generous, thoughtful and positive reviews of course, and I am not about to reference them here but I am immensely and eternally grateful to all those who have written, shared, and commented in long or short form to support my putting my neck very slightly on the line in publishing this book – you know who you are.)
But what I don’t think I was really prepared for was some of the really negative stuff coming from so very close to home. Writing in the Observer, Tristram Hunt, the Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, claimed The Brutish Museums is a work of histrionic activism.2 In The Art Newspaper Nick Thomas – Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University and currently a trustee of the Pitt Rivers Museum where I am a curator – denounced the book for ‘trash-talking museums’, arguing that ‘the Hicks-style monologue learns nothing from, and contributes nothing to, an art of listening that curators have cultivated for decades’.3
And my Oxford University colleague the Reverend Canon Nigel Biggar CBE, who is Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy and runs a personal project called ‘Ethics and Empire’, has claimed that the book represents ‘an object lesson in how political zeal can abuse data in the cause of manufacturing an expedient narrative’.
Thomas claims his silence is listening; Hunt claims his inaction is leadership. The Brutish Museums takes them both to task for the counter-insurgency of their position on colonial history, but nonetheless their comments have stung as they were intended to, since after all I have written this book as part of doing my job. I’m not an activist, I’m a curator. I’m not attacking museums, I’m trying to play my part in making the one I work in fit for the twenty-first century. In their mutual attempt to dismiss the book as some kind of militant attack on museums, rather than a step forward in the development of new ethical and curatorial standards, Thomas and Hunt indulge in the same simplistic binarism for which Biggar’s pro-empire project was so clearly critiqued in an open letter from Oxford academics back in 2017: ‘Good and evil may be meaningful terms of analysis for theologians. They are useless to historians.’4
There is good news though. Beyond the outgoing generation of Oxbridge professors (and, yes, the occasional aging ‘young fogey’ national museum director), the call to return the Benin Bronzes has gone mainstream. The Brutish Museums has added in a small way to the momentum built up over decades by Nigerian colleagues and campaigners. Crucially the book sought to break down the longstanding pretence by the press officers of some of the richest and most powerful Euro-American museums that the question of African cultural restitution is a stand-off between claimants and curators.
For the truth about some of these recent histories, we now have my dear colleague Bénédicte Savoy’s crucial book Afrikas Kampf um seine Kunst (‘Africa’s Struggle for her Art’) (2021), an English translation of which may, I believe, already be in the works. But in considering this most recent period of landmark moments for this cause, let me foreground one. In March 2021 when after Aberdeen University announced their intention to return a looted bronze currently in their care, The Times reversed its editorial position and came out in favour of returns, writing that: ‘Where it can be shown – such as in the case of this Benin bronze – that the removal of a piece was a criminal act, then repatriation should be the primary objective.’5
In the subsequent weeks and months, further commitments to return Benin material have been made by the National Museum of Ireland, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, and by all of the federal state museums of Germany. Speaking in April 2021, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has called the agreement to make returns ‘a turning point in our approach to colonial history’.6 This turning point has been driven by the tenacity of Nigerian-led claims, as they have been maintained and restated since the 1930s. Taking stock of this fast-moving field, as plans for a new museum for Benin City gain momentum and the work of the newly-formed Legacy Restoration Trust develops, it is striking how the urgent reckoning with the form and nature of late-nineteenth-century British corporate-militarist-colonialism is being led by the German government, by Nigerian scholars and curators, by Irish museum directors, by American campaigners – rather than by the British national museums. And how the old strategies of ‘white projection’ – pretending that restitution is somehow an attack on museums – are falling apart.
The relationship between formerly colonised nations and formerly colonising nations is only one part of the restitution process, and much of the progress on returns is being made by non-state actors, both in terms of claimants and Euro-American museums. Perhaps half of the perhaps two thousand objects looted in 1897 that are currently in British collections are outside of the national museums. But the position of Britain’s national museums matters, and London is looking increasingly isolated and left behind by the day.
The Brutish Museums concludes with a vision of the 2020s as a decade of returns. Early into that decade, there is some cause to be hopeful. Cultural restitution does not happen overnight, but equally endless dialogue that continually defers action is no longer feasible. Attempts by some to draw museums into the ‘culture war’ that has been declared by British government on supposedly ‘woke’ institutions or curators are increasingly incoherent. And the wider processes of truth, of what The Brutish Museums calls the physical dismantling of the white infrastructure of Euro-American ‘world culture’ museums, of the struggle for reconciliation, repair, justice, and the repayment of outstanding debts, are gathering pace. A key part of this is the recognition that returning stolen goods on a case-by-case basis is a wholly necessary, but insufficient, part of cultural restitution. Returns are a sine qua non, but acts of dismantling the racist core of our museums must also involve a wider set of anti-colonial, anti-racist actions – from positive action initiatives to diversify these incredibly white organisations to new forms of equitable co-production with African colleagues and institutions, and to new forms of remembrance of the colonial past.
What is clear is that the old argument that restitution is a distraction from the ‘real work’ of anti-racism is past its sell-by date. Art matters. Culture matters. The destruction of sovereignty, the attack on traditional belief, attempts at wholesale cultural dispossession – all these military tactics engaged by Europeans in Africa recognised the importance of art and culture.
As progress is made with the return of the Benin Bronzes, attention will move to the many smaller, less well documented, but nonetheless crucially important, acts of taking that occurred throughout World War Zero across the continent of Africa. A far wider set of unfinished acts of ultraviolence, extractivism, the ideology of cultural supremacy is unfolding, is coming into view. Stolen art, stolen culture, stolen land, stolen climate, stolen past and stolen future. Loss that is rekindled every day that a Euro-American museum opens its doors and puts stolen goods on display.
We’re still in the middle of this period of profound change. It’s a time of great hope tempered with an awareness that the opportunity for substantive change could yet be lost.
* * *
In the months since The Brutish Museums was first published, in these strange times of lockdown and zoom calls, I have been privileged to join many international colleagues in conversations about the book, from whom I have learned so very much. My sincere thanks to all those with whom I have been in public dialogue in a range of video, radio and podcast formats, including Ana Lucia Araujo, Ariella Azoulay, Aaron Bastani, Sandeep Bakshi, Natasha Becker, Marla Berns, Alixe Bovey, Leyla Bumbra, Shadreck Chirikure, Adenike Cosgrove, Julie Crooks, Subhadra Das, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Victor Ehikhamenor, Inua Ellams, Ndubuisi C. Ezeluomba, Errol Francis, Chris Garrard, Paul Gilroy, Andreas Görgen, Diya Gupta, Monica Hanna, Afua Hirsch, Candice Hopkins, Phillip Ihenacho, Ruba Kana’an, Bryan Knight, Christine Mullen Kreamer, Lauren Kroiz, Chaédria LaBouvier, Peju Layiwola, Wim Manuhutu, Wayne Modest, Nina Möntmann, Mai Musié, Terri Ochiagha, Ken Olende, Alice Procter, Ciraj Rassool, Seph Rodney, Felwine Sarr, Bénédicte Savoy, Olga Symeonoglou, Nanette Snoep, Chardine Taylor-Stone, Onyekachi Wambu, Esmé Ward, Anne Wetsi Mpoma and Gary Younge. Thank you all. And thank you also to all those who joined in the audience and the growing online community. Do keep reaching out through @BrutishMuseums and @ProfDanHicks. And a very special thanks also to MC Hammer for hosting the epic four-and-a-half-hour-long Clubhouse event for The Brutish Museums on 5 March 2021 – a night that will forever stay with me and many who participated or tuned in.
Finally, before you read this book you might just now skip ahead and take a look at Appendix 5. Ask yourself how near you are right this minute from a looted Benin Bronze. And then consider what else is in the storerooms of the museum, how and why. What is not even on the database? What is still languishing in a box unopened for a century? The theory that informs this book begins with the premise that an old photograph or an archaeological artefact or a historical object is not a fragment of time, but an endurance. Archaeology is not the study of the remnants of the past: it’s the science of human duration is one of the book’s guiding principles.
So, as you read what follows, do try to keep in mind a sense of how much harm that stolen culture might still be doing – from inside each locked room or ziplocked bag – as you turn the pages. Yes, the Benin theft is ten thousand unfinished events. But yes, there are also millions more items of stolen African material culture in Euro-American collections, further unfinished events, endurances in their millions. We still don’t know how this ends.
Dan Hicks
August 2021
1
The Gun That Shoots Twice
The seven-pounders are most excellent guns, as they are made to stand any amount of knocking about, and also to be mounted and dismounted in a very short space of time. They are much disliked by the natives of the country, who call them ‘them gun that shoot twice’ – referring to the explosion of the shells, which they consider distinctly unfair, taking place as it does so far away from the gun, and mostly unpleasantly close to themselves, when they are, as they fondly imagine, out of range.
Captain Alan Boisragon, Commandant
of Niger Coast Protectorate Force (1897)1
Along the Niger River since 1894 Alan Boisragon had seen scores of military ‘punitive expeditions’ in the bush, with warships, Maxim machine guns, rocket launchers and Martini-Henry rifles. In the passage above, he is describing the rifled muzzle-loading mounted carriage field gun, known as a ‘seven-pounder’ because of the weight of the shell that it fired (about 3.2 kilograms), in his popular account of the military attack on Ubini2 (Benin City) by Niger Coast Protectorate and Admiralty forces in February 1897. Boisragon does not record the number of casualties from the shelling of the city, of scores of surrounding towns and villages, of incessant firing of machine guns and rockets into the bush, during this 18-day attack. He does not take stock of the numbers of killed and wounded soldiers and displaced people in the many, many previous ‘expeditions’ and attacks, or reflect on the extent of death and injury in the many as yet unplanned expeditions of the coming months and years, as yet unnamed: Opobo, Qua, Aro, Cross River, Niger Rivers, Patani, Kano, ‘opening up new territories’, ‘journeying into the interior’, ‘pacifications’, exacting punishment for supposed offences against civilisation.
Undetained by any question of African deaths, this description in fact came from an autobiographical adventure story, in which Alan Boisragon told of his own escape in the face of attack, one of just two survivors of the earlier supposedly peaceful expedition to the City in January 1897, during which perhaps seven (or perhaps five) Englishmen were killed, and how he and his comrade had to walk through the jungle for five days before finally returning to safety and civilisation – ready to exact a brutal revenge on his ‘barbaric’ attackers and the heart of their ‘uncivilised’ power – the so-called city of blood.3
The Daily Mail and The Times led the newspaper coverage of this Boys’ Own yarn of ‘massacre’ and heroism and to which the February ‘punitive expedition’ was the necessary response. A year later, the War Office was issuing medals commending soldiers described as members of ‘the squadron sent to punish the King of Benin for the massacre of the political expedition’.
This is a book about that violent sacking by British troops of the City of Benin in February 1897. It rethinks the enduring effects of this destruction in Britain today, taking stock of its place in a wider military campaign of regime change, underscoring its status as the pivotal moment in the formation of Nigeria as a British protectorate and British colony, exposing how the many ‘punitive expeditions’ were never acts of retaliation, and trying to perceive the meaning and enduring effects of the public display of royal artworks and other sacred objects looted by marines and soldiers from the Royal Court now dispersed across more than 150 known museums and galleries, plus perhaps half as many again unknown public and private collections globally – from the Met in New York to the British Museum, from Toronto to Glasgow, from Berlin to Moscow, Los Angeles, Abu Dhabi, Lagos, Adelaide, Bristol and beyond. Some of these objects have a truly immense monetary value on the open market today, selling for millions of dollars.
Objects looted from the City of Benin are on display in an estimated 161 museums and galleries in Europe and North America. Let us begin with this question: What does it mean that, in scores of museums across the western world, a specially written museum interpretation board tells the visitor the story of the Benin Punitive Expedition?
One of the largest of these collections of violently stolen objects, trophies of this colonial victory, is the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum – where I am Curator of World Archaeology. Are museums like the Pitt Rivers just neutral containers, custodians of a universal heritage, displaying a common global cultural patrimony to an international public of millions each year, celebrations of African creativity that radically lift up African art alongside European sculpture and painting as a universal heritage? The point of departure for this book is the idea that, for as long as they continue to display sacred and royal objects looted during colonial massacres, they will remain the very inverse of all this: hundreds of monuments to the violent propaganda of western superiority above African civilisations erected in the name of ‘race science’, littered across Europe and North America like war memorials to gain rather than to loss, devices for the construction of the Global South as backward, institutions complicit in a prolongation of extreme violence and cultural destruction, indexes of mass atrocity and iconoclasm and ongoing degradation, legacies of when the ideology of cultural evolution, which was an ideology of white supremacy, used the museum as a tool for the production of alterity: tools still operating, hiding in plain sight.
