The Brutish Museums, page 23
Claims for restitution were not new. They had been growing for decades. The first claims for restitution to Benin had begun in 1936 through the agency of Omo n’Oba n’Edo Uku Akpolokpolo, Akenzua II, the Oba of Benin from 1933 to 1978. Oba Ovonramwen had died in Calabar in 1914, and after his son Aiguobasinwin Ovonramwe, Eweka II was enthroned as Oba, he began the process of rebuilding the Royal Palace under Lugard’s evolving policy of ‘indirect rule’.5 In 1936, Akenzua II made the first formal claim for restitution of the objects looted in 1897. Within two years, two coral crowns and a coral bead garment, which had been on loan to the British Museum, were returned to him on the instruction of their owner G.M. Miller – apparently the son of a member of the Benin Expedition – who had previously loaned the pieces to the British Museum in 1935.6
Questions of restitution continued after the Second World War, and after Nigerian independence, and restitutions included Josephine Walker’s return of part of the Herbert Walker loot in 1957 (see Chapter 12 above). The looting of Benin City and the importance of Benin art for Nigerian, African and African diasporic culture grew in the public imaginary and in popular culture: the Benin Bronzes featured on Nigerian stamps in 1971, and in 1979 Nigerian film-maker Eddie Ugbomah made a movie called The Mask, in which a Nigerian action hero steals the Queen Idia mask back from the British Museum.
A key moment came when Nigeria hosted the Second World Black and African Festival of Art and Culture FESTAC festival in 1977, 80 years after the sacking of Benin City. The symbol chosen for the festival was the Queen Idia ivory mask in the British Museum, and the loan of this object from London was requested in 1974 and again in 1976, but refused on the grounds of its fragility. The attitude of a dominant part of the British establishment of the time was captured by the comments of Lord Donaldson of Lymington (just a few months after he had been the judge that delivered the famous miscarriages of justice to the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven, famously reminding the unjustly convicted men that they would have been executed in earlier times) to the House of Lords on 8 March 1977:
There is a new and strident school of thought that argues that because these objects came originally from abroad, they should now be sent back because they ‘belong’ there. I should like to make it emphatically clear that any such objects which are in the national collections were legally acquired and properly paid for at the time. The public collections and this Government respect the export control of other countries on works of art and will have nothing to do with objects which are alleged to be illegally imported into this country … But we must distinguish illicit trade from objects which have been properly acquired. If we had not lawfully made these collections in the past, the probability is that many of the objects concerned would have perished, and that the great collections which were established could never have been put together for the benefit of scholars and the public all over the world. In presenting them properly conserved and catalogued, and in a way which facilitates their appreciation and study, the trustees of our national institutions perform a service for the world.7
The Nigerian government continued to purchase looted objects when they appeared on the open market, paying £800,000 for objects bought at a Sotheby’s auction in 1980 for an exhibition called ‘Lost Treasures of Ancient Benin’ at the National Museum in Lagos the following year, which aimed ‘to reach those countries that have refused to return our art treasures’. ‘We believe that it is our right to demand that all our art treasures illegally removed must be returned to Nigeria,’ the exhibit’s booklet stated.8 In reply, Jean Rankine, Deputy Director of the British Museum, told the British press that ‘nothing in the British Museum was obtained illegally’: ‘In the case of the Benin Bronzes the British were the legitimate authority in the land at the time and therefore anything they did was in accordance with that legitimacy.’9
Three new forms of the ideology of white projection emerged around this time. First was the claim not just that loot was taken legitimately, but that restitution would itself be illegal, making the whole question of returns impossible due to the rules over de-accessioning of museum collections. Second was the claim not just that the destructions wrought in Nigeria had led to safety in Britain, but the returning objects would place these objects in danger, due to security reasons. Third, claims for the return of objects taken as part of the denial of African sovereignty were themselves dismissed as ‘political’.
A decade later, the centenary of 1897 represented a further focus for restitution, especially through the campaign led by Bernie Grant MP from 1994. Grant’s pioneering work revealed how many of the looted Benin objects were in regional, non-national museums across the UK, and led to new pressure on the British government.10 Old and new arguments were generated in response: that any return would set a precedent leading to an emptying of western museums, that returns would limit the access of a global audience to a heritage that belongs to the whole world, that returned objects would not be adequately cared for; and so on.
Then in 2002, the debate reached a new tipping point. In January 2002, the Nigerian Parliament unanimously passed a motion calling on President Obasanjo to demand the return of the Benin Bronzes from the British Museum. ‘Envoy Recalled over Bronzes’ read the headline on the front page of The Times earlier that year, as ‘Britain braced itself for a showdown with Nigeria.’11 ‘These objects of art are the relics of our history,’ said Omotoso Eluyemi, Head of Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments: ‘Why must we lose them to Europe?’12
The following March, following investigative work done by Martin Bailey at Art Newspaper, it was revealed that the British Museum had restituted 24 Benin Bronzes, and sold off eight, between 1950 and 1972. It emerged that in the 1950s, through the agency of Bernard Fagg in Nigeria and his brother William at the British Museum, ten of the museum’s Benin Bronzes were sold at what William Fagg described as a ‘nominal’ price to Nigeria to support the establishment of the new national museums, in which Bernard Fagg was closely involved. Eight more may have been sold off on the open market by the British Museum, supposedly to confirm the market value, before a further 14 or 20 were sold in Nigeria in 1972 – using a loophole in the 1963 British Museum Act which allowed for de-accessioning where objects are ‘duplicates’.13 Questions were asked in the House of Lords, and the British Museum – with no hint of irony – ‘expressed sorrow at the loss’.14 The testimony in the Lords at the time does not reveal the detail of any sales to parties other than the Nigerian Government – although two plaques in the collection of Robert Lehman Jr, currently on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as a promised gift, are recorded as having been acquired from the British Museum in 1972, presumably in an exchange or a purchase.15
Then in September 2002, news broke, again through an Art Newspaper investigation, of a 17th-century Benin bronze head16 with an even more complex death-history – looted in 1897 (Plate VII), bought for the state of Nigeria in the 1940s or 1950s, and then removed from the National Museum in Lagos by General Yakubu Gowon, Head of the Federal Military Government of Nigeria, and given to Queen Elizabeth II during his State Visit to the United Kingdom, 12–15 June 1973. The General had reportedly ordered a replica but, dissatisfied with its quality, took the head from the museum. It was assumed to be a replica until the news story broke 29 years later.
In this increasingly politically heated context, the Declaration of Universal Value in December 2002 introduced a new series of assertions to refute the growing momentum of claims for restitution from Nigeria for the Benin Bronzes, from Greece for the Elgin/Parthenon Marbles, and beyond. First, the incommensurability of past and present when it comes to looting. Second, that the acquisition of objects by museums represents a positive recontextualisation. Third, that western museums are tasked with caring for a universal, and thus supranational, material heritage – for the people of every nation.
* * *
Today there is no place for the logic of Kunstschutz (the fascist idea of seizing art to keep it safe) in our anthropology museums any more – not least in the language used by Professor John Boardman – Oxford University art historian, professor of classical archaeology, and former assistant museum keeper – in the opening quotation for this chapter,17 nor for the allied idea that African societies are unable to care for and make decisions about their own cultural heritage.
For two decades now, this rhetoric of ‘the universal museum’ has been increasingly adopted not only by art museums like the Met, the Getty, MOMA and the Louvre, but across ‘world culture’ museums – driven from the only two signatory institutions with significant ethnological collections, the British Museum and Berlin State Museums. These two institutions, in London and Berlin, also currently house the largest collections of Benin loot taken in 1897, which is today in modern Nigeria. Almost every one of the 18 signatory museums holds in its collections or has at some point exhibited material from the sacking of Benin City. The claim was made that the idea of the universal museum was a tradition that needed to be defended. But in reality, it was a 21st-century charter myth.
The sequence for the invention of the myth of the universal museum appears to run as follows. The term came to be used in debates about the Elgin/Parthenon marbles in the 1980s, specifically in the context of a private member’s bill which would have amended the British Museum Act of 1963 by granting the Trustee Board the additional power to de-accession an object if ‘in the opinion of the Trustees it is desirable that, in fulfilment of international obligations, an object shall be returned to its country of origin’. In his contribution to the debate about the bill in October 1983 in the House of Lords, the Chair of the Trustees of the British Museum, Baron Trend, summarised the position of the Trustees as follows:
It is of course that they oppose [the bill] and they oppose it because they regard it as potentially damaging, perhaps irreparably damaging, to their main function as they see it, the function of maintaining and enhancing a great universal museum – one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the universal museums of the world. I emphasise the word ‘universal’ because, although I think that there is no dispute about the excellence and the international reputation of the various individual collections in the museum – the Egyptian antiquities, the Classical antiquities, the mediaeval and modern collections, and so forth – and although they have to be administered for obvious practical reasons as largely separate or self-contained collections, nevertheless the museum is more than the sum of those individual collections. It aims to present an integrated picture of the stages in the development of various civilisations of the world and their indebtedness one to another, and it has the kind of physical integrity which comes from that kind of concept of human history.18
I want to suggest that although the vocabulary of the universal museum may have come about in the (post)colonial heritage-nationalism of the first term of Margaret Thatcher’s administration (1979–83),19 and presumably used informally around the Department for National Heritage ever since, it became codified as something far more coherent and powerful during the second term of Tony Blair’s administration, as the British Museum was organised under the newly renamed Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and as the geopolitical landscape changed after 9/11.
As plans for the 2012 London Olympics were announced and museums and heritage were seen as a key to expanding global tourism and the brand of ‘Cool Britannia’, Greece’s claim for the return of the Elgin/Parthenon marbles in time for the 2004 Athens Olympics presented a communications challenge, coming so soon after the Benin centenary. In this atmosphere, on 29 October 2003 Culture Minister Estelle Morris spelled out to Parliament the aims of a universal museum:
The Director of the British Museum has said that he sees the aim of the museum to ‘hold for the benefit of humanity a collection representative of world cultures and ensure that the collection is housed in safety, conserved, curated, researched, exhibited and made available to the widest possible public.’ In that sense, it is a universal museum.20
The myth of the ‘Universal-Encyclopaedic’ Museum emerged in part from the specific context of three main institutional re-arrangements and consolidations under Neil MacGregor’s directorship around the 250th anniversary of founding of the British Museum (1753–2003): the closure of the Museum of Mankind and the relocation of the Department of Ethnography from Burlington Gardens back to the British Museum’s main Bloomsbury site, the closure of the British Library Reading Room and the incorporation of the Department of Ethnography back into the Bloomsbury site, and the opening of the new ‘Enlightenment Gallery’ in what was formerly known as the King’s Library – a room built between 1823 and 1827.
As part of how the reinvention of the British Museum was spun, anthropological narratives were actively diminished in favour of the false suggestion that the British Museum had been in any meaningful way established on 18th-century ‘universal’ ideals of the Encyclopédistes, and that it was now working to defend these ideals during times of cultural uncertainty. In reality, this latent vocabulary was reinvented for the moment of 2002, rather than representing some long-standing tradition. The terms ‘universal museum’ or ‘encyclopaedic museum’ were virtually never employed until the later 20th century. Where these terms were occasionally coined, universality referred either to the inclusion of multiple disciplines (natural history, archaeology, geology, art, etc.), or of multiple forms of art. So, for example, in 1962 Albert Eide Parr, Director of the American Museum of Natural History, explained that his was a ‘universal museum’ in that it is multidisciplinary, ranging from nature to culture.21 Even earlier, Paul Vitry’s 1922 Guide to the Louvre described it as an encyclopaedic museum because it included ‘industrial, applied and decorative arts’ as well as painting and sculpture.
At Macgregor’s British Museum, the opening section of the book Enlightenment, published to coincide with the opening of the new Enlightenment gallery, was on the theme of ‘The “Universal Museum”’, and deftly misrepresented the provenance and antiquity of this idea through the title of Kim Sloan’s introductory chapter ‘“Aimed at universality and belonging to the nation”: the Enlightenment and the British Museum’. In reality, this quotation was a description of the legacy of Newton by Alexander Pope, rather than any reference to the British Museum at all.22 Moreover, when it came to Bloomsbury in 1753, Hans Sloane’s Tradescant-style collection of 1,000 rarities was always a sideshow to the library of 50,000 books, the 32,000 medals and coins, and the herbarium – the bric-a-brac of the New World plantocracy rather than anything like the modern universal vision of global heritage; it is an exercise in sheer mythography and spin to claim otherwise.
In anthropological terms, at times, the idea of the universal museum could be said to have functioned like Bronislaw Malinowski’s account of ‘mythical charters’ among the Trobriand Islanders in the 1920s, where the past is ‘one vast storehouse of events’ where ‘the line of demarcation between myth and history does not coincide with any division into definite periods of time.’23 At other times, it has come closer to what Radcliffe-Brown called purely ‘theoretical or conjectural history’,24 concerned more often with succession – that is to say, with power – than with descent.
The comparative global vision for ‘world culture’ collections certainly did come about, but that was very clearly a product of the museum’s Department of Ethnology in the late 19th century, and of social evolutionary thinking as it combined with imperial ‘collecting’ and race science – in which the display of the Benin loot was a watershed moment. And as many anthropologists over the course of the 20th century sought to fight such globalising, decontextualising civilisational tendencies, to operate, in fact, in precisely the opposite direction from the classical-focused art history that came to be so bound up with ideas of European cultural supremacy, to operate, that is, towards context and ethnographic detail and the deep appreciation and celebration of different ways of living, making, seeing and knowing that came to characterise much of the ethos of the Museum of Mankind in the 1970s and 1980s, so in the same moment as the Declaration of the Importance and Value of Universal Museums was aired, this very part of the British Museum’s operation was closed down.
Meanwhile across the Atlantic, Neil MacGregor’s efforts were matched by those of James Cuno, whose declaration of war – what he has framed as ‘Culture War: the case against repatriating museum artefacts’25 – began with further myth-making, in this case the improbable pretence that the ‘encyclopaedic museum’ forms part of a western inheritance that emerged hand-in-hand with the values of the Declaration of Independence.26 George Abungu has eloquently deconstructed the Declaration of the Importance and Value of Universal Museums as a self-appointed ‘group of privileged museums … promoting the Western world’s dominance and monopoly of interpretation over other peoples’ cultures and colonization’.27 Indeed, more than that, the Declaration emerged as part of a wider instrumentalisation of ‘heritage’ and culture as soft power in the rhetoric of multicultural and global exchanges, including international loans as a kind of cultural diplomacy, during the so-called ‘war on terror’ launched by the Blair and Bush administrations, using the universalist storyline to operationalise museums as global spaces in the era of what George W. Bush described as ‘a new world order’. In this new epoch of time-juggling, corporate-militarist colonialism and the rule of colonial difference, according different legal status to the enemy, came back into view in Africa and the Middle East, the 1890s echoing through the Wars in Afghanistan (2001–present), Syria (2011–present) and Iraq (1991, 1998, 2003–09, 2014–present) – and, above all, in Palestine.28
