“France’s wars of religion left hundreds of thousands murdered, tortured, exiled or imprisoned”
Kate Mosse on her latest historical novel, The City of Tears
As part of its campaigns in 2015, the activist collective Rhodes Must Fall Oxford, which works to address the legacies of colonialism at the University of Oxford, called the Pitt Rivers Museum “one of the most violent spaces in Oxford”. The Brutish Museums forms part of Dan Hicks’ response to that statement. Hicks is professor of contemporary archaeology at Oxford’s School of Archaeology and also a curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and he applies both his skills as an archaeologist and a museum curator in the writing of this book. The result is an unprecedentedly detailed – and horrifying – account of the 1897 British Punitive Expedition to Benin City (now the capital of Edo State in modern Nigeria) that frames museums as storehouses of the spoils of war.
Hicks makes the case that the violence was twofold. During the raid, Benin City was machine-gunned and burned to the ground, with no attempt to account for just how many people were killed, excepting the eight members of the expedition itself. In its aftermath, the loot – about 10,000 objects, nowadays widely called the Benin Bronzes –
Museum labels can freeze a particular culture in the past, thereby silencing its people in the present
were brought to Britain and sold or donated to museums, whose curators displayed them as “primitive art”, devoid of context and dehumanising their creators and owners.
For Hicks, the ways in which the story of the expedition have previously been told – or more precisely not told – in and beyond museums, were themselves an act of violence. His approach to the history of the Benin Bronzes is forensic in both senses of the word. It is a detailed account, based on archival research, of the calculation behind, and violence of, the expedition. At the same time, the book reads like a public lecture in museum studies, with a lot of theory alongside the history. Hicks describes “necrography”, the “writing of loss” achieved by mapping where the objects from Benin City ended up, and “chronopolitics”, the political processes whereby museum labels freeze a particular culture in the past, thereby silencing its people in the present.
The Pitt-Rivers is not alone in starting to come to a reckoning with its colonial past – similar research and redisplays are happening in museums in the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria. In France, the 2018 Savoy-Sarr Report has revealed how the overwhelming majority of art objects from African countries are currently stored in European museums. The Brutish Museums, though, marks a landmark cultural moment, as it is the first time a curator in a UK museum has made the case for restitution based on archival research.
Some of Hicks’ critics may argue that he – a white, male, Oxford professor – is part of the problem, and it is clear that his public platform to write and publish this book is considerably higher than those of people outside the museum and heritage sector who have been calling for restitution for decades. Nevertheless, in writing this book and taking this position, he may also be part of the solution. If the arguments of the descendants of those who were massacred in the 1897 expedition haven’t been enough to convince us, perhaps the evidence from our own museum archives might.