Why ARE our top museums so desperate to hand back treasures they’ve preserved for centuries?
In January, the British Museum and the V&A returned priceless artefacts to Ghana on loan. But now a Ghanaian king says he wants to keep them. Here, a veteran Oxford historian warns the Elgin Marbles could be next...
ROBERT Conquest was a Conservative historian best known for laying bare the terrors of the old Soviet Union. He was derided by Left-wing historians but proved to be correct about Stalinism and much else.
Based on his long experience, Conquest drafted three ‘laws of politics’, of which this is the third: ‘The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.’
Surely no British institutions are better described by Conquest’s third law than our museums and galleries, which now seem to be led by the enemies of both their own collections and our culture.
While the National Portrait Gallery and Tate Britain — both recently re-organised — are busy distorting British history with tales of colonial exploitation and racism, other galleries are falling over themselves to ‘return’ precious items that have been in their collections for centuries.
The latest treasures in the crosshairs are intricate gold artefacts which once belonged to the kings of the Asante (also Ashanti) Empire, who ruled over the part of West Africa now known as Ghana, and over other African peoples for two centuries from 1701-1901.
Note that there were indigenous empires in Africa as well as colonial ones. It was in January that the directors of the British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum agreed to lend the Asante Gold to the descendants of the original owners in Ghana, a deal which was to last for three years with an option for a further three.
In the past few days, however, reigning Asante King Otumfuo Nana Osei Tutu II has changed his mind about the terms and announced that he would rather keep hold of the valuables — 32 beautifully cast and decorated items — in perpetuity.
What did the museums expect, you might ask? Was this all part of the plan? Perhaps the Asante King assumes an incoming Labour government will hastily accede to his request.
THE eventual outcome for the gold remains uncertain, but this is by no means the first time that our museums have attempted to hand over some of their finest exhibits.
We have already seen concerted efforts to send Benin Bronzes — elaborately decorated plaques often portraying animal and human figures — back to Nigeria. The row over sending the Elgin Marbles to Athens grows ever more poisonous and protracted.
What these and other cases have in common is a set of crude and troublingly naive assumptions — that, for example, the treasures in question were stolen and that Britain as a former imperial power must be in the wrong. Yet when it comes to Ghana and the Asante Gold, Britain’s motives, though not pure, deserve consideration.
After we banned our own slave trade in 1807, we set about stopping many other nations, including the Asante, from trading in human cargo. We also tried to end the practice of human sacrifice. In 1874, when British soldiers captured the Asante capital of Kumasi, they found thousands of skulls in a sacred grove.
It is worth noting, too, that Britain originally hoped to trade freely with the Asante and other peoples in the vicinity, including the
Ga and Fante, the latter of whom needed British military protection because they were under threat of violent invasion by the Asante.
No one would deny that, taking up arms, we hoped to gain strategically and economically from control of the Gold Coast, as it was once known. It is also true, however, that the British were engaged in humane reforms.
As for our supposedly colonial intent, we could have absorbed this region into the British Empire as far back as the 1820s had we wanted, if not before.
Yet it wasn’t until 1901 that the Asante lands became a British protectorate and then only for a short time. Three decades later,
Asante self-rule was restored. No figure sums up the moral complexity of this history better than the first governor of the Gold Coast, Sir Charles MacCarthy.
He was already governor of Sierra Leone, a British colony established for freed slaves, many of whom had been rescued from slave traders by the Royal Navy and taken to this place of safety.
MacCarthy built schools and houses for the settlers and campaigned to stop other European nations continuing the trade.
In 1824 he was killed in battle by the Asante. His skull, rimmed with gold, was used as a ceremonial drinking cup. The history of these precious artefacts, then, is complicated, yet they are routinely referred to as ‘loot’ as if the British had merely pillaged and plundered their way across West Africa.
There is more than an echo in the long-running tussle over the fate of the Benin Bronzes.
The Horniman Museum in South London has already sent its collection back to West Africa.
Oxford and Cambridge universities were about to follow suit when, last year, the Nigerian government announced that the bronzes were in fact the personal property of the current Oba — the king — of Benin. Descendants of slaves who had once been traded by the Oba’s ancestors — often in horrific circumstances —and who now live in the United States, kicked up an understandable fuss on learning that the treasures would be returned to relatives of those who had profited from the unspeakable trade. There is no resolution in sight.
The bronzes are obviously better off where they’ve been housed since the 1890s, which is to say in British, American and European museums — where millions of people have seen them
over the decades. The same applies to the Asante Gold, much of which had originally been seized by the Fante people and the British, then sold or kept as reparations for the cost of the many armed conflicts. Fifteen of the objects found their way to the British Museum and 17 to the Victoria & Albert.
The best part of six million people visit the British Museum every year, yet the total number of tourists visiting the whole of Ghana is only one million. It is a powerful argument in favour of keeping the Asante Gold and other treasures firmly in this country.
Great museums with international collections in major world cities are simply more accessible than the small museum in Ghana where, if the King of the Asante has his way, the gold would be displayed for the foreseeable future — and beyond.
Regrettable or not, great museums are also significantly better equipped to protect the objects in their care.
There are deeper arguments to make, too, including the fact that treasures have moved between civilisations since ancient times.
displaying things made by people remote from us in time and place — to help us understand other cultures — is an essential purpose of museums. I happen to greatly admire the paintings of JMW Turner and know that one of my favourites, Snowstorm, Avalanche and Thunderstorm — depicting the Valley of Aosta in the Alps — hangs in the galleries of The Art Institute Of Chicago.
Should it be returned to Britain? Of course not. That our greatest British painter is admired thousands of miles away is something to be proud of.
how impoverished would we be, in whatever country we live, if we could only look at works by our national artists and craftsmen?
We should also be concerned that these ‘ restitutions’ will establish a precedent, deliberately so in my view. Benin Bronzes, Asante Gold . . . What next, you might reasonably ask?
GeORGe Osborne, former Chancellor of the exchequer and now Chairman of the Trustees of the British Museum, has been in long negotiations with the Greek authorities to return the elgin Marbles to Athens — supposedly on the basis of a loan.
Like the Oba of Benin and the King of the Asante, the Greeks want more than a temporary arrangement, however: they want the Marbles back for good. Britain’s galleries and museums are a sad illustration not just of Robert Conquest’s third law of politics, but also his second, that ‘any organisation not explicitly Rightwing sooner or later becomes Left-wing’.
So today, the directors of our leading institutions vie with each other to be politically ‘progressive’ — at our expense. Tate Britain is winning this tedious competition with its story sessions for children, the readings performed by drag queens.
Where, I would like to know, are the trustees of our museums and galleries in all this? It is surely time for them to step forward and hold the gang of activist directors — and the elites surrounding them — to account.
We should all remember that these national collections are sustained by the hard- earned contributions of British taxpayers. They are ours.
We, too, the people of this country, should have a say in what happens to treasures such as the Asante Gold.