Mick Hartley

Nigel Biggar, in the Telegraph, on our decolonising institutions:

Ever since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, cultural institutions in Britain have been falling over themselves to signal their virtue by “decolonising”. Among the first were Jesus College, Cambridge and the Horniman Museum in south-east London, which sent back to Nigeria “Benin Bronzes” taken by the British in a military expedition of 1897.

Never mind that the bronzes were icons of African enslavement of other Africans, forged out of brass objects used as currency in the intra-African slave-trade. Never mind that Benin then practiced not only slavery, but mass human sacrifice. Never mind that the British military expedition was launched in response to the slaughter of an unarmed embassy and resulted in the abolition of slavery in Benin. And never mind that the bronzes weren’t looted but taken according to the laws of war, to defray the expedition’s costs and fund pensions for war widows.

Never mind the historical truth, the bronzes were surrendered in a heedless mania of atonement for imaginary sins. 

And yet, since their celebrated return, not a single bronze has gone on display in Benin city’s purpose-built Museum of West African Art, partly funded by the British Museum. This is because Nigerians cannot agree to whom the bronzes belong – whether it is the federal government, the Edo state, or the descendant of Benin’s ruler in 1897. As MOWAA’s director Phillip Ihenacho has commented, “In the West, there was a race about who was going to be the first institution to restitute… there wasn’t enough of a focus on to whom they would be restituted”.

Recently the British Museum’s director, Nicholas Cullinan, has developed a more thoughtful, less craven way of responding to “decolonisation” pressure. Instead of surrendering objects allegedly stolen from India by the British, he’s dispatching 80 items from ancient civilisations contemporaneous with that of the Indus Valley on loan to Bombay, enabling a museum there to show how India was one of the cradles of civilisation. As Cullinan puts it, “You don’t have to embarrass your own country to do something with another country”.      

That won’t stop Cullinan’s Hindu nationalist partners from making “decolonisation” capital out of the loan. The director of the Bombay museum, Sabyasachi Mukherjee, has already claimed it will help to “correct colonial misinterpretation” of India’s past. “Through this exhibition, there is decolonisation, an attempt is made to decolonise the narrative. We suffered for many years and colonisation penetrated into our education, our culture”. 

Never mind that it was Britons like Sir William Jones and Warren Hastings who rescued classical Sanskritic civilisation from oblivion in the late 1700s, undermining the Eurocentric assumption of the primacy of Greece and Rome. Never mind that, according to Nirad Chaudhuri, they “rendered a service to Indian and Asiatic nationalism which no native could ever have given. At one stroke it put the Indian nationalist on a par with his English ruler”, giving him the material out of which to build “the historical myth” of a Hindu civilisation superior to Europe’s. 

It was also British scholars, like Sir Alexander Cunningham, who established the Indian origins of Buddhism – forgotten by the Indians of the time after centuries of Hindu and Islamic rule – and rescued a forgotten culture, and its ancient sites.

Nirad Chaudhuri was a passionate advocate of the positives of British rule that helped produce modern India – notably in his most famous work “The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian.

We’ve recently had historian David Olusoga’s Empire on the BBC. It was , as you’d expect, a damning look at the iniquities that the British imposed on their colonised subjects. Fair enough. I couldn’t quite manage all the talking heads telling us how they’d suffered but, you know, they forgave us – but yes, it was a solid piece of television. The paternalism involved in helping the unenlightened natives to appreciate how lucky they were to be ruled by their cultural and racial superiors, apart from being offensive in itself, did of course involve plenty of brutality.

But there is another side to the story.