The manuscripts form a part of the overall richness and depth of the University's Collections. The University of Edinburgh plays a significant role as one of the world's leading research universities hosting scholars from all over the world and, through the use of leading edge technology, providing scholarly works to researchers. These manuscripts should be viewed within the context of an active research collection where the interaction of these items is important for scholarship both now and in the future.”
University of Edinburgh press release 28 February 05

The arrogance of this answer requires no comment.


Stolen and displayed without shame or regret

Plunder of art and archaeological objects has been going on a frightening scale and with the complicity of many powerful institutions.

Countries in turmoil or subject to invasions are the worst off. Iraq has had most of its very valuable objects, many going back to very ancient civilizations -Sumerian, Akkadian and Babylonian periods- have been plundered. These objects and sites were not protected even though before the invasion, the need for protection was obvious to all and was discussed. Afghanistan has also had its ancient treasures plundered on a wide scale and many of these items are in western european museums.

Greenfield has an interesting chapter on the question of restitution of skulls, bones and artefacts to the peoples the Westerners call the “First People” i.e. Aborigines and the Native Americans. The terminological problems alone indicate the hypocrisies involved here. The author also points out quite correctly that artefacts were valued by the peoples not simply for the material content: “Since the 1980s there has been wider recognition of the rights of indigenous or aboriginal people - First Nations-to reclaim their cultural heritage through retrieving their relics and the bones of their ancestors.

Sometimes the issue of artefacts becomes intermingled with the question of funerary objects, particularly bones. The history of their loss has often been painful. Repatriation involves restoring the collective memory, and in some respects it is as much about reconciling the living and the present with the past as it is about putting the ancestors to rest. These things were not originally treasured for their material worth but for the fact that they emanated from the marrow and the spirit of their owners and their earthly existence. It could be argued that no museum can fully convey that.”(p.300)

The answers that Australian aborigines received when they sought to recover the bones of their ancestors from Western museums were frankly disgraceful. According to Greenfield, the response of English institutions was legalistic while Scottish response was, scientific. In the United States the response was to request that special safekeeping place be considered and accommodation made for preservation and scientific access. The Swedes and the French had similar views. Belgium and Austria opposed any return. The Director of the Natural History of Vienna responded to demand that the Tasmanian Aborigines were extinct!

Greenfield states: “Foreign holding institutions cannot reasonably expect to retain such indigenous human remains in perpetuity”. (p.337)

Europeans and their museums have for a long time displayed Africans as if they were not human beings. Indeed, in most western countries Africans were paraded like animals in circus, in Britain, France and Germany in the so-called “Peoples shows”. The worst example of this display, mentioned by Greenfield, is the case of Saartjie Baartman, a Khoisan lady, who because of her unsual body shape was brought by a British ship surgeon to England to be exploited as a sexual freak and was paraded all over Europe and was mockingly named the “Hottentot Venus”.

After her death, French scientists, in order to establish European racial superiority, made a mould of her body, genitals and all and displayed it in the Paris Museum of Mankind until 1974. Former Azania (South African) President Nelson Mandela intervened for her return and President Mitterrand gave his promise and the body was returned to South Africa. The French National Assembly authorised her repatriation in 2002. A funeral ceremony was held for her to wipe out the recollection of her awful sojourn among europeans and to restore the dignity of her people. (p.340)

The european habit of massacring Africans in the colonial period and in apartheid Azania (South Africa), yielded more skulls, bones and skeletons for european scientists and anthropologists. The bones of thousands of Hereros, Namas, and many others are still in europe, especially in the Ethnologische Museum Berlin which later transferred them to the Naturhistorische Museum Berlin and to the Naturhistorische Museum Vienna.

Has the time not come for all such museums to open their secret rooms and tell us how many of these bones are still there and possibly identify their sources? Many of the persons who disappeared under colonial rule have still not been accounted for.

Greenfield’s last chapter, entitled “Homecomings: real and virtual” enumerates many instances of return of cultural objects to their countries of origin. The author however, ends her excellent book, by stating that: “Perhaps the notion that some of the major cultural treasures of the world should be returned to the people to whom they matter most is put into true perspective by the words of the nineteenth-century American writer Nathaniel Hawthorn.”

Hawthorne observed in 1856 after visiting the British Museum that:
“The present is too much burdened with the past. We have not time, in our early existence, to appreciate what is warm with life, and immediately around us; yet we heap up all these old shells out of which human life has long emerged, casting them off forever. I do not see how future ages are to stagger onward under all this dead weight, with the additions that will be continually made to it”. (p.443)

If what Greenfield intends with this citation is to say that the immense accumulation of objects in the British Museum and similar museums is too much for the needs of the countries they serve, then I think most of us will agree. If on the other hand, the intention is to underline the relative unimportance of the return of cultural objects (which I doubt very much) then we would have to disagree.

So is stealing of other peoples cultural object is a specifically european cultural heritage or universal?

Well although it is known that Japan has taken cultural objects from Korea and China, there are no known cases of African States having forcibly or illegally taken european cultural objects and refusing to return them to their countries of origin. Similarly, no Asian countries are known to have illegally taken european, African or Latin American cultural objects. Nor are there any intra African disputes in this area.

The ability to display stolen art works of others, without compunction or shame or regret, without any expression of apology or condolences for those whose lives or livelihood may have been destroyed in the acquisition, is prevalent across europe.

One cannot imagine Ghanaians or Nigerians displaying, on a large scale, stolen British or German artworks in Accra or Lagos, which the owners want back, and the Ghanaians and Nigerians feeling that they are doing humanity a great service and expecting to be congratulated or congratulating themselves on this “achievement”. The reaction of the African public to this open display of stolen property would prevent the exhibition lasting for long.

There are simply no precedents or traditions in our public morality for such exhibitions.

The overwhelming evidence so far available would tend to support the conclusion that systematic and large scale stealing or plundering of the cultural objects of others and refusing to return them has been so far practised primarily by europeans and States controlled by people of european culture.