Retrospective: British Museum and Africas stolen artefacts
Sun 30 March 2008


A year ago, British Prime Minster Gordon Brown pledged support for the UK’s first ‘Museum of Britishness’. Meanwhile the British Museum still refuses to return the artefacts raided and pillaged from Africa as recent as a hundred years ago.

The proposal for what would be the first National Museum of British History was reported by the Telegraph newspaper as part of their ‘Call yourself British’ campaign. Writing for the paper, Gordon Brown commented ‘while so many other countries have a museum dedicated to their history we in Britain…still do not’.

In his support for former Tory MP, Kenneth Baker’s proposal, Brown continued that the museum could lead in the narrative of british history, also celebrating what he referred to as ‘the great british values on which our culture, politics and society have been shaped’. Brown added that the museum would complement a greater emphasis on the teaching of british history in schools, repeatedly stating the importance of history in the child’s relationship to their national [and personal] identity. The omission of historical fact and denial of the brutality exemplified by the british empire highlights the hypocrisy of the ‘great british values’ to which Brown alludes.

This moral double standard is not the sole domain of british politicians, in March 2008, John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York announced that “Britain must regain the values of mission and enterprise that had made it so successful when it had an empire”. He is not alone. In 2003, Trevor Phillips used a racist anti-African newspaper to publicly chastise author Benjamin Zephaniah for publicising his rejection of an OBE and with it its formal membership into the british empire.

Defending his own decision to accept an OBE and genuflect before british imperialism the former head of the governments scrapped Commission for Racial Equality project and now chair of the governments Commission for Equality and Human Rights said “you can’t rewrite history - Empire happened. It wasn’t all bad”. Phillips later went on to claim at a Tory party conference that the british empire had an upside. What is astonishing about this is that both these men are Africans. Trevor Macdonald, June Sarpong, Floella Benjamin, Kelly Homes, Trevor Beresford Romeo (Jazzy B from Soul II Soul), Lenny Henry, Linda Bellos, Novlette Rennie, Kanya King, Doreen Lawrence are just a few of those willing to betray and one day meet their Ancestors as official members of the institution that enslaved, raped, murdered and continues to exploit and oppress them.

When considering Britain’s seminal and often leading role in the enslavement of African people, then the progression to the destruction of cultures and land grab of Africa that defined colonialism and neo colonialism reveals a story that is in fact one of a ‘culture, politics and society’ shaped by repugnant racist 'white' male supremacist ideology.

Collectively many of the museums in the major cities of the UK have dedicated their resources to boastfully reflecting british history by documenting and ‘collecting’ artefacts from the history of other cultures and civilisations, notably those destroyed by Britain, colonised by Britain; or both. As a result there is an ongoing debate between the consortium of national museums across Britain and representatives from countries across the world on the issue of returning items displayed within these institutions to the land and peoples from which they originate.

Today the peoples of many African nations are denied daily access to their own heritage and Ancestral legacy. As a result much physical evidence of the thriving African civilisation pre-european contact, invasion and destruction exist in the basements and vaults of Britain and not in the museums, schools and communities across Africa.

The most notorious of all for the appropriation of cultural-historical artefacts is the British Museum, internationally condemned for their persistent refusals to repatriate the stolen items they illegally hold in their possession.

FESTAC Mask: A symbol of Pan Africanism

Pan African Community Action

Last May, the Ligali organisation along with other members of the African community, paid a visit to the British Museum requesting to meet with the museum director, Neil MacGregor. Upon arrival they told senior management of the institution that the sought to discuss their illegal possession of the Benin and Ife artworks. While staff at the museum assured the members of the African community present that MacGregor would see them, the group decided to leave when it became clear that the director was too afraid to answer these questions about cultural theft, Ancestral ownership and morality in public.

Ligali submitted a renewed application to the British Museum calling for the release of all African artefacts within their holdings.

Of particular concern was the repatriation of a 16th century mask commissioned in honour of Queen Idia by her son, the Oba (King ) of Benin, in the 16th Century as recognition of her contribution to the success of his reign. The mask which is now commonly known as the FESTAC mask after famously representing the second Festival of Arts and Culture which took place in Nigeria in 1977.

This festival of global African art and culture was inspired and paid homage to the African spirit of resistance and fight for self determination. It followed a succession of conferences, starting with the convening of the Pan African Cultural Society of 1956, by some of the first ever Africans to refer to themselves as Pan Africanists. This era spawned the rebirth of the awareness and knowledge of African culture leading to the FESTAC mask being chosen to represent the spirit of Pan Africanism.

The Ligali application represented one of the latest efforts in the battle to have the mask and all the articles of the former Benin Kingdom and Ife Kingdom the museum has in its possession emancipated and returned to their ancestral home and people since the museum accepted these stolen artefacts from the Foreign Office in 1898.

The location of the treasures of the Benin kingdom - fractured, now span the globe, the majority of which having been sold by the Foreign Office to both private collectors and museums across europe and North America, the proceeds of which was seen as ‘reimbursement’ for their warmongering.