The Museums Caught in Britain’s Culture Wars / Telegraph Magazine

Generations of visitors to Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM) have enjoyed its astounding collection of half a million anthropological objects culled from across the world during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Piled high in Victorian glass cases in its great, dark, neo-Gothic hall are all manner of masks and shields, war clubs and robes, musical instruments, snuff boxes, amulets, charms, arrow heads, trepanning tools and circumcision devices. And, until recently, what has arguably been the museum’s greatest attraction for the better part of 80 years: half a dozen shrunken human heads.

This whole fantastic collection of curiosities is overlooked by a vast Haida totem pole three floors tall. Even today the artefacts bear handwritten labels recording the donor and date of donation – ‘Model of set of betel nuts and ingredients for chewing. Presented by Mrs Braithwaite Batty 1917.’

It is small wonder that this museum inspired scenes in J K Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, and in Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials; or that Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse should discover that a particularly gruesome African knife employed to murder an Oxford professor was stolen from the PRM; or that the poet James Fenton chose to celebrate this cathedral of exotic objects in verse: ‘Entering/You will find yourself in a climate of nut castanets/A magical whip/From the Torres Strait, from Mirzapur a sistrum… a mute violin/Whistling arrows, coolie cigarettes/And a mask of Saagga, the Devil Doctor/The eyelids worked by strings.’

But there is an alternative way of viewing the PRM’s collection. It could also be seen as loot, much of it plundered or taken under duress by British imperialists, or purchased with money earned from slavery, or bought with the vastly superior purchasing power of colonisers over the colonised. Some was probably acquired by missionaries in the course of destroying the very cultures and religions that produced it.

Proponents of that view contend that the artefacts were then displayed in a fashion designed to justify empire, by demonstrating the superiority of our civilisation over the primitive and savage cultures of the subjugated, by suggesting the colonisers brought enlightenment.

Conversely, opium pipes were displayed until recently with no mention of the Opium Wars through which Britain gained control of the immensely lucrative but hugely destructive international opium trade. It displayed certain musical instruments with no explanation of how they became banned symbols of resistance against British colonial rule in what was then Rhodesia.

The very building bespeaks empire. Countries are still referred to by their pre-independence names. Look very carefully, and it is still possible to find racist epithets like ‘n­—’ or ‘k—r’ (the latter now outlawed in South Africa) in the display cases.

So it is also little wonder that in recent years the PRM has been the target of protests by the Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall movements (a protest originally directed at a statue of Cecil Rhodes in Cape Town), the latter describing the museum as ‘one of the most violent spaces in Oxford’ because ‘it houses thousands of artefacts stolen from colonised peoples throughout the world’.

What is more surprising is that Laura Van Broekhoven, the museum’s Belgian director, tends to agree with the second, unflattering view of the institution she has run for the past four years. ‘Many people find it very difficult to be in this space – especially those people who didn’t benefit from the empire,’ she told me.

Hence, when the museum reopened for the first time since the Covid lockdown last month, visitors were greeted with brightly-coloured new signage warning that the PRM is ‘a footprint of colonialism’; that its labels ‘use language and imagery that is derogatory, racist and Eurocentric’; and that ‘often the interpretation in the cases evades the complex and devastating circumstances in which many of the objects were collected’.

Under the leadership of Van Broekhoven, who conducted similar work in the Netherlands before her arrival in Oxford, it has conducted an ‘ethical review’ of its entire public collection. Displays are being systematically relabelled and ‘contextualised’ to explain their historical and cultural significance. Around 120 human remains, including skulls, scalps and a mummified Egyptian child, have been removed from public view and put into storage.

The PRM has even removed – from a case labelled ‘Treatment of Dead Enemies’ – the celebrated shrunken human heads with their sewn-up lips and eye sockets and great cascades of hair.

The Shuar and Achuar people of the Upper Amazon produced these ‘tsantsas’ by removing the brains and skulls before boiling the skins and filling them with hot sand and rocks to shrink them. They were allegedly a means of imprisoning the souls of enemy warriors, or possibly of honouring Shuar chiefs.

Last month the Oxford Mail called the removal of those heads ‘the latest symptom of a politically motivated curatorial revisionism sweeping the land’. A Times art critic accused the museum of ‘patronising’ the public and observed that ‘nobody will be attracted to the Pitt Rivers by the slogan: “It’s the museum that won’t let you see its shrunken heads”’.

But Van Broekhoven is unrepentant. ‘Our audience research has shown that visitors often saw the museum’s displays of human remains as a testament to other cultures being “savage”, “primitive” or “gruesome”. Rather than enabling our visitors to reach a deeper understanding of each other’s ways of being, the displays reinforced racist and stereotypical thinking that goes against the museum’s values today.’

Two present-day Shuar leaders consulted by PRM are now given a rare voice in this white man’s treasure trove. The new signage quotes Miguel Puwáinchir and Felipe Tsenkush saying, ‘We don’t want to be thought of as dead people to be exhibited in a museum. Our ancestors handed over these sacred objects without fully realising the implications.’

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The Pitt Rivers Museum is far from unique. Most of this country’s great museums and art galleries were inspired by imperialists, or were beneficiaries of imperialism in its various guises.

Sir Hans Sloane, whose collections formed the basis of the British Museum, Natural History Museum and British Library, derived a part of his wealth from his wife’s Jamaican sugar plantations worked by slaves. John Julius Angerstein used slave trade profits to amass the art collection that formed the nucleus of the National Gallery. Riches seized by the East India Company as it colonised the subcontinent formed the basis of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s South Asia collections.

As such, these institutions are now caught in the middle of an increasingly intense culture war between activists pressuring them to ‘decolonise’ their collections by purging them of their imperialist bias, and conservatives who say they are being forced to erase or distort Britain’s colonial history. Indeed scarcely a week passes without another flashpoint emerging – the removal of statues, the BBC’s plan to drop Rule Britannia from the Last Night of the Proms, the National Trust putting Winston’s Churchill’s home at Chartwell on its list of properties with imperialist connections, the National Maritime Museum reviewing Horatio Nelson’s ‘heroic status’.

For Toyin Agbetu, a British Nigerian social rights activist, ‘Any institution that continues to exhibit stolen ethnographic items, publish false narratives and maintain idolatry ideologies of global “white” supremacy is abusing its audiences by making them both recipients and enabling participants of criminal endeavour.’

On the other side, Neil MacGregor, former director of the British Museum, has warned of the danger of museums becoming ‘theatres of atonement for past wrongs’ instead of places of research and conservation. ‘The role of the great collections is to be lending libraries,’ he suggested.

To Jeremy Black, the historian and academic who last year published a defence of empire called Imperial Legacies, ‘the decolonisation movement is wokery and political correctness run amok’. He adds, ‘It relies on baseless and simplistic assertions about our past and present instead of rational analysis based on historical evidence and context.’

This pressure on museums to ‘decolonise’ themselves is not new. For decades Greece has been demanding the British Museum return the marbles that Lord Elgin removed from the Parthenon in the early 19th century. Nigeria has long demanded the return of the Benin Bronzes, seized by British soldiers during a punitive expedition in 1897. Egypt wants the Rosetta Stone returned.

As immigration and mass tourism brought more foreign-born visitors to the museums, they too began questioning why precious artefacts from their own cultures were exhibited in Britain, why the stories of those artefacts were told from an exclusively Anglo-centric perspective, and why so little mention was made of their provenance. Before Covid, three quarters of the British Museum’s visitors came from abroad.

Most recently, the Rhodes Must Fall and BLM protests have propelled the issue of decolonisation to public attention – not least by toppling the statue of Edward Colston, a slave trader, into Bristol Harbour last June. The City Council has since put the statue into storage.

The Museums Association says it now ‘unreservedly supports initiatives to decolonise museums and collections’, and has set up a Decolonisation Guidance Working Group to produce guidelines for its members.

Some museums like the PRM are enthusiastically decolonising, but others are more hesitant, says Alice Procter, a young art historian who offers unofficial Uncomfortable Art Tours of the British Museum, National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, V&A, Tate Britain and National Maritime Museum (she also distributes badges proclaiming ‘Display it like you stole it’).

‘There are institutions that are resistant to talking about colonialism, that feel it may harm their image and make them too controversial,’ she says. ‘It’s not that these institutions see colonialism as a brilliant thing to be celebrated. It comes down to the fact that doing this work is quite tricky and can be very scary.’

It can mean painful discoveries and painful admissions about their past, but also charges that they are a part of liberal elite bent on trashing British history.

The National Trust learnt that lesson last month when it published research showing that 93 of its properties had links to slavery or colonialism.

They included Chartwell because Churchill, who saved the world from fascism by defeating Hitler, had also been Secretary of State for the Colonies and opposed India’s independence. Bateman’s, the Sussex home of Rudyard Kipling, the revered winner of the Nobel prize for literature, was listed because he wrote so much about the British Empire – albeit not always flatteringly. Even Allan Bank, William Wordsworth’s home, made the list because although Britain’s greatest Romantic poet opposed slavery he invested in two East India Company voyages to China captained by his brother.

Oliver Dowden, the Culture Secretary, led a chorus of criticism, accusing the Trust of making ‘one of Britain’s greatest heroes [Churchill]… a subject of criticism and controversy’. Charles Moore, writing in The Spectator, called it ‘a charge sheet and a hit list’, and said ‘the Trust’s poor, Covid-hit, six million members are now in for a long, grim “re-presentation and interpretation project” designed to make them ashamed of being British’.

Hartwig Fischer, the British Museum’s director, has also found himself in the firing line. In June he outraged the activists with a statement expressing solidarity with the BLM movement following George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. That generated thousands of tweets accusing him of hypocrisy given his museum’s sizeable collection of artefacts taken from Africa. One declared: ‘Time to give back the swag, guys!’

But in August he angered the right by moving Sloane’s bust from a pedestal to a display case where his links to slavery are now made clear (an alternative to removal in the decolonisation process being ‘contextualisation’). Writing in this newspaper, the historian Andrew Roberts accused the British Museum of ‘besmirching the memory’ of a renowned doctor, peerless philanthropist and ‘giant of the Enlightenment’.

In September Dowden warned Government-funded institutions including the British Museum, British Library, Imperial War Museum, Royal Armouries and Tate galleries that they faced cuts if they removed statues or artefacts under pressure from campaigners.

‘You should not be taking actions motivated by activism or politics,’ he told them. ‘History is ridden with moral complexity. Statues and other historical objects were created by generations with different perspectives and understandings of right and wrong.’ The government is now preparing to change planning rules to allow Robert Jenrick, the Housing Secretary, to stop councils removing statues, plaques and memorials.

Most museums are now taking steps to review their collections and acknowledge their sometimes ugly provenance. They are seeking to provide greater context and more honest labelling, to present displays from the perspective of the cultures from which they came, and to offer greater digital access to their collections.

Some are staging appropriately themed exhibitions, or creating anti-racism task forces, or trying to employ more black curators – the British Museum has just one.

A wider and even more contentious issue is that of restitution. Should our museums repatriate items – particularly human remains and sacred icons – that were obtained improperly or by force?

They face increasing pressure to do so. In 2007 the UN urged states to address through mechanisms including restitution ‘cultural, intellectual, religious and spiritual property’ taken from indigenous peoples ‘without their free, prior and informed consent or in violation of their laws, traditions and customs’. A ground-breaking French government report in 2018 recommended the restitution of ‘any objects taken by force or presumed to be acquired through inequitable conditions’.

But there is no uniform policy on restitution, and most of Britain’s big museums remain resistant. They invoke the 1983 National Heritage Act, which prevents them disposing of items in their collections unless they are duplicates or irreparably damaged. They prefer to talk about loaning rather than giving items back to the people from which they came. They fret about the safety and security of those artefacts in developing countries, a fear fuelled by the destruction of museums in war-torn Iraq and Syria.

Restitution could also become a process without end – Malta’s culture minister last month demanded the return of a fossilised shark tooth that Sir David Attenborough found on holiday in the 1960s and gave to Prince George on a recent visit to Kensington Palace (the minister has since changed his mind).

In 2002, 19 of Europe and North America’s largest museums issued a statement asserting ‘the importance and value of universal museums’ – those with collections drawn from around the globe, not just the nations in which they are located. They serve the peoples of all nations, they said.

In similar vein Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, warned in the Observer last year that ‘we need to tread carefully along a path of total restitution, dictated by a political timetable’. There was, he argued, ‘something essentially valuable about the ability of museums to position objects beyond particular cultural or ethnic identities… while allowing free and open access, physically and digitally’.

Alice Procter offers the contrary view: ‘The main argument against restitution is essentially that museums would like to keep their stuff.’

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As the arguments about decolonisation and restitution rage, the trailblazing transformation of the Pitt Rivers Museum continues apace. Alongside its ethical review of the entire public collection, displays are being relabelled and contextualised. Its staff are all receiving anti-racism and ‘decoloniality’ training.

It has repatriated several dozen ancestral remains and other cultural objects, and has published detailed procedures and criteria for considering further restitutions.

It is inviting artists, leaders and other representatives of indigenous communities –Maasai, Aboriginal Australians, Shuar, Tibetans – to visit the museum, explain its artefacts and tell the stories of those items from their own perspectives.

The PRM attracted a near-record 485,000 visitors last year. Van Broekhoven says that so far the public response to its decolonisation programme has been largely supportive, and she rejects the charge that the museum is erasing history, patronising its visitors or letting wokery run wild. On the contrary, she argues that by inviting narratives other than that of British imperialism ‘we are revealing a lot more’ and ‘taking our audiences more seriously than ever’.

But she does not deny that the museum’s transformation is politically motivated. ‘I don’t believe there’s a way of non-political curation,’ she says. ‘Museums are political instruments. In their establishment they were political instruments. What we are being is explicit about our politics. We are an anti-racist institution that wants to be part of a process that looks at humanity with respect, and wants to be a welcoming space to all.’