8. From objects of enlightenment to objects of apology: why you can’t make amends for the past by plundering the present
Tiffany Jenkins
In early 2016, a brass cockerel that had stood in a student dining hall in Jesus College, Cambridge, became the focus of a lively repatriation claim. The Okukor, as it is known, is one of almost 1,000 Benin bronzes taken from Benin City, present-day Nigeria, during a punitive expedition by the British army in 1897. It had perched among the young scholars as they ate their meals in the college since 1930, when it was bequeathed by George William Neville, a member of the Benin Expedition, whose son had attended the college.
But not for much longer, student campaigners hoped. At a meeting of the Jesus College Student Union in March 2016, the Benin Bronze Appreciation Committee passed a motion which supported the repatriation of the Okukor to Nigeria. In a dense eleven-page document, the campaigners argued for ‘returning [the artefact] to its place of origin’. Sending it back to the ‘community from which it was stolen’, they said, was ‘just’ – they wanted to return the cockerel to make amends for the ‘sins’ of British imperialism, continuing: ‘the contemporary political culture surrounding colonialism and social justice, combined with the University’s global agenda, offers a perfect opportunity for the College to benefit from this gesture’.1 Following internal discussions, Cambridge University agreed that the statue should be taken down from its perch in the hall and the possibility of return considered. A University spokesperson said: ‘Jesus College acknowledges the contribution made by the students in raising the important but complex question of the rightful location of its Benin bronze, in response to which it has permanently removed the Okukor from its hall’. It pledged to work with university authorities and museum professionals to ‘discuss and determine the best future for the Okukor, including the question of repatriation’.2
On her blog, the racial equalities officer at Jesus College cheered this decision: ‘It’s nice to see Jesus [College] setting a precedent and taking steps in the right direction to weed out the colonial legacies that exist in bits of the university. We still have a lot of work to do ... but how exciting and momentous and revolutionary is this?!’3 Joanna Williams, a lecturer in higher education at the University of Kent, took a different view, judging it a ‘cowardly’ move on behalf of the University and that ‘students have declared war on the past and this is another example of how students are using history as a morality play to express their own moral superiority in the present’.4
Beyond the case of the cockerel, the repatriation of an object to its original location or people will, it is said, make amends for colonization, for the impact of settler societies, and for the harm that was done to conquered peoples hundreds of years ago. ‘Cultural property turns out to be a particularly appropriate medium for negotiating historical injustices’,5 posits the historian Elazar Barkan. But is it? Why now are museum objects expected to repair the past? And what are the limitations to repatriation as a solution for historical injustice?
The origins of repatriation as an apology for past wrongs
The term ‘reparations’ was initially used in connection with fines exacted among states. It now refers to a broader project of making amends towards communities and individuals, as part of what the sociologists Jeffrey Olick and Brenda Coughlin characterize as the ‘the politics of regret’. Olick and Coughlin describe the rise of a variety of movements for redress that have won some form of financial or symbolic compensation, including the restitution of objects and art as well as criminal prosecutions and public apologies, all of which have become prominent since the late 1980s. That is when the practice of making reparations went beyond those paid by the Germans to their Jewish victims from the Second World War and was extended to other groups for different historical wrongs. In a study on the vogue for historical contrition, the historian and geographer, David Lowenthal, identifies 1988 as the important turning point, when the American government distributed $1.6 billion to Japanese-Americans who had been interned in camps during the war, by way of compensation. Lowenthal documents several subsequent reparations campaigns, with claimants from South Africa, Namibia, Argentina, Brazil and Chile, as well as Australian Aborigines, Native Americans, Japanese-Americans, and African-Americans.6
The historian Elazar Barkan locates the emergence of a new international moral order, based on apology for past acts, as emerging around the late 1990s. Barkan demonstrates that it was at this point that restitution for past victims became a major part of national politics and international diplomacy. He describes as a manifestation of this ‘performative guilt’ situations in which leaders theatrically say sorry for acts that they had no responsibility for from the past.7 Examples more recently closer to the U.K. include when, one month after the British Conservative M.P. David Cameron became prime minister of a coalition government, in June 2010, he told the house of commons: ‘I am deeply sorry’ for an event that took place when he was five years old, that is the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1972, when British paratroopers opened fire on crowds at a civil rights demonstration in Derry/Londonderry in Northern Ireland. Two years later, Mr. Cameron was ‘profoundly sorry’ for the Hillsborough tragedy of 1989, which was when a series of failures by the police led to the deaths of ninety-six people, yet the authorities at the time blamed football supporters for the tragedy.
It is novel, Barkan posits, that political leaders draw attention to the wrongs committed by governments or institutions of their societies in the past. Previously, society did not in general look back so much – or at least so regretfully; when it did look back, the tales it told of itself to itself tended to be myths of past greatness. This is especially true for Conservative prime ministers; indeed when in office Mr. Cameron was particularly fond of the phrase the ‘bad old days’, using it on a number of occasions, but most notably in 2012 in relation to kicking out racism in football.8 Someone in his position, the most senior member of the Conservative party, would have once preferred the ‘good old days’. National myths about nations have tended to be based on heroic deeds and victory. The kings and great leaders would take centre stage and those that they governed were either portrayed as happy and grateful, or not mentioned at all. Those myths were one-sided; they celebrated the elite of a culture – the victors; the losers were brushed aside. The new collective memory that is being forged, by contrast, is one more likely to recognize the heinous rather than the heroic, the victims over the victorious. It is curious that this development is a top down as much as – if not more so than – a bottom-up phenomenon.
This turn towards the worst aspects of the past is evident in the museums built in recent decades. In the past thirty years, more memorial museums have opened than in the previous 100 years. These include the memorial museum of the 9/11 attacks; sixteen Holocaust museums in the U.S. alone (with plans for more); and a museum dedicated to those who died and lost their loved ones in the bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995. There are scores of museums documenting slavery in America, and genocide in Armenia, Rwanda and the Balkans. Others show state repression in Eastern Europe; apartheid in South Africa; political ‘disappearances’ in Argentina; and massacres in China and Taiwan. Even within older institutions, such as the Natural History Museum in London, there is a memorial, alongside the natural history specimens and the old dinosaurs, to the lives lost in 2004 when an earthquake in the Indian Ocean caused a tsunami that led to the deaths of around 300,000 people, including British holiday-makers in Thailand. In institutions that used to valorize great deeds and achievements of human civilization, this is a significant departure.
It came from within
The inclination to repatriate objects, or grant a sympathetic ear to the possibility, often comes from within museums and the academy, either because its members proactively attempt to solicit repatriation requests, or because they are unable to argue firmly a defence for retention when they receive them, effectively advertizing for repatriation claims.9 Take the dynamics of the claim to return the Okukor. The demand for the return of the cockerel came, not from people in Nigeria, though Nigeria has long appealed for the return of bronzes, if not the Okukor, but from students within Cambridge University. A similar pattern of events took place with a related controversy, which was set alight one month before that of the cockerel.
High up on the façade of Oriel College in the High Street of Oxford, stands – for now – a small statue of Cecil John Rhodes, the Victorian imperialist who shaped Britain’s empire in Africa and who, in 1887, told the house of assembly in Cape Town that ‘The native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise’.10 In the autumn of 2015 students at Oriel College, led by a South African Rhodes Scholar, Ntokozo Qwabe, kick-started what became known as the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign, arguing that the statue of Rhodes should be removed. Rhodes had studied at Oriel, intermittently, between 1873 and 1881, and bequeathed funds to the college in his will. To the university he left the legacy that founded the Rhodes Scholarships: it is this money that funded the students who wanted his statue removed.
The campaign had its origins at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, where Rhodes built his fortune and power before his death in 1902 and where there was a statue honouring his legacy. In March 2015, activist Chumani Maxwele smeared excrement on the statue, triggering further protests by activists who complained that the statue had ‘great symbolic power’ which glorified someone ‘who exploited black labour and stole land from indigenous people’11 and should be taken down. In a short space of time they were successful: one month after the protests began, the university authorities removed the statue. The campaign then spread like wildfire to America and Europe where different groups, especially on university campuses, argued that statues including those of Thomas Jefferson, the third American president, and of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy during the Civil War, be toppled.
In one respect, it’s hard to get all that excited either way about a small statue of a Victorian imperialist. There are lots of monuments to old white men all over the world, men whose influence and often names have been forgotten, and whose time has passed. Unlike many of the contested artefacts in museums or universities, as with the cockerel, the statues are political and unremarkable; neither pretty to look at nor unique evidence of past peoples’ ways of living. It’s possible they educate passers-by about the tangled web of history they pass, but more often than not, they are forgotten. We might not even notice their absence: I grew up in Oxford and only noticed the statue of Rhodes once the campaign drew it to my attention. Even so, this controversy and the future of such statues is important because of the claims that are made for removing old pieces of stone: primarily, that it is a necessary part of repairing the past, akin to decolonization.
Decolonization, which took place in the second half of the twentieth century, was driven by the great social movements that swept through Africa and Asia and forcefully challenged the might of European rule. They grew out of the insistence that people of Africa and Asia could and should run their own lives and be free from the domination of Europe, challenging Rhodes’s argument that they were to be treated like children, or worse. To compare this major transformation which came out of many years of hard struggle to what might be brought about through the removal of a statue is to elide two very different movements and achievements. And in so doing, there is a danger that it diminishes the earlier battles and even the meaning of ‘decolonization’.
It is true that toppling statues has been at the heart of significant political and social change. During the Protestant Reformation, Catholic statues were defaced and destroyed; during the French revolution statues of monarchs and their artworks were demolished; in post-independence India, statues of viceroys and British monarchs were taken down and neutered by placing them in Delhi’s Coronation Park. But in all these cases the toppling of statues came as part of a great social upheaval or in the midst of great change when the old oppressive regime also was removed. The ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ formed a long time after decolonization, and – not insignificantly – in a time of political inaction, where removing statues appears to stand in for social change. As the author of The Meaning of Race, Kenan Malik, observed in an article on Aljazeera: ‘Once upon a time, student activists used to demand that capitalism must fall, or that apartheid must be crushed, or that colonialism must be swept away. Now, it seems, they just want to take down statues’.12 This is one of the limits to such campaigns and, indeed, repatriation: that it stands in for social change, that it does little to advance material and political equality, and that statues and museum objects are expected to do more work than they can achieve, turning the latter into objects of apology where they were once objects of enlightenment.
We must organize to mourn – the end of politics
In Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: on Reparations Politics, the sociologist John Torpey analyses the trends towards apologies, reparations, and repatriations, and is especially interested in explaining what he describes as the ‘avalanche’ of such activity that has taken place post-1989. Torpey suggests that the increasing efforts to make amends have arisen at the same time as forward-looking, future-oriented political movements have been in decline. In short, he argues that reparations thinking arose in the face of political defeat. It is, he writes, ‘a substitute for expansive visions of an alternative human future of the kind that animated the socialist movements of the preceding century, which have been overwhelmingly discredited since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989’.13 What he means is that developments that include the end of the Cold War and the collapse of an ‘alternative’ politics – by which he means any form of socialist movement – have transformed contemporary politics, making it less about competing social visions for the future and more about accepting and managing the status quo.
Torpey argues that it is difficult to overstate the significance of this change in outlook. Over the past two centuries, the big projects that captured the attention and focus of society were capitalism, socialism and the idea of democracy. Even when people were at loggerheads, or at war – be that the Soviet Union against the U.S.A., capitalism versus communism, battles over extending the franchise to wider sections of the population, or fights about extending democracy to new nations – Torpey posits that society was driven by visions of how things could be, or should be. They were future orientated. Today, he contends, these aspirations have been found wanting and to a great extent, abandoned. Utopia is considered a dangerous aim.
From the 1970s onwards, political movements weakened and shrank. The slogan popularized by Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher to underline the defeat of socialist economics – that ‘There Is No Alternative’ to the free market and economic liberalism – is now generally accepted. The competing political sides of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, which were formed in the times of the French Revolution, now compete over the centre ground. People continue to protest, and agitate for change, but in a way that is more inchoate, less directed, less effective, and less popular. And it is oriented far more around the process of the present day – or the wrongs of the past – than around visions of the future.
As visions of a transformed future seem less plausible, people have turned away from fighting for the good society. And in this context, the past has become a battleground. For Torpey, the desire to atone for past wrongs has come to supplant the search for a better tomorrow; the demand for reparations has supplanted the fight for a future. He recalls a phrase that was used within the socialist and labour movements – ‘Don’t mourn, organise’ – which, he notes, has been replaced by a sensibility that urges us instead to ‘organise to mourn’, ushering in what he calls the ‘politics of tears’.14 The political theorist Wendy Brown draws similar conclusions, characterizing the turn towards the recognition of victimhood – a key demand in reparations politics – as ‘the language of unfreedom’: ‘its impulse to inscribe in the law and in other political registers its historical and present pain rather than conjure an imagined future of power to make itself ’.15 In this regard, it is argued, campaigners focus on reparations and the recognition of damage instead of shaping the life they would like to lead.
Who benefits?
Repatriation, restitution and reparations, are all presented as positive for the victims of historic wrongs. It is assumed that the people of the countries to which the objects would be returned, or those who receive reparation, will benefit. But this assumption is questionable.
When Elazar Barkan documented the rise of restitution cases in the 1990s, he was intrigued that pressure for restitution and apology was more likely to come from the perceived perpetrators than from the victims. And the fact that political leaders seemed to be driving the process was of interest to him. Why would they invite such demands for reparations? Barkan thus explored the alleged perpetrators’ willingness to engage and accommodate to the alleged victims’ demands. Especially from the 1990s onwards, he identified a ‘new world opinion in which appearing compassionate and holding the moral high ground has become a good investment’. Barkan concluded that reparations are acts that bring moral credibility to the elites of today, by drawing a contrast with the morally dubious actions of their predecessors. The political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain describes apologies from political leaders and institutions as ‘contrition chic’: ‘a bargain-basement way to gain publicity, sympathy, and even absolution [that] now extends to entire nations’.16 While these critics may seem a little harsh, there is no doubt that the processes they identify – making some kind of apologetic gesture – can act to secure legitimation for leaders.
It can also be used as an excuse for not doing things today. Consider what energy and ideas are now diverted away from imagining a better future when those who would have fought for it are now so distracted by finding the cause of present problems predominantly in the past. This is a point that the writer Marina Warner makes, in an essay on the ritual of public apologies: ‘Yes, well, what are you doing about us now?’17
Even if we accept that today’s political elites have something to gain from the rhetoric of reparations, is it not the case that the victims gain something too? Here, too, questions need to be asked. Theorists raise legitimate concerns about the way people are seen when their role is deemed to be simply that of the victim of historical wrongs. The one-sided presentation of the loser of a conflict as one whose life and that of their descendants is invariably damaged can rewrite the role that people actually played in the shaping of their circumstances. Those who fought and struggled, and whose actions had an impact, are recast in a passive role, as simply having been on the receiving end of violence and injustice. Elizabeth Willis, an emeritus curator at Museums Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, makes this observation, even though she broadly supports campaigns for reconciliation and the recognition of past wrongs by the repatriation of artefacts. Willis’s research into the case of Aboriginal populations found that reparations, even repatriation claims, tend to ignore the agency of these people, simplifying and reducing the role they played. These claims ‘can, unwittingly, diminish people’, she observes, recasting people who fought as merely injured parties who suffered and failed.18
As well as rewriting a more complicated history, the impact of emphasizing the victimhood of groups may have negative implications for how people are encouraged to view themselves today. People are presented, and asked to perceive themselves, as defined only by what heinous things were done to their ancestors. They are identified as having a history of frailty, and as being now reliant on their conquerors to bestow upon them some kind of compensation. This fatalistic view sees the people of today as forever imprisoned by a past that pre-dates their own existence, and encourages them to find refuge in enduring victimhood. In order to bid for reparations or compensation, different groups have to compete over how much they suffered, and this in turn helps to shape a culture of grievance.
The movement for reparations is an example of a trend which relies on therapeutic measures, such as the recognition of historic ills through the removal of cultural artefacts, as a way to solve social problems. But in the process of making claims, groups and individuals have to enter a competition in which their wounds are evaluated. They cannot just ask for money, or demand material and political equality; rather, they have to prove how badly they have been affected. Because of this competitive dynamic, reparations are more likely to divide than reconcile. And because the process relies on supplication, with the victim asking the historical victor for a hand-out or a statement of recognition, power relations are not transformed, but reinforced.
We also have to look at what the idea of reparations says about descendants of the so-called perpetrators of historical wrongs. People living today, most of whom were born long after the event in question, are held culpable for the past – not because of their own actions, but because of the particular national, religious, ethnic, or racial group to which they belong. Thus it is said that British people today, and their institutions, are responsible for the suffering of those people conquered and subjected by the British empire, and should assume a sense of collective guilt for the sins of imperialism. This has uncomfortable echoes with old racializing discourse, which promoted notions about the biological inheritance of moral traits, and the culpability of whole populations or groups for the actions of their ancestors.
Finally, by presenting the people of today as casualties of the past, the move towards reparations implicitly detaches responsibility for action in the present. By encouraging people to blame the past for today’s troubles, rather than face up to the problems of the present and future, the all-important relationship between action and accountability becomes eroded.
Rewriting history
The American attorney Alan Audi states:
From an anti-imperial [sic] perspective, I believe that the starting point must be restitution. Simply put, a wrongfully taken object should be returned, including objects taken by virtue of an imperial, exploitative apparatus that is widely abhorred today.19
The journalist Henry Porter ventures that for a similar reason, the Elgin Marbles should be sent back to Greece:
To weigh the issue, you need only ask yourself if Elgin’s behaviour would be acceptable today. Of course it wouldn’t, and nor would we expect to keep the result of such looting. So why do we hold on to these ill-gotten sculptures now?20
Examining and reassessing the past is something that museums and historians do all the time, and rightly so. But these commentators are calling for something quite different: an exercise in reading history backwards, judging it by a particular set of contemporary mores, and then taking action on the basis of how we – or rather, a number of influential commentators – feel about it now.
Attempting to undo history in this way erodes the differences between historical periods. Interpreting history through the eyes of the present contorts our understanding of what happened and why, and reduces what is always a more complex picture, in the interests of making us feel better. The first step in understanding the past is to appreciate that things have not always been the same; that many of the actions that appear unjust, even monstrous, to the present-day sensibility were accepted norms at the time. It is far better to try to get to grips with the past, and understand what gave rise to certain values and practices, than to embark on a futile project of trying to undo it.
Besides, where would such actions stop? And who decides? History is long and untidy. It is always more complicated than the goodies versus the baddies. If we take the two cases of the Parthenon marbles and the Benin bronzes, both subject to claims for return on the basis of historical wrongs, we find a tangled path. The ancient Athenians were not angels, but warriors. The Parthenon was a display of power and it was built by slaves; the enemies of the Athenian empire would quite rightly have seen it as a monument to their humiliation. The glory of Benin was built on the slave trade: the contested Benin bronzes were crafted from manillas, brought by European traders, traded for slaves, and melted down.21 In some instances, then, the very sculptures and plaques that some would like to see returned to Nigeria were made from the proceeds of slavery, exchanged for men and women. Are these artefacts tainted by how the material was created and acquired?
Judging the past though the eyes of the present does not change what happened. Nor will it aid our understanding of ancient Athens, nineteenth-century Europe, or Benin during its golden age. The best way to respect the lives of the people who came before us is to research history without such an agenda.
Throughout history, harm has been done; but it cannot be ‘repaired’, only studied and understood. The obsession with museums and their ‘loot’ can mean that we avoid engaging with the deeper forces that brought about war, colonization and imperialism; we focus on objects and museums as the source of domination, rather than seeing them as institutions and artefacts that reflect wider political and social events of their times. In asking artefacts to atone for the past, we lose sight of their original meanings and purposes, viewing them only as objects of tragedy and apology. This hampers our appreciation of the artefacts; what they meant to their creators and owners, and what they say about their moment of origin.
_______________
1 ‘Jesus votes in cockerel row’, Varsity, 18 Feb. 2016 <https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/9877> [accessed 17 Apr. 2018].
2 ‘Benin Bronze “permanently removed” from Jesus Hall’, The Cambridge Student, 9 March 2016.
3 ‘Cambridge college’s bronze cockerel must go back to Nigeria, students say’, The Guardian, 21 Feb. 2016
4 ‘Cambridge University agrees to remove Benin Bronze cockerel from the dining hall at Jesus College after students complained about its links to Britain’s colonial past’, Daily Mail, 8 March 2016.
5 E. Barkan, ‘Restitution and amending historical injustices in international morality’, in Politics and the Past: on Repairing Historical Injustices, ed. J. Torpey (Lanham, Md., 2003), p. 100.
6 D. Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge, 1998); and also The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1995).
7 Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (Baltimore, Md., 2001), p. 316.
8 ‘David Cameron calls football racism summit’, The Guardian, 12 Feb. 2012.
9 See T. Jenkins, Keeping their Marbles: how the Treasures of the Past Ended Up in Museums – And Why They Should Stay There (Oxford, 2016), for an in-depth examination of this dynamic.
10 Cited in R. L. Rotberg, The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power (Oxford, 1998), p. 225.’
11 Rhodes statue removed in Cape Town as crowd celebrates’, B.B.C. News, 8 Apr. 2015 <http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-32236922> [accessed 17 Apr. 2018].
12 K. Malik, ‘The Cecil Rhodes statue is not the problem’, Al Jazeera, 11 Jan. 2016 <http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2016/01/cecil-rhodes-oxford-problem-160110061336569.html> [accessed 17 Apr. 2018].
13 J. Torpey, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: on Reparations Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), p. 16.
14 Torpey, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed, p. 1.
15 W. Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, N.J., 1995), p. 66.
16 J. Bethke Elshtain, ‘Politics and forgiveness’, in Burying the Past: Making Peace and Doing Justice After Civil Conflict, ed. N. Biggar (Georgetown, D.C., 2003), p. 45.
17 M. Warner, ‘Sorry: the present state of apology’, Open Democracy (7 Nov. 2002).
18 E. Willis, ‘The law, politics, and “historical wounds”: the Dja Dja Warrung Bark Etchings case in Australia’, International Jour. Cultural Property, xv (2008), 49–63.
19 A. Audi, ‘A semiotics of cultural property argument’, International Jour. Cultural Property, xiv (2007), 131–56.
20 H. Porter, ‘The Greeks gave us the Olympics. Let them have their marbles’, The Observer, 20 May 2012.
21 Manillas were a West African metallic currency in the form of armlets.