Resisting Restitution

On Tuesday this week, the morning mass readings offered as the Epistle a particularly brutal denunciation of the arrogance of the King of Tyre from Ezekiel, and for the Gospel Jesus’s exchange with the Rich Young Man from Matthew – camels going through the eyes of needles, and so on. I preached about power and wealth, and their spiritual dangers, and how little I would have wanted to be the King of Tyre. The evening brought a radio discussion about the Horniman Museum’s decision to repatriate 72 items from its collection to Nigeria, including twelve of the notorious Benin Bronzes (in fact the Museum decided this a week earlier, but it wasn’t widely reported).

‘Go, sell what you own and give to the poor’, Jesus tells the Rich Young Man, who ‘goes away grieving, for he had many possessions’. Renunciation of things we hold dear is a common theme in Christian life, and as a former museum curator I have to confess I hold dear the collections of the great national museums. The Benin Bronzes are a particularly appalling example of objects looted in an act of imperialist violence, but other museums are positively stuffed with artefacts acquired under dubious circumstances. Even at Wycombe we had a cuneiform brick, which we always joked was a laundry list, and we had no idea how it had ended up with us. But what about the collection of the Royal Engineers Museum in Chatham, another former workplace of mine? Because the RE were involved in every campaign the British Empire ever fought, we had material essentially looted from all over the world, the most striking examples being a Tibetan libation cup made from a human skull and brought back from the Younghusband Expedition, and bits of the Mahdi’s Tomb grabbed during the Omdurman War led by Lord Kitchener to punish the Sudanese for the murder of General Gordon in 1885.

Notwithstanding the grisly insensitivity of receiving and displaying these artefacts, this is all small-scale stuff, and nobody’s clamouring for its repatriation. Most of it is of very little interest to its nations of origin: Egypt isn’t going to ask for all its mummies back, no matter how municipal museums from Buxton to Brighton got hold of them. I think instead about objects of real charismatic power, such as the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum. Who did that ever rightfully belong to – the imperial Turks, the French who occupied Egypt at the time, or the British who seized it from them? I can never walk past the Rosetta Stone without a shiver that here is this thing which not only unlocked an entire landscape of human history and knowledge, but also entered the language – and an uneasy recognition of my own privilege at having it in front of me, whenever I want to get on a train to London and through the august portals of the BM. I am a citizen of a former imperial state, and the bloody processes of history have dumped this artefact of intense human lustre in what amounts to my own cabinet of curiosities. I may share the cabinet with millions of my fellow-citizens; it may not be in my house and only accessible to those I choose to admit; but it is mine, nevertheless. And let us not pretend that giving up, if not it, then objects like it, will hurt. We go away grieving, for our possessions are very great.