The moment before the dam breaks: repatriation and the British Museum
PART ONE — THE JOURNEY OF THE GWEAGAL SHIELD
On 29 April 1770, Captain James Cook sailed into Botany Bay, Australia on his first trip aboard the HMS Endeavour.
They had departed Plymouth two years prior, in pursuit of the fabled ‘Great Southern Continent’.
Upon docking, the crew encountered two members of the Gweagal tribe — warrior Cooman and another.
Cook instinctively fired his musket between the two tribesmen, in the aspiration of impeding their advancement.
This was shortly followed by another shot, directly aimed at Cooman.
A single shield, made from the bark and wood of red mangrove, undecorated, and oval in form, is all that protected warrior Cooman from the bullet that hurtled towards him — penetrating his leg.
Fast forward 251 years and the Gweagal shield hangs 10,558 miles from home in the Enlightenment Gallery of the British Museum — a trophy of Britain’s past colonial endeavours.
How the British Museum acquired the shield is a mystery.
In 1978 it was unearthed from the museum’s vast store of priceless artefacts and registered with a Q number.
One theory is that the shield was donated by Sir Joseph Banks, George III’s principal adviser on scientific matters and trustee of the British Museum, who had accompanied Captain Cook on that fateful trip to Botany Bay.
In October 2016, Rodney Kelly — a sixth-generation descendant of warrior Cooman, made a repatriation claim to the British Museum for the return of the Gweagal shield used to defend his ancestor, his country, and ultimately his culture, all those years ago.
His request was denied.
PART TWO — REPATRIATION: THE BIG PICTURE
A Freedom of Information request I sent to the British Museum uncovered that four former European colonies made repatriation requests to the British Museum between April 2014 and December 2020, totalling 148 objects.
Requested items included two Dja Dja Wurrung barks, 133 sculptures from Amaravati, the Gweagal shield, an Easter Island statue, and eleven sacred Ethiopian alter tabots.
None were granted.
What was once a rare occurrence stemming from bad collecting practices, has swiftly become part of the global discourse of decolonisation as more and more source nations bring claims and lawsuits against museums.
The African Foundation for Development (AFFORD) is an international organization established in 1994 with the mission “to expand and enhance the contributions Africans in the diaspora make to African development”.
Through their programme ‘Return of the Icons’, AFFORD is working with museum professionals and members of the diaspora to return stolen African artefacts from British cultural institutions, such as the British Museum.
Onyekachi Wambu, Executive Director of AFFORD, said: “All these artefacts are a vision into the kinds of societies that were there before colonialism, and the achievements of certain civilisations and societies, and it’s important for people from those countries to have a conversation with their past and to draw on some of those lessons from the past to construct their futures.
“The positions that people are striking are not sustainable. We as a country now stand for certain values and all of this is in contradiction to those values. So, in the end, the items will go back; how long it takes is the question.”
2019 visitor figures gathered by the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions identified the British Museum as the most visited museum in the United Kingdom, with a total of 6,239,983 visits.
The museum was founded in 1753 and holds an estimated eight million objects within its collection, many of which were stolen or looted during the British colonial era.
Over the past few months, momentum has been growing for the repatriation of artefacts acquired as a result of European colonialism. France, Germany, the University of Aberdeen, and the University of Cambridge have all pledged to repatriate items in their possession.
The British Museum, on the other hand, continues to hide behind the British Museum Act 1963 which prohibits the deaccession of any object held in the museum’s collection, bar exceptional circumstances.
Dr Tatiana Flessas, Associate Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science said: “When a different country retains their goods or wants to claim their stuff back, it’s called nationalism. When the UK does it, it’s called patriotism.”
On 22 September 2020, Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden wrote to the British Museum to outline the Government’s position on contested heritage.
He said: “History is ridden with moral complexity. Statues and other historical objects were created by generations with different perspectives and understandings of right and wrong.
“Rather than erasing these objects, we should seek to contextualise or reinterpret them in a way that enables the public to learn about them in their entirety, however challenging this may be.
“Our aim should be to use them to educate people about all aspects of Britain’s complex past, both good and bad.”
He continued to demand impartiality from publicly funded bodies and strongly discouraged taking actions motivated by activism or politics.
This governmental response to the removal of statues that formed part of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, speaks more generally of the Conservative government’s conservative approach to museology.
As traditional justifications for retaining artefacts obtained via morally questionable and often brutal means lose what weight they once held, a new explanation is required.
Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum from 2002 to 2015, put forward the argument that great national museums (such as the British Museum) are encyclopedic and benefit the common cultural heritage of mankind.
However, with the opportunities that modern technology has to offer, and the ability to travel to these objects post-pandemic, MacGregor’s rationalization fails to match the requests made by source nations.
“We’re at a turning point, either the British Museum has completely dug its heels in and is going to reify that, or it’s like that moment before the dam breaks when things look like they’re never going to change, and then they change all at once, really quickly,” said Dr Flessas.
“The British Museum is afraid. They’re really worried that if they open the floodgates, we’ll lose everything. Or, if they repatriate one thing, then we’ll have people from foreign countries crawling through our storerooms.”
PART THREE — LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
Whilst the historic significance of the Gweagal shield is undeniable, it possesses a distinctive cultural significance to the Gweagal tribe that outweighs the needs of the British public.
Speaking to Sarah Keenan about his visit to the British Museum in October 2016, Rodney Kelly, a sixth-generation member of the Gweagal tribe, said: “I felt insulted and angry. They don’t respect it. The amount of rods that hold it in place are doing damage to the shield.
“People walk past it every day and don’t look at it, don’t know the significance of it. It’s disappointing to see it like that.
“Our shield deserves to be at home where it can help repair our history and start telling the true story of Botany Bay, where modern Australia started and started to go wrong.
“The healing power that this shield has for Aboriginal Australia is much greater than any value it can have as part of a collection in the British Museum.”
The perceived purpose of museums is changing.
In days past, museums were shrines to educational advancement and research, whereases the future of the museum and heritage sector consists of permeable institutions focused on community engagement.
Speaking on the larger issue of decolonisation in the sector, of which repatriation is an integral part, Charlie Pratley, Lecturer in Museum & Heritage Studies at Nottingham Trent University, said: “You can’t just stick a policy on it. You have to have a serious overhaul of the entire systemic organization: looking at the diversity of the board, and how the board functions, rather than just ticking off policies and engaging high profile individuals. It requires a complete change in culture which is a very long-term change.”
A pioneer in the field of museology is the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.
In a project they termed ‘Radical Hope, Critical Change’, the museum is hosting online discussions, film screenings, and Q&A sessions aimed at reimagining museum practices — particularly Western museums’ reliance on colonial ideas.
However, the Pitt Rivers Museum is not bound by the same legislation as the British Museum, and their collection of half a million objects doesn’t hold a light to the British Museum’s eight million.
So, as public demand for decolonisation grows exponentially, what changes need to be made within the British Museum for it to align with this shift in public opinion?
According to Dr Tatiana Flessas: “The curators and the trustees should have more power, and we should see these collections as being much more fluid than we have thought about them before.”
In contrast, Onyekachi believes that change is in the hands of the general public.
He said: “It’s going to be about ordinary people beginning to say, taking my children on a Saturday to view the result of conquest and murder is not actually a good way to spend a Saturday afternoon.”
“As Obama once quoted: ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”