[CPProt.net] Some Thoughts on Repatriation and Cultural Memory

[MSN CPPnet]

Some Thoughts on Repatriation and Cultural Memory 
By Richard Pankhurst

June 11, 2005
 

People who live differently, as we know, think differently.

Thieves and robbers think differently from the people from whom they have
stolen and robbed.

And more relevant to today's Reflections: 

Those whose countries have inherited loot from other countries tend to be
complacent, and to think differently from those whose ancestors were
plundered.

 "The Obelisk in Rome is too heavy to transport!", declare the former.

 "If we return one item of loot from country X, may we not be pressurised
into returning something to country Y? Where will it end?", like frightened
rabbits they ask.

 "We can look after the manuscripts better in Europe than in Africa!", they
proclaim - without knowing anything about the matter.

 "The natives", they pontificate, "are too backward to be interested in
their cultural heritage!"

The culturally disinherited - and impoverished -  see things very
differently!

 "Why should Italy retain the obelisk in violation of its Peace Treaty of
1947?", they ask -"Whose culture is it anyway?" an indignant Ethiopian
scrawled in Amharic on the ancient stone.

 "Why should the finest Ethiopian manuscripts ever produced be held in the
Royal Library in Windsor Castle?", they ask.

 "Why should Nigerian children have to go to London to see the Benin bronzes
their ancestors produced? 

The above is, in a way, a continuation of the old debate between Colonized
and Colonizers.

 When the peoples of Africa and Asia were struggling for their political
emancipation: 

 They were told by their European masters: "We know better how to rule than
you do. We are experts in colonial government. We even have professors of
colonial administration - and Congresses of Colonial Studies!. You, on the
other hand, are too stupid, or inexperienced, to rule yourselves". 

"Why do you not let us rule you ourselves? It would rally be in your own
interest".

The ruled, the disinherited, the colonial subjects, replied:

 "We want our birth-right!!"

 "We want to enter into our inheritance!"

 "We want the right to make our own mistakes!"

 The present debate on the Loot from Africa and the Third World  has its
roots in that debate about the rights of historically oppressed peoples. 

 This is because people who in the past had to struggle against foreign rule
are now beginning to struggle to regain their cultural heritage from which
they were deprived as a direct consequence of that foreign, or colonial,
rule.

 How did the obelisk, the aeroplane Tsehai and the Ministry of the Pen
letters end up in Rome; why are  the Maqdala treasures and the Benin bronzes
in Britain rather than in Ethiopia and Nigeria? 

 There is but one answer: They were taken by force: Might not Right!

 AFROMET, the Association for the Return of Maqdala Ethiopian Treasures, is
the voice of the culturally robbed, fighting to regain, and reconquer, their
cultural heritage.

 AFROMET represents the voice of justice, which declares that the plundering
of Maqdala in 1868 was an act of loot, without any justification whatsoever
in international law - an act of plunder which involved the looting of the
Church of Medane Alem, and was thus an act of sacrilege.

 AFROMET is committed to the restitution to Ethiopia of such loot - and
hence to the cause of cultural justice.

 In the course of its struggle AFROMET is helping to foster a deeper - and
wider - understanding and appreciation of Ethiopian culture. 

 To see this point one has only look at the history of other countries:

 Look at Egypt, Greece, Rome - great centres of ancient civilization: their
inhabitants by the early nineteenth century had little knowledge or interest
in their antiquities - about which, however, they are today justly proud.

 Ethiopia for the last half century or so has been in a similar state of
transition. Travellers of the past tell us that Ethiopians of the past (like
Egyptians, Greeks and Romans of the past) had little interest in their
historic artifacts. But this is changing. The country is now increasingly
committed to the protection of its antiquities... and this awareness will
doubtless increase in the years ahead.

 AFROMET is playing its part in this cultural awakening: in the great
transformation of ideas now in progress.

 AFROMET has won the support of a growing number of lovers of justice: An
anonymous donor who returned the Amulet, which Emperor Tewodros was wearing
on the day he committed suicide; Professor Fiona Wilson in Denmark, who
repatriated the remarkable shield which had belonged to Tewodros;  Mr Robert
Moxon-Brown, the distinguished British QC, who  only a few weeks ago
returned an illumination sadly torn from an historic manuscript

These artifacts are now on display in an important Exhibition now on show in
the Intitute of Ethiopian Studies Museum, in Addis Ababa.

Private British individuals have thus fully endorsed AFROMET's appeal for
restitution. Their repatriation of Ethiopian loot represents a challenge to
the British Library, the British Museum and other British institutions,
which are still today largely run by complacent individuals who belong to
the category to which I earlier referred - and lack a sense of justice.

 But even the most complacent opponents of restitution are changing. The
British Museum possessed eleven Ethiopian tabots, or altar slabs. Faced by
AFROMET's demands for their repatriation to Ethiopia - and wishing to
subvert it - the Museum has decided to place these tabots in the hands of an
Ethiopian Church in London. They have not repatriated them, but they
recognise by their action that they have no right to retain them. This is no
less true of the manuscripts they still unjustly hang on to, and whose
repatriation AFROMET demands.

  It is no less interesting to note that Edinburgh University Library, which
held a number of Ethiopian manuscripts, has expressed a desire to be in
dialogue with AFROMET. 

 The walls of cultural injustice, you see, are shaking...

   Several years ago the Italian Foreign Minister, Signor Franco Franchini,
wrote to a friend of AFROMET that Italy, by returning the obelisk, was
setting an example to other powers. 

 We welcome that initiative, and likewise see it as an example for others
to copy. You cannot return an antiquity weighing over 120 tons without
setting an example for others to follow! 

   Italy must, however, go further: It must honour the Peace Treaty of 1947
by repatriating the Ethiopian aeroplane Tsehai, as well as the Ethiopian
archival letters in Rome on which our friend Professor Sven Rubenson has
written.

   We cannot expect less than that the country which only a  few weeks ago
so expertly returned the obelisk - and thus proved wrong all the critics,
and "experts" who had argued that the obelisk's repatriation was impossible!

 

Obelisk

By Jamie McKendrick
(Written in the shape of an Obelisk)

Reprinted from the London Review of Books, 17 February 2005, i.e. shortly
before the obelisk's repatriation

There are certain houses built

not to be lived in - long

houses pyramids and this

the Axum Obelisk

that stood nearly 70 years

an exiled axle

near the Circus Maximus

whilst at its home in the Horn

a site's been dug a pit a pause

a prolonged hiatus

that mortal span's an eye blink

in its career made

to measure and memorialise

deep time a dial

for solar or for astral time -

solo un attimo

but children now grown old

remember its removal

when thinking like a Roman

Dux Mussolini spoke

have it shipped to Rome

to celebrate the victory

won by poison gas

re-erecting its five

fallen pieces each almost

unbugeable whole

some hundred and forty tons

- cut with helicoidal wire

those same dismantled blocks

still wait for their return

in a Fiumicino warehouse

an airport longhouse

on the first available US

Galaxy plane

certain houses have no space

inside for living

though some like this are fitted

with doors front and back

and windows which won't open

rock-solid granite

that waits on us and fathoms space

but now it's time high time

this long house went home