Museums, empire and racism Premium

Contextualising what is referred to as ‘contested heritage’ is always necessary, but it is not the same as restitution or reparation. There is no nice way to say it: the starting point of museums was always a process of extraction

“What’s the point of museums?” asked the Wellcome Collection, a museum and library in London, recently on social media. Wellcome is a global philanthropic organisation that funds medical research. It was set up in 1936 after the death of Henry Wellcome, a pharmaceutical entrepreneur. Over a lifetime of selling medicines around the British empire, including the innovation of giving free samples to doctors, he had collected over one million artefacts, a number of which were related to medicine and healing practices around the world.

In a series of tweets, the Wellcome Collection went on to reflect on the ways in which one of the galleries in their museum, titled Medicine Man, was problematic. The display of objects had been amassed by one man with “enormous wealth, power and privilege”; and it centred that man’s story. The display never questioned who the artefacts had belonged to, or how they had been obtained.

For some time now, the art and culture world has responded to problematic questions about empire and racism with contextualisation: here a footnote, there a curator’s reflection, occasionally even an entire exhibition devoted to exploring these issues. But somehow, actual cultural artefacts continue to remain exactly where they are. Except for a minuscule few, they do not go back to where they came from. Contextualising what is referred to as “contested heritage” is always necessary, but it is not the same as restitution or reparation.

What does contextualisation do? I think of the statue of the racist imperialist Cecil Rhodes that stands at the entrance of Oriel College in Oxford with a small sign below which provides the context: that although the college had wanted to remove the statue, they are under legal advice not to do so.

A number of arguments are offered against restitution — it is an impractical and naïve idea; it is expensive; objects could be damaged in transit or after return; the places to where the artefacts are returned will not be able to care for them in the same temperature-controlled conditions. And so on.

When I went to the British Museum in London this October, the bus dropped me at the back entrance, which was closed to the public. As I walked around to the front entrance, I became acutely aware, step by step, of how very large the museum was.

The museum was massive, and practically everything of value inside had been “acquired” from elsewhere. As a friend commented, it could have been called “Treasures from the Empire”. I wondered if the many school groups being led through the galleries were also being taught about British imperialism and the lasting damage it had done to the world. Or was that not a relevant part of contextualisation?