activists from Ogoniland who protested against the oil companies’ pollution of the Delta region (Human Rights Watch, 1999, 2002). Nor is there any mention of the threat this pollution poses to the very masquerade tradition on display, whose imagery calls up the cosmology represented by the water-loving animal life in the Delta and whose resilience and inventiveness are celebrated by the BM.
FIGURE 0.1 (a) Display of masks made by the Kalabari peoples from the Niger Delta in Southern Nigeria in the Sainsbury Africa Gallery at the British Museum, London. The explanatory labels exclusively foreground the importance of water spirits in the masquerades and the use of new materials: “These are various fish masquerades, made over a period of a hundred years and drawing on changing materials and techniques.” (b)
(b) Detail of a Kalabari fish mask showing the incorporation of recycled cardboard boxes.
Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. Photos © Annie E. Coombes.
Radical revisions to conservative museum narratives are much more often found in artists’ interventions. A case in point is the Throne of Weapons, which remained on view in the BM at the time of our writing. Initially exhibited in 2002 as part of the exhibition Swords into Ploughshares, organized by Christian Aid for London’s Oxo Gallery, the sculpture represents a real attempt to acknowledge African agency and to introduce a contemporary context which challenges standard frames of reference for display at the BM. Constructed out of decommissioned weapons from the Mozambique civil war (1977–92), the “throne” was made in 2001 by the Mozambican artist Cristóvão Canhavato, known as Kester. It was part of the Transforming Arms into Tools project made possible by an amnesty which allowed fighters to exchange their arms for tools to help reconstruct their war-torn country where over one million people had been killed.7 A moving account of the conception behind the “throne” is supplied by Kester himself: “The war was just so horrendous, so difficult; I don’t know how to talk about it.” The rifle butts on the throne, he continues,
are smiling at each other as if to say “now we are free” … I didn’t carve the smile, it’s part of the rifle butt. The screw holes and the mark left from where the strap was attached to the gun. I wanted to just use the gun as it was, not change it. So I chose the guns and the weapons that had the most expression. Also the back of the chair is curved. You can see a kind of archway or a door of a church. You can imagine you are at the door of a church. (Kester 2014)
The piece has been shown internationally in exhibition venues promoting peace such as Belfast’s Ulster Museum and several prisons, contexts which allowed the throne to shine a spotlight on the international arms trade.
In the drawing that represents the “throne” on the BBC website for A History of the World in 100 Objects each armament is carefully labeled and the country which supplied it named. This kind of detail is missing from the gallery display, though the label declares that “during the war, seven million guns – none of them made in Africa – poured into the country.” In the Africa Galleries, the complicity of countries and institutions in the international arms trade is spelled out in a video on a related exhibit. The Tree of Life was commissioned by the BM and Christian Aid specifically for the Sainsbury Africa Gallery and created by Mozambican artists Adelino Mate, Fiel dos Santos, Hilario Nhatugueja, and Kester (Figure 0.2). Bishop Dom Dinis Sengulane is filmed speaking to camera saying, “Mozambique does not manufacture guns,” and close-ups of individual weapons are paraded before the camera sporting the names of the countries which supplied them during the Mozambique civil war from 1977 to 1992. These include Rhodesia, South Africa, Russia, and Germany. The website for A History of the World in 100 Objects unwittingly exposes some of the controversial issues raised even by commendable initiatives such as these. A comment submitted by an aid worker recently returned from Mozambique draws attention to the question of access to the “throne”:
Where I am we don’t have communications and certainly little art and no stimulating radio. So firstly I am reminded how lucky we are here to feed so richly in these ways. I am currently working with my community to construct a monument to peace; 15 people died in the war years, 7 boys killed with large knives, 3 women and 5 men with a mixture of guns as depicted in this chair. Thank you for bringing this fascinating interpretation of the war to light and I wish the insight provided by your interviews, and mainly the art work could sit prominently in our local town Pemba.8
FIGURE 0.2 The Sainsbury Africa Gallery at the British Museum, showing the Tree of Life, 2004, in the foreground, with the video explaining its relationship to the international arms trade in the background. The sculpture by the Mozambiquan artists Kester, Hilario Nhatugueja, Fiel dos Santos, and Adelino Mate is made out of recycled military hardware handed in after the civil war in Mozambique.
Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. Photo © Annie E. Coombes.
The two examples above also expose the confusing inconsistency in the way issues of globalization and its attendant power relations are acknowledged in the displays in the Africa galleries and elsewhere in the BM. On the one hand, the international arms trade is proclaimed as the culprit responsible for fueling the civil war in Mozambique, and, on the other hand, the role of multinational oil companies in the decimation of the ecology of the Niger Delta is thoroughly denied.
On a more practical note, from 2005 to 2010 Tony Blair’s New Labour government’s Africa initiative provided the museum with funding from the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport to develop collaborations with African museums, supplemented by additional funding from the Ford and Getty Foundations. MacGregor has insisted on the important role played by the BM in the cause of soft diplomacy and has been explicit that international partnerships between museums are a tool for nation building and even for peace. As a result, museums in West and East Africa have benefited from skills-sharing initiatives and curatorial and conservation training. Paul Basu’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 15) describes a collaboration between British museums and the National Museum of Sierra Leone that began in the context of these projects. As it suggests, such programs have real potential for local capacity building and are to be welcomed. They are also, however, highly sensitive to power shifts within Western culture and heritage ministries and the museums they sponsor. Elections of conservative governments and the climate of fiscal restraint of the early twenty-first century have resulted in the shutting down of many promising initiatives of international collaboration, as well as of collaborative projects within Western museums.
At the beginning of the new millennium, in 2002, a consortium of directors representing some of the wealthiest major museums in Europe, Russia, and North America came together to defend the “importance and value of universal museums.”9 This defense was launched in the face of more than a decade of deconstructive postcolonial critique and an even longer history of demands for the return of treasures of world art that had entered European museums during and after the colonial era. Disingenuously claiming to speak for the “international museum community,” the directors marshaled globalization and internationalism as key arguments against restitution: “Although each case has to be judged individually, we should acknowledge that museums serve not just the citizens of one nation but the people of every nation.”10 Interestingly MacGregor’s speech two years later, in 2004, on the occasion of the British Museum’s two hundred and fiftieth anniversary celebrations, turns on a similar contradiction using the three (and as we have now seen, rather controversial) examples already discussed – Sokari Douglas Camp’s sculpture Otobo, the Benin bronzes, and
