by Rick Gekoski
Seems clear enough, doesn’t it? But the policy, or perhaps the self-congratulatory tone in which it was stated, prompted a provocative rejoinder from James Cumo, Director of The Art Institute of Chicago. According to Cumo, the question of who ‘owns’ antiquity is more complex than usually imagined. He is sceptical regarding the received wisdom that mere possession of the land on which antiquities are found entitles a present nation-state to claim them as its heritage. The argument, he feels, applies in our present case: ‘Whatever it is,’ he says, ‘Iraqi national culture certainly doesn’t include the antiquities of the region’s Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian past.’ Of course, he acknowledges, material stolen from the Baghdad Museum must be returned, but about the treasures previously taken from the archaeological sites he has his doubts. As his own museum’s collection amply testifies, it is surely better for the artefacts to be properly housed abroad than left to lie in sites which are pillaged and damaged in casual ways.
Thus, to take a nice example: the Pergamon Museum in Berlin has as one of its finest attractions a reconstruction of the magnificent Babylonian Gate of Ishtar, dating from the sixth century BC, under the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar II, which are amongst my favourite relics of antiquity. The archaeological site from which it was long ago removed is, to this day, only partially excavated. Bits and pieces of the Gate can be found round the world, but only the Pergamon had the funds and imagination to put (some of it) back together again.
During the Iraq War, American military vehicles had levelled the original site to create helicopter landing areas and parking lots for tanks and other military vehicles. Twelve trenches were dug into the ancient deposits, still extant portions of the original Ishtar Gate were demolished, brick pavements more than 2,500 years old were crushed. Yet the Hague Convention and Protocol of 1954 prohibits the use of internationally recognised heritage sites for the installation of military bases. Many countries who sent forces to support the ‘coalition’ in Iraq were signatories to that treaty, including Australia, the Netherlands, Italy and Poland. The United States of America refused to sign.
No doubt these relics would have been safer and more widely enjoyed, if they were under Mr Cumo’s care? Surely it is a mistake to assume that a putative home culture will take adequate care of its archaeological past?
We have a prize instance in our own British Museum. We are frequently told that it was an act of cultural vandalism when Lord Elgin removed many of the great marble friezes from the Parthenon in 1806, and carted them back from Athens to their eventual home in London. Apparently this was very bad of him. We are told this so often, and so heatedly, that it is now possible to mistake it for a received truth. To this day you will hardly find a Greek who doesn’t believe they should be returned to Athens and reinstated at their original site.
But would the Marbles have survived the neglect of the nineteenth-century Athenians had Lord Elgin not seen fit to take them away? And he wasn’t the only one: half of the Parthenon’s sculptures are entirely lost, while various pieces are now in ten museums in eight different countries. For over a century the marble from the Parthenon had routinely been used as a source of building material, until the local Turks discovered, to their astonishment, that Western travellers would pay for bits of the sculptures. Did Lord Elgin save them for posterity, and ought his name to be honoured? Perhaps, I sometimes like to muse, the Parthenon ought to be transported to London to be reunited with its great friezes, in tacit acceptance of the fact that a homeland is not always the best place to preserve its own treasures. Perhaps it could be reassembled in Hyde Park and used as a drop-in centre for those disgraced Members of Parliament who faked their expense forms, and have lost both their jobs and their marbles.
This is frivolous, of course. But there is an ironic attendant gain that results from the multitudinous cultural transfers (if I may so designate them) which have for centuries filled museums with artefacts transported, often dubiously, from their original homelands. It is on the basis of such transfers that we are able, in country after country, to appreciate and to understand other cultures and to form, from childhood, lasting impressions of the richness and variety of other civilisations. The spooky embalmed cat at the British Museum, the Rosetta Stone, the Elgin Marbles were all features of my children’s early education, and I am certain that, in however fugitive a manner, they developed differently and more richly than they would have done in the absence of such exposure. Were we without such opportunities – imagine museums which were severely limited to national artefacts – a profound source of pleasure and instruction would be lost. It is through such exposure that we can locate who we are, and how our culture differs from, contrasts to and overlaps with other cultures, both ancient and modern. Artefacts migrate in much the same way humans do, often with no discernible purpose or sense of destination, but when they put down roots they can enrich the community in which they settle.
If we embark upon a frenzy of giving back from one culture to another, we will come to have museums which are merely ‘national’, in which we cannot get adequate comparative glimpses of other pasts, where a kind of crimped provincialism holds sway, like those worthy but boring local museums that small towns use to illustrate and to explain their past.
It’s a bit uncomfortable, finding myself in this paradoxical position, but it seems to me a little looting can go a long way. Has my inner Donald Rumsfeld begun to get the better of me? Civilisation may have begun in Mesopotamia, but it didn’t stay there or end there. It is a now universal phenomenon, shared by the people of the world. There is much to rejoice in about this process, as well as much to regret.
It was one of the pleasures of having an office near the British Museum that there were antiquities dealers all around me. The shop opposite had astonishing treasures in its window: terracotta horses from China’s Han period; Greek amphorae painted with scenes of war, the hunt or lustful pursuit; Roman glass beakers astonishingly intact after thousands of years; Persian bowls with beautiful designs in turquoise against a mushroom-coloured ground. I liked to watch people as they window-shopped, until they walked away, shaking their heads in bemusement at the prices. Too expensive? Quite the opposite. Nothing was priced at more than a couple of hundred pounds. They were, for objects of such high craftsmanship, beauty and antiquity, unimaginably cheap. The reason is simple: there are too many such treasures, their original homes having been stripped over centuries of hundreds of thousands of such objects.
Such treasures, I suspect, would be easier to sell at twenty times the price. But while they are still available, I buy them: as presents for my wife or for myself, and occasionally as wedding gifts, for I cannot bear offering a mass-produced ceramic bowl when I could give an antique Persian one. If the recipient is too young to appreciate such an object, surely they can grow into it? Such an object can open a world.
If there is anything, now, that might be called a cradle of civilisation, it is no longer Iraq. If you want to see the objects from such an archaeologically rich past, go to a museum. But even the British Museum, stuffed with relics of culture after culture, de-natures its holdings, sanitises and isolates them. In their original context such objects make sense, resonate with each other and with the landscapes in which they were generated. Stripped willy-nilly from those originating landscapes and cultural context, they take on a separate life of their own, become objects of contemplation and aesthetic value, like paintings. You strip a previously useful object of its utility and regard it purely for its form, as if it were intended as a work of art, as Marcel Duchamp wittily did in submitting a urinal – titled Fountain – to an art exhibition in 1917. Though it was never actually shown, and eventually lost, the point was clear: look at the thing in itself, wipe away the streams of urine and the object takes on an eerie attractiveness.
At the Pergamon Museum we are invited to view the great Gate of Ishtar as an object of contemplation, not of entry into a city; and though the available guides and headphones try to establ
ish the original context, it is hard to imagine it. The Gate of Ishtar is the Gate of Ishtar, once one of the portals into a thriving city, grandly adorned but defined by their function; now it is merely (and wonderfully) a beautiful object in lapis lazuli with bas-relief auruchs and dragons. The Gates had a function and a place – were site-specific – and their utility and meaning can only be understood through their complex relations to the whole configuration not merely of that city but of Babylonian culture generally. But, of course, that is now quite impossible: bits and pieces of the original gates – the Pergamon reconstruction is of the eighth gate – are distributed in museums round the world: examples of bas-relief lions from other gates, for instance, may be found in museums in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Gothenburg, Istanbul, Munich, New Haven, New York, Paris, Philadelphia and Toronto. The remnants of a great world city displayed in the great cities of the world.
This sounds all right: we are inured to it, and undeniably benefit from such cultural transmissions, however brutally achieved. But when we gawp appreciatively at the Mesopotamian and Sumerian artefacts in the museums to which they have been transported, it is impossible not to recognise, too, how much has been lost, in converting material that had a living presence in an ancient culture into isolated works of art in an exhibition hall: beautiful and inspiring, to be sure, but detached and denatured, ironically stripped of meaning in the very act of demonstrating how very meaningful they once were.
14
The Savaging of Africa: The Sacking of the Lost Kingdom of Benin
It is one of the most memorable images of the American 1960s, a decade notable for its unforgettable visual records: of the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, student riots and political protests, demonstrations against the atrocities of the Vietnam War. Yet even in the midst of this compelling turmoil I can still recall vividly the image of three Olympic athletes standing on the rostrum to receive their medals after the 200 metre sprint, in which Tommie Smith had just set a new world record of 19.83 seconds. Time for that simple joyous celebration and pride which Olympic winners demonstrate, tears rolling down their cheeks as their national anthem echoes tinnily through the stadium? Not for a hundredth of a second.
As the Star Spangled Banner played – the land of the free and the home of the brave! – both Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who won the bronze, bowed their heads as each lifted his arm, black-gloved fist clenched, in the Black Power salute that had mobilised a new generation of angry young people into opposition to the endemic racism of American culture. It was a thrilling moment, totally unexpected, of breath-taking simplicity and nobility. To make it even more shocking and powerful, they were joined in their protest by the silver medal winner, the Australian Peter Norman, who did not raise his arm but, like the others, was wearing the badge of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, in support of Australia’s Aboriginals.
Olympic Project for Human Rights? Seems some sort of oxymoron. The project was certainly not generated by the organisers of the Games themselves, but was the brainchild of the sociologist Harry Edwards, who had urged a boycott of the Games by blacks, and whose ideas had apparently catalysed the protest by the three athletes. It was an extraordinarily imaginative and courageous gesture in the Olympic context, unprecedented. The two Americans were both vilified and applauded, but it was impossible to deny the power and authority of what they had done.
Olympic athletes do not protest. They not only capitulate to the crass nationalism of the Games, they embrace it. Though they are, supremely, individual athletes in search of individual glory, they enfold themselves in the phoney nationalist ethos of the Games. After being booed off the podium, Smith put this baldly: ‘If I win, I am American, not a black American. But if I did something bad, then they would say I am a Negro. We are black and we are proud of being black. Black America will understand what we did tonight.’ Smith and Carlos were suspended from the United States team and ordered to leave the Olympic Village. Avery Brundage, the creepy, reactionary President of the International Olympic Committee, announced that sport and politics must be entirely separate.
A bronze from the Kingdom of Benin, looted by British soldiers in 1897. As recently as 1972 original Benin bronzes were being sold by the British Museum.
This happened in October 1968, the year that also saw the publication of Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. Written in Folsom prison, this former dope dealer and ‘insurrectionary rapist’ was a follower of Malcolm X (whose own Autobiography was published in 1965). Both advocated a breakaway from America’s racist culture and promoted the fantasy of some sort of return, whether literal or spiritual, to Africa. Black Americans, first classed as Negroes, then as coloureds, more recently as blacks, were, now, none of the above: they were African-Americans. It was hard, for a time, to keep up with the approved nomenclature.
Africa, properly understood, was a homeland to be proud of, the history of which had been whitewashed and rewritten by European and American colonialists. Malcolm X puts the point concisely:
But if you want to take the time to do research for yourself, I think you’ll find that on the African continent there was always, prior to the discovery of America, there was always a higher level of history, rather a higher level of culture and civilization, than that which existed in Europe at the same time.
Of course, this claim knowingly and misleadingly conflates Saharan with sub-Saharan Africa, and presumably rests much of its case on the achievements of the Islamic cultures of the north, whereas Malcolm X’s real constituency was of those sub-Saharans who had become slaves, captured and often transported – this is worse than ironic – by North African, Arab slavers. But Malcolm X (a follower of Elijah Muhammad, as Cassius Clay was to become as well) had joined the Nation of Islam, and was doctrinally inclined to treat Africa as if it were a single entity. The followers of this movement were curiously unengaged with the loathsome practices of the Arab slave traders.
Nevertheless, I read both Malcolm X and Cleaver with fascinated respect, and if I knew little about African-American life, and less about Africa, it was impossible to deny the justice of their case and the righteousness of the anger that Smith and Carlos so perfectly symbolised on the Olympic rostrum.
At exactly that time – the autumn of 1968 – I began work on my Oxford D.Phil. thesis on Joseph Conrad. My focus was on what I called ‘The Moral World of the Novelist’, in which I tried to trace the uneasy relations, in his work, between a cosmology which insists on the ultimate meaningless of things and that traditional Conradian imperative for personal responsibility, upright conduct – ‘honour’ – which is based so firmly on the principles that govern life – or should govern life – amongst the crew of a ship.
I read the fiction chronologically, tracing the development of this theme, so it was hardly any time before I came to consider the first of Conrad’s works to be set in Africa, Heart of Darkness, the most remarkable evocation of that continent from that period, and of its haunting pull on the minds of the Europeans who went there. Mr Kurtz, the subject of the tale, finds that his deeply civilised nature – ‘all Europe went into the making of him’ – is inadequate to resist a regression into ‘savage’ and unspeakable practices (head-hunting and cannibalism are suggested). He has honoured the natives with his presence, and been undermined by theirs. In Africa he encounters what that great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe later described as an ‘unconscious primeval hegemony that had apparently gone nowhere and seen nobody since the world was created’.
Mr Kurtz’s final words are a judgement of the adventures of his soul upon this earth, but also a howl of regret for the pleasures of an unrestrained godhead abandoned. ‘The horror! The horror!’ is a judgement made by the Ego upon the Id. Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, is duly and rightly horrified, and wise enough, on a later encounter with Mr Kurtz’s fiancée, to lie to her and to claim that Kurtz’s last words were ‘your name’. Through such lies is the darkness held uneasily at bay, that civilisation ma
y protect its thin veneer.
Africans may have been ‘savages’ to Marlow, but they were also – marginally if recognisably – human beings. As his boat drifts down the Congo, it is greeted by an incomprehensible cacophony, deafening and terrifying, from the jungle along the banks:
The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us – who could tell? … we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand … because we were travelling in the night of first ages … It was unearthly, and the men were – No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know that was the worst of it – this suspicion of their not being inhuman … what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity – like yours – the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.
In a seminal essay on racism in Heart of Darkness (an ‘offensive and deplorable book’) published in 1977, Achebe quotes from this passage, and is appalled. This supposedly enlightened thinking is mere verbiage, and the tortuous double negative (‘not … inhuman’) itself seems to indicate some unease in the telling, though it may have some slight mitigating value. But the sentiment places Marlow in a tradition of European visitors who have, in Achebe’s words, encountered in Africa ‘the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality’.
Even Conrad, who tried to distinguish between bad colonialists (Belgians, Portuguese) and better ones (British), and who was unrelenting in his condemnation of the greedy exploitation of Africa by rapacious and cruel Europeans, nevertheless felt that the subjugated peoples in these countries were, au fond, alike. Similarly simple, primitive, emotionally unreliable, warlike and childlike: in need of firm restraint, and the sort of guidance imposed from without.
