Europe stole a lot more from Africa than just art

January 18, 2023 admin 0 Comments

After decades of rejection and denial, the past year has seen a flurry of announcements from Western countries and richly funded museums that they are willing to begin recovering artifacts that have been seized or hidden from Africa over the past century and a half.

This has been a season of reckoning for one institution after another, from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, along with many others in Britain and Europe, as their directors have publicly dealt with the problems inherent in continuing to own invaluable cultural heritage. formerly colonized continent.

In some ways this latest movement seems to have reached its climax not only with a statement from a European capital or a visit by a museum delegation but Arrival For an official German government delegation in Nigeria carrying 20 so-called Bronze Boys, with one official say According to the mask of a queen mother figure drawn from the former West African kingdom of Benin, “She’s back where she belongs.”

The Nigerian Minister of Culture, Lai Mohamed, was quoted kindly as saying, “Twenty years ago, even 10 years ago, no one would have expected these bronzes to return to Nigeria, because the obstacles to achieving repatriation seemed insurmountable.” It’s all painless.

But as someone who works in African history, I’m left feeling that such measures aimed at restorative justice and dealing with a terrible past are just beginning. In fact, the matter of returning priceless pieces of art—however necessary and incomplete—is just the easy part.

What was never undertaken, nor really started, is a re-examination of the circumstances in which so much of Africa’s cultural heritage has been plundered and what it has to do with the continent’s current instability, poverty and vulnerability. This question lies at the heart of my latest book, Born in Black: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to World War II. In this book, the treatment of this question is mostly confined to the subject of demographics, which means influencing Africa to deplete huge numbers of human beings for the purpose of providing wealth-generating employment under slavery to the West.

Coming to a definitive account of this is very difficult and may never be possible. However, what is already known is sufficiently clear that Africa was undergoing a demographic cycle at the exact period when the world was holding together completely for the first time in world history.

What we do know is that approximately 12.5 million Africans were shipped in chains across the Atlantic to the Americas, nearly all of them destined to work on plantations. These people were chosen precisely because they were in their physical and reproductive prime. Their work and that of their potential descendants were irretrievably lost in Africa, imposing a still unacknowledged form of mass poverty.

To this we must add – with greater uncertainty about numbers but no doubt of orders of magnitude – the numbers of people killed in the chaos that Europeans deliberately unleashed in Africa to continue feeding a strong traffic in humans, plus the horrible death rates on floating graves that They were slave ships. According to one estimate that I reference in my book, only 42 percent of the Africans involved in this transcontinental human trafficking survived long enough to undergo sale in the New World.

If one assumes, then, that Africa loses 25 million people to these operations, which is probably still gravely underestimated, this number can only be calculated with estimates of the total population of the continent around the height of the age of the slave trade. Here, it is estimated that about 100 million people lived in the eighteenth century.

As devastating as this unacknowledged blow to Africa was, there were other, perhaps more important, ways in which the West set Africa’s development in motion, and these ways continued beyond the long centuries of slave trade. Europe’s engagement with Africa took a dramatic turn in Berlin shortly before the end of the nineteenth century in a way that takes us directly back to stolen art.

At a famous conference in that city in 1884-1885, the major imperialist powers of the time divided the African continent for purposes not of slavery per se, which was soon on the way out, but of political control, the acquisition of resources and the establishment of captive markets for themselves for the goods flowing in from their modern industrial economies.

as a historian Brenda Plummer books:

Berlin’s great powers gave themselves carte blanche for military conquest. Soon after, France defeated Dahomey (1893), Britain defeated Benin (1897), and the Kingdom of Ashanti (1895-1900). These wars were marked by the theft of indigenous treasures and the first widespread use of machine guns. The Mandingo warrior king Samori Toure lost to France in 1898. German punitive expeditions against the Magi Magi uprising in Tanganyika from 1905 to 1907 killed 120,000 Africans. In an apparent rehearsal for the destruction of European Jewry a generation later, German forces are in southwest Africa [today’s independent Namibia] He almost exterminated the Herero and Hottentot tribes. In King Leopold’s Congo Free State, Africans who refused forced labor in the rubber groves had their arms cut off.

How many people in the West know anything about Hottentot, other than the name that forms part of a Funny lyric in The Wizard of Oz? How many have heard of the atrocities of Leopold, who did so much to help make Belgium a rich country, estimated to have killed 10 million Africans?

Somewhat paradoxically, focusing on the account of this kind of loss of life, however necessary and belated, may obscure a larger point associated with much of Africa’s lost art. Begun in the aftermath of the Congress of Berlin, the broad European imperial offensive against Africa to deliberately wipe out African kingdoms came at a crucial time for what should be considered the formation of a modern state.

While carrying out their plans, the Europeans worked hard by self-justifying projecting images of African backwardness and barbarism. Think of Tarzan, a direct outgrowth of that era. Indeed, African countries such as Benin, Ashanti, Congo and many others have been establishing traditions of order and governance, often very developed. At the same time, many of these indigenous states were engaged in an expansionist war, as European states had done in recent centuries, with the aim of political agglomeration and unification.

As I wrote in my first book, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of AfricaWere this continued uninterrupted by European imperialism, one could imagine a very different African continent today: not one of 54 outwardly designed, cookie-cutter states, many of which are small or landlocked. One could also imagine a continent with far less political dysfunction, because the peoples of Africa would have been given space to shape or deepen their own approaches to institutional arrangements for governance.

One of the most interesting examples of what could have come from Ghana, where a vast federation was created by the Fanti ethnic group in 1868, which led to the writing of an original constitution that reached its final form in 1871. These self-propelled arrangements created a chief for the king And a council of kings and elders, and a national council. The British, Dutch and Danes, all of whom had important economic interests in the region, saw such local political solutions as a threat to their profits and worked hard to undermine anything that beat building local institutions.

Under these pressures, the Fant Confederation declined, but the dreams of supremacy it had launched persisted for a long time. In the late first decades of the twentieth century, a brilliant Gold Coast thinker named Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford persevered in efforts to try to hold together the English-speaking colonies of West Africa by governing under local institutions, using the Fante Union as a model. He was even willing that his country should remain a part of the British Empire, and only insisted on self-government in his ideas and forms. Britain, of course, refused.

As tempting as it may be, we can never know how historical reality could have worked out. But what the long-overdue recovery of African art should help make clear is that Africa’s plunder was more than artifacts, and the continent’s moral debt is much more than its return.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply