The Plunder of Maqdala: Ethical Concerns Around Belongings and Ancestral Remains in Museums

Abstract

During the colonial period, museums did not just passively benefit from the plunder of human remains and culturally sacred items. When Britain sent a punitive military expedition to Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in 1863, it was accompanied by Richard Holmes, a staff member of the British Museum, whose purchase of loot from the expeditionary force institutionalised the plunder of cultural heritage. His inclusion in the expeditionary force was carefully planned, though the belongings he took — mainly manuscripts, religious items and emblems of power belonging to the Ethiopian royal family — were not the intended focus of his participation. Whilst the UK’s 2004 Human Tissue Act had a beneficial impact on the treatment of human remains in museums, objects belonging to colonised people are often still positioned as artworks or artefacts, evidencing ignorance of the deep personal and spiritual links that connect them back to their communities of origin.

This article draws on our professional experience of curation and research in museums and libraries, as well as the impact of ICOM’s new Museum Definition on our practice. Joint research on the Maqdala expedition led us to question assumptions about the legacy of empire in museums and to scrutinise unexpected connections in the history of museum collections. This article addresses the problematic relationship between collecting and imperial power, the false dichotomy between ‘artefacts’ (belongings) and ‘human remains’ (ancestors) and the need to decolonise collections through further research and the recognition of ongoing cultural and physical violence.

Keywords:

• Maqdala
• British Empire
• colonial violence
• plunder
• ethics
• museums

In the consultation process to determine a new Museum Definition between 2019 and 2022, ICOM encouraged participatory responses that brought to the surface a sense of injustice and frustration around how numerous museums in Europe and North America had been created through the exploitation and violent conquest of non-western cultures. In the opening sections of Jette Sandhal’s 2019 article entitled ‘Addressing Responsibilities through Core Museum Functions and Methods’, she underlines that while in the past, core museum functions and their social responsibilities were considered as separate, in the current landscape these are seen as interconnected. Museums cannot be defined or understood outside the realm of society ‘because they formed part of the institutional state apparatus to educate societies, while at the same time representing and forming societal norms and attitudes’ (Hooper Greenhill 1992, p. 182). Sandhal also argues that the new museum definition ‘needs to acknowledge and critically reflect the legacies and continuous presence of societal inequalities and the asymmetries of power and wealth marring the geopolitical relationship between continents as well as national, regional and local societal contexts’ (Sandhal, 2019, p. v).

This central argument — that museums should reflect on their historic legacies and assist in the construction of a better and fairer society — has been embraced in museological discourse, and addressing the legacy of colonialism has been crucial as an objective in the emergence of museum studies in the late 1980s. For example, Coombes’ Reinventing Africa (1994) unpacked the history and use of objects belonging to Africans in imperial education and display in Britain, whilst Barringer and Flynn (1998) dissected the role of empire in museums and related archives in Colonialism and the Object. The claim that museums have social responsibilities, and an active role in social agency, was articulated by a range of museum leaders, activists and academics 20 years ago in the edited volume entitled Museums, Society, Inequality, which itself was based on a conference entitled Inclusion, in 2000 (Sandell 2002, p. 3). Over the last two decades, this focus on social inclusion and agency has shifted towards museum activism, in which museums play a more active role — but one which co-produces forms of knowledge and understanding with communities through participation and knowledge exchange, rather than through patrician instruction. Following discussion and consensus around the new Museum Definition, there is greater acknowledgement that museums have the power to influence society, and can redress the injustices of the past to build a better and fairer future.

The idea that the museum is a neutral space — one that holds objects and interprets concepts that can be observed equally by, and are universal to, all people — has been discredited by this aforementioned work on the history and social agency of museums. In offering an overview of the emergence of museum activism, Janes and Sandell (2019) refer to the ‘myth’ of neutrality that persists to this day, especially for museums that define themselves as ‘encyclopaedic’ or affiliated with particular national identities; it is a myth that can negate the broader social vision and role of museums in twenty-first century society (p. 8). Hicks has argued that ‘universal’ or ‘encyclopaedic’ museums are late- twentiethcentury constructions, created in part to justify the retention of objects pillaged during imperial conflicts and as part of colonial economic exploitation of the Global Majority (2020, p.202). Savoy has further argued that this construction was made in response to strong campaigns, mainly by newly independent nations in Africa, for the restitution of their cultural heritage during the early 1970s. This led, in 1973, to the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3187 on the Restitution of Works of Art to Countries Victims of Appropriation (Savoy 2022, p. 32). National museums in Britain, West Germany and elsewhere reacted by retaining their collections, justifying this through pedagogical and ethical claims relating to stewardship and the dissemination of knowledge.

In 1982, Melina Mercouri delivered a speech to the World Conference on Cultural Policies, held by UNESCO in Mexico; in it, she passionately advocated for the Parthenon Sculptures to be (re)united in a museum in Athens, and positioned Greece and the Greek people alongside communities and nations from Africa, Latin America and Asia (UNESCO 1995). Campaigns and claims for the restitution of objects taken through colonial violence, as in the case of Benin, or due to the exertion of economic and diplomatic power, as is arguably the case with the Parthenon Sculptures, have emerged in a consistent fashion from the 1970s to the present day, with varying responses from museum professionals and leaders.

Some museum leaders, notably of large national or civic collections in Europe and North America, have continued to argue that cultural heritage can serve to educate and inform audiences about other cultures, as an ‘encouragement of global understanding’ (Cuno 2008, p. xxxv). James Cuno, former Director of the Art Institute of Chicago (2004-2011) and then- President and Chief Executive Officer of the J. Paul Getty Trust (2011-2022), has argued that encyclopaedic museums ‘encourage a broad understanding and appreciation of the historical interrelatedness of the world diverse cultures and promote inquiry and tolerance’ (2012, p. 9). Meanwhile, Neil MacGregor, former Director of the British Museum (2002-2015), described the museum as representing ‘the world under one roof ’ and championed universal museums as ‘the great intellectual challenge’ for those ‘who wanted to think differently about the world’ (MacGregor 2012, p. 39). This stance was not, however, widely representative of large sections of the museum profession, nor was it embraced by all museum leaders. In 2004, the then-head of Glasgow Museums, Mark O’Neill, pointed out that ‘while a universal museum could be invaluable in a world full of conflict and misunderstanding, the credibility of the idea is undermined by its being deployed chiefly as a defence’ against restitution. There is little acknowledgement in the universal encyclopaedic ideal of the museum of the ‘precious legacy of other lands’ collected through ‘wars of aggression, theft and duplicity’ and no forum to which ‘they can turn to get them back, at least if they were wrongfully obtained before 1970’ (Robertson 2021, p. xi).

Beyond the perspectives of external activists, recent debate over the new Museum Definition has demonstrated that many people who work in museums also believe that institutions built by colonial nations and countries — whose economic capital enabled them to exploit the artistic and cultural heritage of colonised peoples over the previous two centuries — were not ‘neutral’ spaces; nor did they tell ‘universal’ stories.

When MacGregor (2012) published his article ‘To Shape the Citizens of “That Great City, The World” ’, global geopolitics and the position of Britain in the world were profoundly different from today. In a post-Brexit Britain which restricts people entering the country through increasingly draconian measures backed by chilling xenophobic rhetoric, the idea that holding objects ‘in trust’ for all people to share, no matter who they originally belonged to, how they were taken, or their significance for the cultures they were taken from, feels distinctly inappropriate (MacGregor 2012, p. 43). In addition, public interest has grown in specific collections acquired through colonial violence, in part fuelled by activism and popular accounts of the plunder of cultural belongings.

The 1868 expedition by the British against Emperor Tewedros in Ethiopia, which resulted in the storming and looting of the fortress at Maqdala, can be firmly placed in a colonial context, even though Ethiopia remained independent until Italian occupation in the 1930s. In the case of the Maqdala expedition, writers of Ethiopian heritage such as Maaza Mengiste and Lemn Sissay have vividly articulated the continued colonial violence inflicted on them and their people through the plundering of ancestral belongings that remain in Britain. In addition, the journalist Andrew Heavens (2023) has recently drawn attention to the campaign for the restitution of belongings plundered during the Magdala expedition with a new book detailing the campaign and its legacy.

The Maqdala Ethiopian Treasures: A legacy of colonial violence

This article was inspired by a 1867 letter from Sir Charles Thomas Newton to Sir Roderick Murchison, then President of the Royal Geographical Society, which proposed sending ‘an archaeologist’ with the military expedition to Abyssinia (the name then used to describe the countries of Ethiopia and Eritrea) to excavate and collect material from ‘the old Indian trade of the Ptolemies’ (Newton 1867). The historical background to, and importance of, this letter has already been detailed elsewhere (Gunning and Challis 2023). The letter had been obliquely referenced in a biography of Murchison, but we realised that there was an important wider context which linked the letter to the long campaign for restitution of belongings and ancestors of the Ethiopian people (Stafford 1989).¹

Research by Richard and Rita Pankhurst on the displaced belongings and manuscripts taken by the British military informed the creation of the Association For the Return of the Maqdala Ethiopian Treasures (AFROMET) in the 1980s, and finds parallels in more recent activism by people of Ethiopian heritage (Pankhurst 1986; Pankhurst 1973). It has long been known that Richard Holmes, a staff member of the British Museum during the late nineteenth century, accompanied the expedition as a ‘museum man’ taking and bidding for manuscripts and objects in the resulting plunder of Maqdala. The interactions between the Foreign (and India) Office, Royal Geographical Society and British Museum meant that a member of staff from the British Museum was able to join non-military personnel in the expedition with the intention of acquiring Ptolemaic classical antiquities for the museum, although this particular detail is little-known. Such interest in the classical past was in keeping with historical approaches to empire at the time, yet only scant excavations of classical material were made during the expedition (Satia 2020, pp. 74-75). What this letter nevertheless illustrates, is the widespread involvement of individuals and institutions in the machinations of imperial politics for the acquisition of objects destined for the collections of the British Museum.

Although we are accustomed to working on the collection history of objects from the former Ottoman Empire and the reception of such artefacts in UK-based museums, including the Parthenon Sculptures, we were unprepared as academics and museum professionals for our visceral reactions to historical accounts of the plunder of Maqdala, the removal of belongings and of Prince Alemayehu, a seven-year-old boy, who was one of several children displaced to Britain during the expedition (Heavens 2023, pp. 105-107). Stoler notes that the Dutch colonial archives she worked in illustrate the meddling of the state in ‘affections and attachments — familial and otherwise’ with regard to colonised people and colonial agents, especially around moulding ‘racial ontologies’, and maintains that these documents are not ‘dead matter’ (2008, pp. 2-3). Similarly, the aforementioned letter is not a ‘dead document’, but one that has consequences for people living today, due to the violent removal of both belongings and ancestors.

The brutal expedition by the British and Indian armies against Emperor Tewedros at Maqdala — partly carried out as retribution for the Emperor taking Europeans, including the British consul, as hostages — resulted in the plunder of manuscripts, sacred objects, national emblems and personal items belonging to the Ethiopian leader, his family and nation. Maqdala was stormed on Easter Monday, 13 April 1868. As the British and British Indian forces advanced between the gates of the fort, Tewedros shot himself to death. Then, while the army plundered the fort, a crowd of soldiers tore his clothes from his body. Despite the burial of the Emperor soon after his death, in a macabre example of how soldiers in imperial campaigns took body parts as grisly war trophies (Harrison 2008), a ‘lock of the late King Theodore’s hair’ eventually ended up in the window of a shop in Plymouth, England. Described as ‘cut from his head by Captain C. F. James after the fall of Maqdala in 1868’, it was displayed in the window as a ‘matter of curiosity’ (‘A Relic’ 1868) and was eventually gifted to the National Army Museum (NAM) by relatives of James in 1959. After a request for repatriation by the Minister of Culture and Tourism from the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, the museum agreed to return these human remains in 2018. In a handover ceremony at NAM on 20 March 2019, Hirut Kassaw, Ethiopia’s Minister for Culture, Tourism and Sport, called for the return of plundered objects and remains from Maqdala, saying that ‘these are not simply artefacts or treasures, but constitute a fundamental part of the existential value of Ethiopia and its people’ (Heavens 2023, p. 210).

Fig. 1. Prince Alemayehu of Abyssinia photographed in 1868 by Julia Margaret Cameron. © National Portrait Gallery, London

Tewedros’ Queen and legitimate heir were taken from Maqdala by the British, in part to protect them from Tewedros’ rivals. The official geographer on the expedition, Clement Markham, recounted that the 26-year-old Queen Woyzaro Terunesh was ‘grossly insulted’ and saved from ‘further outrage’ (Markham 1869, p. 361). The young queen died in Ethiopia during the journey. Her jewellery and elaborately embroidered cotton dress were sent to Sir Stafford Northcote (then Secretary of State for India), who donated them to the British Museum in 1869; from there, they were sent to the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) (Bailey 2018). The Queen’s orphaned son, the seven- year-old Prince Alemayehu, was taken to Britain as a ‘possession’ of the Crown, i.e. Queen Victoria. The story of his time in Britain, in which he was in the care of the British State and passed from foster carer to foster carer and from school to school, is told in Heavens’ book The Prince and the Plunder, which also details the racism encountered by the Prince.

After his death, Tewedros was racialised in depictions of his almost entirely naked body; these included descriptions that scrutinised his facial features. For example, a post-mortem image of Tewedros was printed in the Illustrated London News, with a physiognomic description of the face as having a ‘brow massive and thoughtful, indicative of great natural intelligence’ (‘An expedition’, 1868). Alemayehu was similarly scrutinised, and on his arrival at Plymouth as a seven-year-old boy in July 1868, a reporter described his ‘thick prominent lips, but in all other respects his features are of the pure Caucasian type’. As Heavens observes, this description constituted an attempt to define his ‘exact placing on the exact scale from African “Negro”: to “purer” Caucasian’ (2023, pp. 109-110). This racist scrutiny followed Alemayehu throughout his short life. After attending public school in England, he sadly died of pleurisy in 1879 in Leeds at the age of 18. He was buried outside St George’s Chapel in Windsor and remains there today.

There has been a campaign, supported, among others, by the writer and activist Lemn Sissay, who is himself of Ethiopian heritage and experienced the ‘care’ system in Britain in the 1980s, for the repatriation of Alemayehu’s remains to Ethiopia, where he is seen as having been held hostage by the British (Sissay 2019). The Ethiopian writer and activist Maaza Mengiste, meanwhile, has pointed to the imperialist arrogance that would ‘kidnap a young boy’ and ‘trumpet it as an achievement’, despite the child’s asserted wish to return to Ethiopia:  … there is no longer any excuse for that same refusal and arrogance. There is no viable reason to continue to keep his remains hostage. He has become, like the sacred and valuable objects still in British museums and libraries, a possession (Mengiste 2015, n. page).

Amongst the possessions taken from Maqdala that remain held in British museums and libraries are a number of religious objects and manuscripts so sacred to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and Ethiopian and Eritrean people that they cannot be shown to the public. Looted material with deeply personal or sacred attributes have been stripped of their emotional and cultural importance. The Ethiopian academic and campaigner Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes conducted a series of interviews with educators and students in Ge’ez (the language of Ethiopia) about the loss of the manuscripts; in one interview, a scholar told him that ‘keeping [these looted ge’ez manscripts] in institutions is like keeping living bodies in graveyards’ (Woldeyes 2020). For example, precious religious tabots — representations of the ark of the covenant — were taken to England where they remain to this day. Held in confidential storage at the museum (Af1868, 1001.3-5), they are considered by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church to be so sacred that they should only be viewed by its own priests, and remain unseen even by the curator responsible for them (Bailey 2019).

The looting of these items was seen by some as a travesty even shortly after the expedition, as noted in a speech by William Gladstone when he served as Prime Minister in Parliament (Gladstone 1871). The belongings taken are considered sacred or hold intrinsic value of national and cultural identity. The campaign for the return of this cultural material, by and to the people of Ethiopia and Eritrea, began within a matter of years. At the request of Emperor Yohannes IV of Ethiopia, Queen Victoria returned a manuscript as early as 1872. George V returned a crown from the V&A to Emperor Haile Selassie in 1924, and Elizabeth II returned Haile Selassie Tewedros’ cap and silver seal on her state visit to Ethiopia in 1965 (Wilson 2002, p. 174). In 1942 the Wellcome Collection returned ‘King Theodore’s Bible’, which they had bought in a sale in 1936. In 2001 the — St John the Evangelist Episcopal Church — in Edinburgh rediscovered a tabot plundered in the campaign, which had been donated in 1868 by Captain William Arbuthnot. It was decided to return the tabot to Ethiopia and a ceremony of restitution was held the following year. This in turn inspired a Scottish woman to return a manuscript taken during the Maqdala campaign (‘Scottish Church’ 2002). Yet Prince Alemayehu remains in England. His burial location is known, and in death at least, he was provided with a semblance of dignity. This does not excuse his ‘kidnap’, or his retention in Britain, but does contrast with the innumerable African people who suffered colonial violence and were not buried, or whose remains are lost and undocumented. For example, the heads of Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana and three other spiritual leaders of Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe) are still missing after they were killed in an expedition by a British settler army in southern Africa. After the First Chimurenga War of 1896-7, in the territory known to English speakers as Matabele and that was inhabited by Ndebele and Shona people, Nehanda and other African heroes were captured, hanged and beheaded, and their skulls taken to London. Although the relationship between the Colonial Office and the private company was a complicated one, the expedition can be seen as another example of the interconnection between colonial violence, networks of learned societies and museums. In Africa, this is identified as the first war of independence led by Africans against the administration of the region by Cecil Rhodes’ British South African Company, and the killing of the spiritual leaders as the point in which the region fell into British hands.

One of the authors of this article was present at the Changing the Narrative event held at the Africa Centre in London in January 2020. Organised with the UK-based diaspora newspaper Informer East Africa and the Museum of British Colonialism, the event hosted journalist and African Cultural Ambassador Princess Eugene Majuru of Harare, who remarked that it is the belief of many in Zimbabwe that the country’s decline began with the killing of these leaders and no peace can be found until these four leaders heads are returned home and given proper burial. In 2015 President Mugabe had called for their return, explaining that

the First Chimurenga leaders, whose heads were decapitated by the colonial occupying force, were then dispatched to England to signify British victory over, and subjugation of, the local population … Surely, keeping decapitated heads as war trophies, in this day and age, in a national history museum, must rank among the highest forms of racist moral decadence, sadism and human insensitivity (Wambu 2020).

At the aforementioned Changing the Narrative event, Princess Eugene told the audience that she had made it her goal to have the skulls returned by the Natural History Museum, and had travelled to London for this reason. But to her surprise, the remains of her ancestors were mixed up with roughly 20,000 others and could not be easily located, because no specific records existed for them (Nndoro 2022).

The displaying of human skulls in museums is taboo in African culture (Wambu 2020) and historically there has been little, if any, consent, obtained from Indigenous and colonised peoples for the collection of bodies or objects for institutions and museums by the Global Minority (Das & Lowe 2018). Far more attention has been paid to the motivations and narratives of those who collected bodies than to the beliefs of their victims or their descendants. As the case of the Zimbabwean leaders shows, there were often no records kept of the victims, nor information about their origins, because the individuals collecting the bodies did not believe that the dead had records worth keeping: to the conquerors, they were curiosities, objects of study or simply a tangible demonstration of victory.

Fig. 2. The case showing the small Maqdala 1868 display in the Silver Gallery by the staircase at the Victoria and Albert Museum, 2018. © Lucia Patrizio Gunning

Human remains in museums: colonial and class intersections

From the late eighteenth century and well into the twentieth, human bodies and body parts were used by European museums to demonstrate supposed evolutionary differences between ethnic groups through the application of racist ideologies such as social Darwinism and eugenics. Museums for which ancestral body parts were collected range from natural history and medical collections to anthropological and ‘encyclopaedic’ counterparts. Many have long since recognised that ‘practices of medicine and science were far from neutral and innocent’ but were instead ‘thoroughly entangled’ with ‘negotiations of life and death, from war to empire’ (Alberti and Hallam 2013, p. 7). From the early to mid-nineteenth century, experts argued, body parts ‘represented facts that could be placed together to showcase broader interpretations of race, disease and history’, a problematic belief that became embedded in museum practice (Redman 2016, p. 13). For example, the so-called ‘Granville mummy’ in the British Museum was used to define ancient Egyptians as White European, and divorce Egypt from the African continent (Stienne 2022, p. 179). Bodies of people of colour were not seen as human, but were instead used to demonstrate the supposed superiority of the white race; they were kept in boxes and stored as mere objects. This process of taking body parts through violence, which Robertson has defined as a crime against humanity, became a key aspect of colonial domination (Robertson 2019, p. 11).

In 2004 the UK Parliament passed the Human Tissues Act, section 47 of which entitles museums to return human remains in their collections to tribal descendants or others with good claim to kinship. The act represents an instance of legislation being crafted in England and Wales in response to the ethical duty of restoring human bodies to descendants and communities. Yet, the Human Tissue Act was triggered by a scandal that had hit the UK a few years earlier, which at first seemed tangential to museum collections and their practices. In the late 1990s, it emerged that Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool had for the previous 30 years and without consent, retained organs from babies and children and stored hundreds of foetuses, supposedly for medical research. The remains were kept in terrible conditions, with little dignity accorded to the children or their families. A parliamentary report in 2001 found that the use and retention of organs undermined the rules of the Human Tissue Act 1961 and the Anatomy Act of 1984, but also concluded that legislation required greater transparency and clarification. As a result, the Human Tissue Authority was enacted in 2005, and has since regulated the display of human remains less than 100 years old. In the same year, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport also issued ethical guidelines to museum professionals (DCMS 2005).

The retention of body parts at Alder Hey was considered not just a betrayal of patient and public trust, but a return to the days of the 1832 Anatomy Act. Under this act, the unclaimed bodies of poor people, usually from workhouses or hospitals, would be taken to be dissected at training hospitals. Combined with the 1834 Poor Law, which provided that very poor people could only obtain relief from local parish councils in workhouses, this effectively meant that the bodies dissected from that point until the early twentieth century were those of the destitute (Hurren 2012, p. 21). McGann (2017) has, for example, drawn parallels between the historic treatment of the poor in Britain, particularly underprivileged Irish Catholic people, and the treatment of the bodies of children in Liverpool. For some, including the sociologist and cultural commentator Tiffany Jenkins, the aftermath of the Alder Hey scandal and Human Tissue Act has not had beneficial effects. She has argued that there is, as a result, ‘heightened significance accorded to the body’ that is detrimental to research (2011, p. 120). What Jenkins does not recognise is that in the nineteenth century and until the early twentieth, there was already ‘heightened significance accorded to the body’ by a majority of people in Britain, as most belonged to Christian denominations which believed that the human body needed to be complete and buried intact in order for resurrection and life after death to take place. Relatives had the right to protest, and there were indeed petitions and reports of protests, even riots, when bodies were taken away. People deliberately ‘misremembered’ the time of death to ‘delay an anatomy sale’ or to try to raise the money needed for a funeral (Hurren 2012, p. 56).

The opportunity to determine the use of one’s body or body parts after death was a luxury accorded to the rich and eccentric, such as the philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1747-1832), whose body and head are kept at University College London. Bentham left his body to be preserved and put on display at the entrance of the college to show the utility of leaving human remains to science, and to demonstrate that mortal remains were not needed for a final resurrection. The continued display of his ‘ auto-icon’ and head in What Does It Mean to Be Human?, an exhibition in 2017 at University College London that was co-curated by Debbie Challis, is a rare example of an historic body for which we know that consent was specifically given for display and research (What Does It Mean to Be Human? 2017).

Consent for medical (or other) use of the body after death by the next of kin is now a crucial requirement in the UK. One of the authors has given informed consent for the use of her baby daughter’s body in medical research after death. This involved signing a number of forms, each explained by a registrar, who then checked that we understood exactly what we were signing. Unlike many grieving parents before us, we had the choice and ability to give our informed consent for the autopsy of our daughter’s body and its potential use in medical education. The grief never ends, but we felt able to trust the professionals to look after and learn from her body, with dignity and decency. This was of course a deeply personal decision.

The point to highlight here is that the emotional significance of the human body after death does not pose a threat to research and learning, provided there is trust between the deceased, their next of kin and all the professionals involved, as well as the ability to make choices and to give informed consent. This also applies to museums, because the return of human remains is a particularly delicate issue, and one that requires the participation of communities, so that museums understand the significance of these ancestral bodies for their descendants, and descendants are able to come to terms with a painful part of their own history. It means engaging with the ritual of return in a way that brings justice and helps to build a shared history (Vawda 2019, pp. 74-75). Museums need to accept that restitution and restorative justice may be the decision that kin and descendants make, and in these cases it is important to honour that decision.

It also means understanding that handing back a body, or parts of a human body, does not end the grief caused by colonial violence. The 2005 DCMS guidance states that attitudes ‘change over time’ and that the restitution and care of human remains is a ‘developing issue’. More research has been made on the beliefs and attitudes of people, particularly the poorest in the UK and the Global Majority, that illustrate that there has always been sensitivity among different communities, for varying cultural and religious reasons, about the use of the body after death. Knowledge exchange between communities and museum professionals means that we know far more about how human bodies were acquired in colonial military campaigns and by imperial settlers in 2023, than we did in 2005. A more empathetic approach to people, their ancestors and their beliefs has improved both research and understanding.

Whilst the Human Tissue Act has enabled Indigenous peoples and communities in colonised countries to approach museums and to work together to return bodies and human remains, it was not arguably drafted for museums, nor created out of a desire to redress colonial injustices of the past; instead, it was the consequence of a contemporary scandal within British medicine. Yet, the Alder Hey scandal was in turn related to memories of the past treatment of deceased people in Britain, which involved various levels of social and class-based discrimination. Ideas rooted in eugenics and based in social Darwinism, for example, were particularly aimed at eradicating the ‘unfit’ amongst the urban poor in the UK, as well as recording examples of supposedly ‘inferior’ or ‘dying’ races in colonised countries (Challis 2021). Therefore we can see how, in 19th and 20th century Britain, poverty and class intersect with race and colonial violence with regards to the treatment and use of the human body after death.

Reconciliation: research and activism

In order to better understand the context of how human remains have been handled by museums in Britain, it is important to underline the racialised ideology and racist practices that deeply inform the founding of institutions such as the British Museum. Sir Hans Sloane, from whose collection the British Museum originated, was a plantation owner on which he used the labour of enslaved Africans. He began collecting body parts of ‘Black slaves’ and divided peoples into different racial typologies, describing their socalled “utility” for the purpose of work. On the population of Jamaica, he wrote that the inhabitants were divided into two groups: ‘ “Masters” and “Slaves”. The first group is constituted by “Europeans” and some “Creolians”, the second one by “Indians, Negros, Mulatos, Alcatrazes, Mestizes, Quarterons, &c.” ’(Sloane 1707, pp. xlvi-xlvii). He also described various types of punishment inflicted on enslaved people and their reactions, explaining that, however cruel the punishments might be, they were treated ‘better’ by the English than by other Europeans.

A number of museums and cultural institutions originated from such racist ideology and from the riches brought by enslavement. It is in part the growing reckoning with, and understanding of, this racist legacy — both historically and economically — that informed the social definition of the museum. Museum professionals, and the governments and publics that fund and visit them, therefore have a responsibility to address the social-justice implications of these histories. The UK Museums Association’s web resources on Decolonising begin with the following statement:

Decolonisation is not simply the relocation of a statue or an object; it is a long-term process that seeks to recognise the integral role of empire in museums — from their creation to the present day. (UK Museums Association 2022)

This process requires, among other things, research, understanding the nuances of terms — such as a move towards using the term ‘belongings’ rather than objects in reference to cultural artefacts — and working with external activists and communities to better understand and care for their collections. It also means recognising that belongings, as much as the remains of ancestors, can have deep spiritual significance for people, and to act accordingly.

The What Does It Mean To Be Human? exhibition at UCL showed that personal belongings gradually replaced religious atonement in British mourning rituals. Bentham himself bequeathed remembrance rings to his friends; these were decorated with his silhouette and filled with locks of his hair. Of course, only those who were sufficiently wealthy, and thus likely to have their wishes respected following their deaths, were able to afford such remembrances. In contrast, the economically underprivileged people whose unclaimed bodies were dissected in Britain were not remembered, and their belongings (if they had any) were discarded. People who died in colonial wars and had parts of their bodies taken may have also had their belongings taken. In the present day, museums need to understand the significance of looted objects for the people that they belong to, and that some belongings, such as the tabots taken from Ethiopia, cross the ‘sacred barrier that separates humans from non-humans’ (Latour 2009, p. 240). Listening to, and with, ‘outsider activists’ (as Wajid and Minott call them) is crucial to the process of Reconciliation, and efforts to empathetically understand the racist origins and colonial legacy of many of our cultural institutions (2019, p. 64). The brutal ways in which museums have acquired objects, such as those taken from Maqdala, means that retaining them even after requests for their return have been repeatedly made, perpetuates colonial violence (Hicks 2020, pp. 214-215).

Recent exhibitions in the UK have attempted to address these issues. Maqdala 1868, which opened in April 2018 at the V&A, aimed to explore ‘a selection of Ethiopian objects in the V&A’s collection’ and made no mystery of the imbalance of power between the ‘British forces and Tewedros’. The V&A Director Tristam Hunt wrote at the time that the display of a photograph of Prince Alemayeh reminded us ‘that not only material possessions were lost to the British forces’ but people were too (2018, n. page). However, the powerful message emanating from the pieces themselves contrasted with the tiny exhibition case they were displayed in, and the case’s placement in the museum on an upper floor, near a staircase amidst the silver collection. Owing to its remote location, visitors would likely have either stumbled on it fortuitously, or have had to make efforts to find it. As Maaza Mengiste observed:

That exhibit was very moving for me, but it was also embarrassing to see these items contained like that and then shoved into a corner […] Stealing them was a gesture of power, and keeping them still is a gesture of power. (Quoted in Trilling 2019)

Hunt and V&A Deputy Director Tim Reeve have expressed their willingness to loan and even return these and other items as part of ‘decolonising’ collections, recognising the necessity for a more ‘honest conversation about history’ (Getachew 2020). Nevertheless, a recent change in the charities law in the UK, which appeared to offer a legal route for national museums to return items to their countries of origin, appears to have been blocked for the time being by the current British government, demonstrating that the resolution of these issues is political and that the British government continues to apply a nationalistic and increasingly anachronistic view on its cultural institutions.

It is also worth mentioning here a growing trend towards individual and community activism and involvement. People from communities affected by the retention, or inappropriate display, of their belongings in museums and galleries, have started to leave personal testimonies by such displays. One of the authors observed offerings of flowers left next to the exhibit of a human skull at the Oceania exhibition at the Royal Academy in London in 2018 (Oceania 2018). These offerings, laid by religious symbols, bodies and skulls in museums, remind us of the deep difference in understanding around objects (belongings) between the takers (or current custodians) and those from whom such sacred objects have been taken. For some people, their display confers sacrality to the space itself. At the Royal Academy, intangible belief was put on show, and new layers emerged to disrupt the objectification of ancestors and belongings. Suddenly the offerings became part of the show, and the display acquired a deeper and more intimate meaning for spectators: the violence was instantly brought to the surface by the offerings left by the skull. These alluded to brutal violence, untold stories of dehumanising domination and, whilst the show paid lip service to the sacred nature of some of the exhibits, in our view, the decision to include human remains perpetrated the barbarity of colonial power.

Campaigns and direct activism from people whose cultural and ancestral heritage has been stolen invites a re-examination of certain museum collections. ‘The Return of the Icons. The Restitution of African Artefacts & Human Remains Project’, initiated by The African Foundation for Development (AFFORD) in 2020 with the aim of obtaining ‘restitution of stolen African artefacts and human remains in UK museums and cultural institutions’, published a detailed report and a mapping of African antiquities in the UK (Return of the Icons 2020). The report is accompanied by several recommendations for governments and museums, civic societies and community groups. Appendix 1 of the document lists the Maqdala hoard and tabots as the first case study in its goal for restitution of African objects (Ibid., pp. 50-51). The report acknowledges that some museums have become more open about the historic racism behind their collecting practices and, in some cases, have returned belongings as well as ancestors.

Fig. 3. Offerings left at the Oceania exhibition at the Royal Academy London: a feather, flowers, a wreath etc — below the display of human remains (cropped out of the image), 2018. © Lucia Patrizio Gunning

There have been very different reactions to these specific issues in the museum sector. Whilst university and local museums in the UK are leading the way on the repatriation of sacred items and human remains where requested by descendants, it must be understood that they have legislative freedom do so (in accordance with the Human Tissue Act), unlike the national museums such as the V&A and the British Museum, which are instead bound by national legislation and direct political control. For example, the Manchester Museum, which is part of the University of Manchester, has been returning human remains to Aboriginal communities in Australia and Torres Straits since 2003, and in November 2019 it also returned ceremonial and religious items (Herman 2019). Meanwhile, the independently operated Horniman Museum has agreed to return ownership of the Benin bronzes in its collection to Nigeria (Horniman 2022) and the University of Aberdeen’s museum was the first in the UK to do so in 2021.

Activism and research led by individuals seeking the restitution of their sacred belongings and their ancestors’ remains has enabled us to better understand the role of the museum in the plunder of Maqdala and its colonial legacy. On a broader level, museums can and must use information and educational tools in transparent ways to help promote understanding of the historical role of empire in museums’ collecting practices, and to present a more informed account of the continuing impact of colonial violence.

From a pedagogical standpoint, museums are perfectly placed to assist in ushering in a new era of transparency and social justice. Newly redefined as institutions ‘in the service of society’ and its development, they can play an important part in making overdue social reparations, which include returning belongings to their rightful owners when requested to do so (ICOM 2022). Prior to undertaking our research on this topic, we had no idea that classical archaeologist and curator Charles Thomas Newton played a role in enabling the plunder of Maqdala. Researching the history of the Maqdala expedition, thanks to the discovery of a single letter from a man holding a role in one institution to another, has enabled us to understand the devastation brought to the people of Ethiopia. The items looted from Maqdala were not classical antiquities: they were manuscripts, sacred and royal objects. These ‘living bodies locked away in graveyards’ remain vivid constituents of Africa’s cultural heritage that should be ‘put back into the hands of Africans’ (Woldeyes 2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lucia Patrizio Gunning

Lucia Patrizio Gunning is an historian and a Lecturer (Teaching) at University College London (UCL). She is author of The British Consular Service in the Aegean and the Collection of Antiquities for the British Museum (2009 & 2018). Lucia specialises in the connections between heritage and disaster. Her activism after the L’Aquila earthquake of 2009 inspired Invisible Reconstruction Volume 1 (UCL Press, Fringe Series), edited with Paola Rizzi, which comprises cross-disciplinary responses to natural, biological and man-made disasters. Her research has a particular focus on the history of collecting for European museums and its implications in ethics, legislation and the art market.

Debbie Challis

Debbie Challis is an Events Producer at the Portico Library Manchester and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool (Milesian Tales). Debbie is author of Archaeology of Race. The Eugenic Ideas of Francis Galton and Flinders Petrie (2013) and From the Harpy Tomb to the Wonders of Ephesus: British Archaeologists in the Ottoman Empire 1840-1880 (2008). She has published articles on the reception of the ancient past in museums, gender politics, and the impact of racist theory in British history and society in the collection of material culture during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Notes

1 The authors of this article have studied and written on the acquisition of classical antiquities for the British Museum for over 20 years, working in museums, archives and libraries, in public engagement, as well as on the reconstruction of heritage and the significance of heritage for communities affected by disaster. They are currently collaborating on research to raise awareness around the professional interests and career of the archaeologist and curator Sir Charles Thomas Newton, who was a curatorial assistant in the 1840s, a British diplomat in the 1850s and then Keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum from 1861 to 1886.