[CPProt.net] British Museum blazes a trail to the exhibition rooms of Africa

[Museum Security Network / Cultural Property Protection Net (Ton Cremers)]

British Museum blazes a trail to the exhibition rooms of Africa
By Frederick Studemann 
Published: May 24 2005 03:00 | Last updated: May 24 2005 03:00

When Kiprop Lagat, a senior curator at the National Museum of Kenya, was
seeking artefacts for an exhibition exploring the relationship between his
country and its immediate neighbours, his search took him thousands of
kilometres away from east Africa to central London.

 
There, in the ordered neoclassical confines of the British Museum, he spent
a year searching through the 12,000 objects in its Africa collection.

Eventually, he selected 150 that will make the journey to Nairobi for next
year's exhibition - including a fibre circumcision mask and a clay painted
headdress.

The choice of the British Museum was hardly surprising. One of the legacies
of Britain's imperial past is that the 253-year-old museum has one of the
biggest collections of African artefacts outside the continent.

But Mr Lagat's project is seen as a pioneering endeavour that is being
closely watched by other institutions.

For the British Museum, the loan marks a deliberate attempt by a big owner
of African artefacts to rethink its relationship with Africa at a time when
the continent's developmental needs have moved up the international agenda.

Rethinking the approach to Africa was first considered when the African
collection was returned to the museum's main building in Bloomsbury in 1998,
after decades in the Museum of Mankind.

Now the debate is being watched by other institutions with big African
holdings, such as Belgium's Musée Royal de l'Afrique Centrale in Brussels.

The Nairobi initiative also offers the potential for other African countries
to join the international exhibit loan circuit - from which they are largely
excluded.

The British Museum believes it can set an international precedent by going
much further than occasional loans of individual objects and opening its
collection for more extensive use.

Neil MacGregor, the museum's director, argues that it is showing the way for
the world's other big "encyclopaedic" collections in London, Berlin, Paris,
New York and St Petersburg.

"Only the encyclopaedic collections of Europe and America can provide that
wider context, the evidence of links and influences that shape and explain
why a country is the way it is," he says.

This goes beyond providing regional contexts as with the Nairobi exhibition.
In China, the British Museum is working with counterparts in Beijing and
Shanghai to provide contemporary western context for large-scale local
exhibitions.

Under Mr MacGregor's model, collections such as those of the Metropolitan in
New York, or the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, would make their items and
expertise globally available. The great museums of the world would become
museums for the world.

For Mr MacGregor this ambition marks a return to the universalist ambitions
of the British Museum's 18th-century founding fathers. "Previous assumptions
that objects had to be held in one place no longer hold, given technological
developments," he says. "We can [now] serve the public in Africa and
elsewhere."

He hopes it will become a two-way process, with British Museum benefiting
from the expert input of partners.

Adopting the role of global lender has other benefits. Not least, it offers
an answer to controversies surrounding the ownership by western museums of
artefacts from other countries.

Mr MacGregor hopes that by sharing artefacts, the disputes about ownership
will be less acute. "What is the real question: ownership or use of
objects?" he asks.

Curators such as Mr Lagat and Claude Ardouin, a colleague from Mali also
working with the British Museum, agree. "The time of big claims has passed.
It was more in the 1970s," says Mr Ardouin.

Others see it differently. Famously, the Greek government has claimed
ownership of the Elgin Marbles, parts of the Parthenon frieze it wants
returned from London to the Acropolis in Athens.

Last year, the return of aboriginal etched barks lent by the British Museum
to Museum Victoria in Melbourne was blocked after ownership was contested
under local heritage protection law. Museum Victoria successfully challenged
the claim. Other museums in Europe have had disputed pictures seized while
on loan.

Mr MacGregor says the British Museum will lend only when it has contractual
guarantees that works will be returned.

There are other risks, however. Belgium lent artefacts to Mobutu Sese-Seko,
then ruler of Zaire. When he was overthrown in 1997, the collection
disappeared into the international art market, says John Mack, an Africa
expert.

Mr MacGregor says: "If we are going to share the culture of the world, we
need a legal framework that enables this to happen."

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