Prisoners In The Temple Of The Muses (original) (raw)
**Wole Talabi
I love museums. It should come as no surprise then that a key plot element of my contemporary fantasy novel, Shigidi and The Brass Head Of Obalufon, is a heist at the British Museum. But if I love museums so much, why would I want to write a story about robbing one? Good question. Perhaps I should say what I love is the idea of museums. Of what they could be.
The first museum I ever visited was the Benin City National Museum in Edo State, back in Nigeria. It’s situated right on Ring Road, an area rich in history and culture. The museum started its life in 1944 under the auspices of Oba Akenzua II, created from his collection of antiquities in the royal palace. The collection eventually evolved and moved to its current location, and opened to the public in 1973. When my family moved from Warri to Benin City in the late 1990’s, my father took me to see it. I must have been about eleven at the time. I remember that the artifacts were beautiful despite the displays being a bit underwhelming. I also remember that it was surprisingly dark, and that photographs were not allowed. The bulky camera my father had brought along remained unused. Most of all, I remember how powerful the experience of seeing history in front of me was. These were not just stories about a great kingdom skilled in metalworking technology, rich in philosophy and traditions—they were accounts of a reality that had left a lasting residue on the world, one which I could see. Each artifact was an anchor to history, a story of the Benin people who have long historical ties to my own people, the Yoruba. It was inspirational.
Since then, I have been to many museums around the world, museums of all shapes and sizes and lightings, doing their best to preserve and display artifacts of archaeological, historical, and cultural interest. It is a fundamental human drive to construct these museums—temples to nature, creativity, and history. It’s the desire to know, remember, consider, and make sense of our past, understand our present, and inspire ourselves towards the future. One could argue that a museum, like a book, computer, or the internet itself in its better iterations, is a kind of collective external cognition. A warehouse of memory, of the things left behind by those that came before us, a place to experience science and history and nature, and therefore knowledge. Knowledge of self and of community upon which new knowledge can be built, and therefore upon which progress in all its forms can be made. Museums and the things that they give us an opportunity to see, touch, hear and interact with can help create a tangible sense of identity and a sense of our place in the long arc of history, just like I experienced in that museum in Benin decades ago.
What does an item forcefully or unethically taken say to those who come to see it? What kind of understanding can come of an item whose place and value are being interpreted without including the people and culture that created it? What kind of inspiration can one find in a place full of such things?
But museums are not perfect, unbiased archives. Every item and artifact displayed in a museum requires collection, preservation, contextualization, curation, and interpretation—all of which is done by people. There can be no museums without people, just as there can be no functional body without a brain. The people who collect and interpret objects of cultural significance do not do so in some kind of intellectual vacuum. They, like the museums they help create, are also part of history.
The International Council of Museums defines a museum as: “a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection, and knowledge sharing.”
It is obvious that this statement is more aspirational than definitional, because the history of museums reveals an obvious but uncomfortable truth. Most of them are rooted in the practice of ancient monarchies and wealthy individuals collecting and displaying art, archaeological materials, or anything else they considered rare, curious, or interesting, items which were often taken under questionable authority. The first museums in many parts of the world were often royal palaces displaying objects from conquered territories and peoples or enforced tributes from vassals as a show of their power and influence. It is hard to deny that the modern museum was born as a trophy case for plunder. What does an item forcefully or unethically taken say to those who come to see it? What kind of understanding can come of an item whose place and value are being interpreted without including the people and culture that created it? What kind of inspiration can one find in a place full of such things?
In 1938, several 14-15th century “bronze” works were dug up in Ife, the home of the Yoruba people, and stolen away to European museums such as the British Museum. The craftsmanship of these beautiful pieces was so impressive that many European historians refused to believe it was the work of any African culture, and some went as far as to theorize that the bronzes must have been the work of a lost Greek colony, perhaps even Atlantis. This hilariously racist and wrong interpretation is completely divorced from the true history of the Yoruba. Or consider the even more widely known case of the “Benin Bronzes”, similarly intricate and lovely works that were taken as part of a British punitive expedition in 1897 to enact vengeance on the Oba of Benin. During that expedition, much of the cultural heritage of that city was destroyed or looted, and that loot was sold to museums around the world. Spiritual items, metalwork murals, statues of ancestors, household tools, historical documentation, even hairpins and keys were taken away to dozens of museums all over the world, leaving the great city in shambles and the Oba in exile.
(Rolf Dietrich Brecher/Wikimedia)
When I went to London for the Caine Prize ceremony in 2018 (I was a nominee), I visited the British Museum. In a way, it was impressive to see so many displays of items from all over the world. I had the same powerful experience of seeing tangible history, but I was also struck by a deep feeling of wrongness. A gnawing awareness of the trail of pain, violence, and thievery through which many of the objects had made their way to that place, and of the cultural loss suffered by those who had cultural connections to these items. And even beyond that burden of bloody history, I was also very aware of the wrongness of context in which many of these items were being displayed, interpreted, and discussed. It struck me the most in the African galleries, in the basement of the building. There were so many things being displayed in ways far removed from their meaning. Take for example a funerary mask that was meant to provide sustenance to, and enable communication with, the spirit of the deceased, now being displayed in a museum half the world away, when the children or grandchildren of that person are still alive. How do they feel about the state of their ancestor’s spirit? Why has their spiritual and cultural wellbeing been trampled upon to sate the curiosity of people who have no connection to the item? It is one thing for a people to collect items of their own heritage and determine how and where they want to display them, with the consent of those connected to the items, but it’s another thing entirely to hang plundered items in a storeroom like carcasses, like prisoners, as if they are not still alive with meaning and significance to people. In fact, many of the African items owned by the museum aren’t even on display. They are locked away in storerooms, like hostages.
It was this deep feeling of wrongness that filtered its way into the story I was writing, a story that became my first novel, Shigidi and The Brass Head Of Obalufon, in which Yoruba gods attempt to liberate the titular sculpture of a Yoruba king from the British Museum. The head is one of the “bronze” items that was dug up and taken from Ife and is sometimes also called The Bronze Head from Ife, even though like most of those items, it’s not actually bronze_—_it’s mostly copper and zinc. The novel is largely an entertaining adventure that also looks at the influence of modernity on spiritual beliefs, but its central plot_—_the supernatural heist at the British Museum_—_was directly inspired by those uncomfortable feelings I had visiting the museum.
Today, several museums around the world are making efforts to shed as much of their questionable history as they can, by returning and restituting stolen items_—_as is evidenced by the International Council of Museums definition. And this is a step in the right direction. Germany in particular has been at the forefront of this. Returning items is fraught with complexity, yes, but at its heart is a simple principle_—_ownership should be given back, ideally to local museums. And while such local museums like the first one I visited in Benin City, or the dozens I have been to across many parts of Africa and Southeast Asia, may not be free of their own history of violence and atrocity (every kingdom is built on violence, and even the Benin kingdom traded in slaves for the copper used in making its “bronzes”), at least that burden should be borne in the right context, by the people who have the greatest cultural claim to the items. And they should determine what happens to the items going forward, whether they are returned to their original uses as cultural or religious items, put on public display in a local museum, or even kept away in storage. A thief does not get to dictate where, when, and how they return stolen loot.
I look forward to the day when I can walk into a museum and feel nothing but a sense of wonder at the trace of human history through time, at how much we have been able to do. To know that everything I see is there of its own free will, obtained ethically, whether that means found locally or given on loan. To know that they are being displayed and interpreted in the right context with the input of those who know them best. I look forward to being inspired to write stories not of taking things back, but of projecting our future forward, imagining the items that our descendants will want to display to contextualize their own experiences as they chart their courses forward into the stars.
Wole Talabi is an engineer, writer, and editor from Nigeria, currently living in Malaysia. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Lightspeed, F&SF, Clarkesworld and several other places. He has edited three anthologies and been a finalist for several awards including the Caine Prize, the Locus Award, and the Nommo Award. His work has also been translated into Spanish, Norwegian, Chinese, Italian, Bengali, and French. His collection Incomplete Solutions (2019) is published by Luna Press, and his debut novel Shigidi was published by DAW books in fall 2023.
Transparency Statement
This article was commissioned from an emailed pitch. The author and editors had no previous acquaintance; a review of Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon was commissioned separately from this article. This article was edited by Misha Grifka Wander and copyedited by Cynthia Zhang. The cover image from this article is from the Benin Bronzes in the British Museum, via user Tillman on Wikimedia Commons.
