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“The restitution of those cultural objects which our museums and collections, directly or indirectly, possess thanks to the colonial system and are now being demanded, must also not be postponed with cheap arguments and tricks.”

Gert v. Paczensky and Herbert Ganslmayr, Nofretete will nach Hause. (1984)

I. CUNO SETS THE TONE
“Whose Culture? The modern nations within whose borders antiquities — the ancient artifacts of peoples long disappeared — happen to have been found? Or the world's peoples, heirs to antiquity as the foundation of culture that has never known political borders but has always been fluid, mongrel, made from contact with new, strange, and wonderful things?

The Promise of Museums. As a repository of objects, dedicated to the promotion of tolerance and inquiry and the dissipation of ignorance, where the artifacts of one culture and one time are preserved and displayed next to those of other cultures and times without prejudice.” James Cuno (1)

The editor of Whose Culture? has an astonishing way of presenting statements that are wrong or only partially correct as if they described the obvious plain truth that everybody would accept without hesitation. He describes antiquities as “the ancient artifacts of peoples long disappeared” and goes on to illustrate his ideas with six objects, two of them from Benin, Edo. (Nigeria). With all due respect to James Cuno, the Benin people are still alive and have by no means disappeared. He should know this.

The recent Benin exhibition, Benin - Kings and Rituals: Court Arts from Nigeria, was organized by the Museum for Ethnology, Vienna, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, Museum for Ethnology, Berlin and the Art Institute of Chicago, with the collaboration of National Commission for Museums and Monuments and the Royal Family of Benin. The King of Benin, the Oba, a direct descendant of Oba Ovonramwen from whose palace the British stole the Benin bronzes in 1897, wrote an introductory note to the catalogue of the exhibition. (2).

Representatives of the Royal Family participated in the opening of the exhibition in Vienna and in the International Symposium held on 10 May 2007, they demanded the return of some of the stolen artefacts. Before the opening of the exhibition in the Art Institute of Chicago, Members of the Edo (Benin) Community protested in Chicago at the continued detention of the looted objects in Western museums (3). At the opening of the exhibition in Chicago,

representatives of the Benin Royal Family, including a princess, reiterated the demand for restitution and Cuno, the Director of the Art Institute promised to consider the demand. At the closure of the exhibition, a Benin royal, also a Professor of Art at the University of Lagos, Dr. Peju Layiwola whose mother is a Benin princess, was invited to lecture. Finally, in September 2008, the Royal Family sent a formal request for restitution of some of the Benin bronzes to the Art Institute of Chicago which has not yet been answered. (4)

In view of the above, how can Cuno include Benin artefacts in his definition of antiquities as “the ancient artifacts of peoples long disappeared”? Did he think that the Edo people he saw recently were resurrected from the dead and did not represent a living culture? He could talk to the Edo Community in Chicago to realize that Edo culture is not a dead culture and the people of Benin have not long disappeared. Unfortunately for the Western anthropologists and others who sought to justify the rapacious policy of depriving Africans of their artefacts on the grounds of an alleged imminent disappearance, most of those peoples have not disappeared. Cuno could read In my Father's House by Kwame Appiah, his friend and colleague, to realize that, for example, the Asante whose artefacts were looted and stolen by the British are still alive and have not disappeared.(5)

Obviously, it would be easier to justify the retention of cultural objects of a people if these could be presented as artefacts of a people and a civilization long gone and extinct. This however, is not the case of the thousands of African objects lying in Western museums.

The definition of antiquities as “the ancient artifacts of peoples long disappeared” is problematic from many viewpoints. Are we to understand by this definition that there are no antiquities of living cultures and peoples? Can we no longer talk about French antiquities from the 17th Century because the French people have not disappeared? Cuno seems to have been so keen on cutting all possible links between present day Egyptians, Chinese, Greeks and their ancient roots that he declared their peoples as having disappeared and in the process took in Benin. Thus the very first sentence of Whose culture? is not free from serious doubts.

After reading this new book, a reader might be forgiving for thinking that misleading statements, misrepresentation and contempt are the stock in trade of Western intellectual tradition. The editor does not shy away from statements that are clearly misleading:“Museums are concerned with both the fate of the individual antiquity and the preservation of archaeological context. To this end, most museums in the developed world (the so-called art importing countries) have developed acquisition policies intended to remove incentives for looting archaeological sites. First, museums abide by all applicable national and international laws, bilateral agreements, and international conventions. And second, museums are encouraged to set a date before which an antiquity must be known to have been out of its likely country of origin before it can be acquired”. (6)This is clearly a misleading statement and paints a picture of Western museums which is not true.

As I write this article, there is information in the media that Marion True, a former curator of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles and Robert Hecht, an American art dealer, are on trial in Italy for various offences involving illegal transfer and purchase of looted art objects from Italy, knowing that they had been looted. (7) It may be recalled that in 2007 Italy obliged some leading American museums - J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Princeton University's Art Museum - to return various art objects which had been illegally exported from Italy and bought by leading American museums. (8) In view of all this information that is easily available, how can James Cuno, writing in 2009 declare that “museums abide by all applicable national and international laws, bilateral agreements, and international conventions”? Had these institutions been observing the 1970 UNESCO Convention? (9) Why did the American Association of Museum Directors have to adopt new rules on acquisition of archaeological materials as recently as 2008? (10) Cuno does not, give a complete picture of what has been going on in the American and other European museums as regards the acquisition of objects without a clear history or likely to have been looted. This has been the main point of contention between the archaeologists and museum directors. This is the reason for Cuno's contempt for Lord Renfrew who recently went to America and suggested that American museums such as the Metropolitan Museum should finally adopt rules forbidding the acquisition of artefacts of dubious provenance that have surfaced since 1970. Just before Lord Renfrew's recent visit to lecture in New York, the Metropolitan Museum quickly issued new regulations on acquisitions. Most commentators attributed this hurried issuance of new rules to the then impending visit of Lord Renfrew. (11)

Cuno does refer to the case of Marion True, not in connection with the non-observance of laws but to show the sensational nature of the reports on the case:

“And some high-profile museums — the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the

J. Paul Getty Museum; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; among others—have negotiated for the return of dozens of antiquities to Italy, where they are currently on display in Rome in an exhibition dramatically titled Nostoi: Recovered Masterpieces (nostoi referring to the lost epic relating the return home of Greek heroes after the Trojan War). And of course, the travails of the Getty Museum's former curator of antiquities, Marion True, indicted for conspiring to acquire looted antiquities for the museum, has been covered widely in the international press. (Photographs of her wearing dark sunglasses and shielding her face with her pocketbook outside the Rome courtroom have appeared in newspapers around the world and continue to circulate in cyberspace on Web sites, blogs, and Listservs).” (12)

The pressures the Italians brought on the American museums, including threats of legal action and non-lending of artefacts for future exhibitions, do not appear in the above statement.

Cuno is obviously a past master in misrepresenting the argument of others and in displacing the weight of the argument in directions that distort the real issue. He continues to misrepresent the main argument of the archaeologists against illegal diggings and the acquisition of unprovenanced objects. He creates the impression that archaeologists are against the acquisition of looted objects or objects without clear histories because they consider them to be of no great value or as not providing any valuable information. The main argument of the archaeologists is that illegal diggings or looting deprive us of the possibility of studying artefacts in their context and that by removing these objects we lose valuable information which may never be recovered. Furthermore, the purchase of objects without clear history encourages plunder and the eventual buyers or beneficiaries of the illegal diggings are the museums.

Cuno takes some pages examining famous objects which, according to present standards, were procured without any clear history, out of their context but have nevertheless provided useful information about the societies that produced them:

“Unlike the archaeological establishment, museums do not believe that unexcavated antiquities - whose archaeological context has not been scientifically recorded, or which didn't come from an ancient archaeological context - are meaningless. Numerous examples of such “orphaned” antiquities can be cited; some are cited in this volume. Two additional examples are offered here”. (13) Continued    Source: Kwame Opoku, Dr.

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