 Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum and fellow at St Cross College, Oxford. He was awarded the 2017 Rivers Memorial Medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute and is author of six books including his most recent and what we'll be discussing today, the British Museums, The Benning-Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. Dan, welcome to Navarra Media. Hello, really nice to be here. Can you tell our audience a little bit about yourself, what your background is, your interest and how you came to write this book? Yes, of course. Okay, so the book really, you know, charts a journey that I guess I've gone on as curator at an anthropology museum at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford over 13 years and that 13 years is a time in which the wider conversations over anthropology museums have really changed but I guess it really began arriving at, you know, Oxford having, you know, done a doctorate and taught in another city, you know, Bristol, where sort of conversations about the legacies of empire were far more advanced, you know, than they were in Oxford. I arrived in 2008 and really found that the conversations that I was expecting to have, you know, you couldn't have in Oxford at that time. You couldn't have, well, they didn't exist. They didn't exist and when you tried to have them, actually, this was not the done thing. Yeah, exactly, wasn't it? Yeah. So, you know, I spent those early years in my role as curator really just sort of, you know, aiming to understand what objects were in the collections, you know, diving into the documentation and then really over those sort of times, you know, as understanding more and more about how that, how they were formed and their relationship with empire, you know, a big alteration really came in 2015 with the Rosemouth Fall movement and as the world sort of changed around the museum, you know, I really had to update how able I felt to speak out and, you know, to tell the story but also maybe to do more than talk and to look at action especially in terms of African restitution. And what was your doctorate in? So, I worked, it was in archaeology. I worked in, I was really looking at the Caribbean and the Southwest of England in the early modern into modern periods, you know, looking at the ongoing legacies of empire in the urban infrastructure but also in the Eastern Caribbean and how, you know, different layers of those histories, most recently, of course, in the Caribbean with heritage tourism. And at the same time, of course, I was sort of writing that at the end of the 90s, you saw also the tourism industry, you know, re-describing objects in, in, if you like, you know, what we would call the world culture museums as well. So, a part of the book also, it builds on that experience of how the tourist economies have attempted to rebrand and to reimagine and thereby often to silence a lot of the, you know, really important histories that are in these institutions. For anybody who's watching or listening who's not familiar with the Pitt Revers Museum, it's quite a unique space in terms of, sort of, of these spaces in Britain. Can you briefly, sort of, explain what it is and what your role is there and how it's somewhat different to most museums people will generally go to? Well, I think it isn't absolutely. I mean, it is unlike, you know, most museums that you would visit, but it's not necessarily unlike a whole host of collections which are across the UK, across Europe that we just don't see. So, it's a world culture. It's an archaeology and ethnological collection. It was founded in 1884 in the same year as the Berlin Conference and the beginning of the scramble for Africa. And importantly, it was founded at the same moment as the refounding of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum in its, sort of, you know, a new location. So, in 1884, you get a division in Oxford of archaeology in between, you know, two museums. There's a museum of European objects and, sort of, you know, civilization as it were in the Ashmolean. And in the Pitt Revers, there's everything else. And this is really a product, it was a gift to the museum by Augustus Henry Lane-Foxpit Rivers, who was a soldier and who developed a theory of what he called the evolution of a culture from his early work in the 1850s, 1860s around the improvement of the right form. So, literally, he builds a theory of the cultural evolution of the evolution of objects, you know, what if cultural objects evolved in the same way as your natural things was his argument. He built that absolutely out of the cutting edge of the most violent, you know, ends of sort of army operations, you know, in the 1850s. So, there's always been this link in the Pitt Revers in between the weaponry, sort of warfare and objects that he didn't, he wasn't the source of collector that went out around the world himself. He was really, you know, acquiring what sort of washed up in London and elsewhere in Europe, you know, if you like, as empire sort of went on. So, then having been formed in 1884 by the time of events that we're going to be talking about in Nigeria in, you know, in the late 1890s, the Pitt Revers was, you know, really well set up not only to receive these sort of goods which were looted, but also to tell a story which ultimately was a story of, you know, cultural evolution and thereby white supremacy. So, it's really that link which as anthropologists, we've been so good in some areas of starting to talk about, you know, the role of our discipline in the creation of so-called race science. We've, we've, I think, achieved some, you know, good things in terms of how we've talked about our discipline's role with physical anthropology, skulls, you know, measuring skulls, all that sort of thing. We haven't even started when it comes to talk about appropriation of objects and culture and the cultural displays that showed, you know, equally a different sort of fake, you know, superiority. So, the fact that this is coming into existence the very same year as the Asimolean Museum, I mean, as you write at length in the book, I mean, it's pretty clear then that the social function here is to make this quite clear cleavage between European and non-European history. What kind of broader purpose does it serve? I mean, and to what extent is that part of a conscious project? Well, that's right. So obviously, you know, I mean, Asimolean initially is sort of, you're founded in the 17th century on a different site. And even objects, you know, in the anthropology collections were already in Oxford, there were significant, you know, Cook objects from the second and third voyages of, you know, Captain Cook, and so obviously, you know, from the 17th, sort of 60s and 70s. But it's this moment in 1884 where there's this realignment and, you know, re-establishment of what at the time were very, you know, new and really, you know, cutting edge institutional spaces. You know, these are the re-display of objects in order to tell a particular story at a particular moment in the development of empire. And how's it different to previously? So obviously, Europeans have thought themselves being superior to Africans for a very long time. But what's changing right at the end of the 19th century for this to be? So it's a link with, I think, evolutionary, you know, ideas over material culture, you know, the idea that objects could evolve. But it's also how fast objects that are taken in acts of violence are finding their way on to display. So it's a matter of weeks in between, if you like, the taking of the Benin objects from, you know, royal and sacred objects in between, you know, that happening, you know, in Nigeria. And these objects being displayed in Berlin, in London, and also in Oxford. So what do those displays sort of do? Well, they tell the story of a victory. And they tell the story of this weird mix of a kind of appreciation of, of course, art, which is incredible, which, you know, artistic, you know, history that goes back hundreds of years. But sort of as part of that story also says, well, actually, Africans aren't able to look after their own culture. We have removed these objects of sovereignty, and we're displaying them here in a different setting. So it creates the idea of the primitive or the barbarous, all these horrible words which are used at the time. But it also, I think, importantly, also served to racialize the visitor as white. So, you know, in order to get access into a late 19th century museum, I guess initially you had to be a certain sort of person. But then even more so, it reinforces a sense of domination, a sense of the cultural aspects of, of empire. And do you think they still serve the same function today? So when people say, oh, the British Museum, and I'm not going to just talk about the British Museum or these sort of great national museums, because the conversation is going to go far beyond that, I hope. But they say this serve the same function today in terms of reproducing a set of presumptions about white superiority, do you think? So I think exactly as any other institution, which has to deal with the ongoing legacies of empire, you know, that idea that the, the, the imperial process is not over, you know, that the decolonizing history is an ongoing one, it's in the present, of course, exactly like any other institution, which is having to fight institutional racism, which is an incredibly white organization, you know, like actually, you know, most of our museums are, we have to face up to and actually take action on that sense that, of course, we are working, you know, you know, with a living legacy. So yeah, I mean, absolutely, we, I think it, you know, there's an interesting moment in 1946. And so when we meet the fascists, one of the first things that happened in, in, in Oxford's gallery spaces is the displays of skulls that were there to tell, you know, the racist, you know, narrative of there being different types of the people, they were removed and the skulls were taken off display. This is right next door, the Natural History Museum. Okay. So as I were part of the same building. So they were removed, the skulls, you know, taken off actually into London and in the vaults now of the Natural History Museum in London. But right next door, the cultural displays weren't really touched, because we didn't as a discipline at that point in 1940s. I don't think we recognized at that point as a discipline, what these displays were, and how they were operating in relation to empire. So there is a, there's a moment here, here of understanding that history, there's a reckoning, which is much wider than museums. So reckoning with, if you like, the ongoing nature of, of imperialism. And, you know, that reckoning, you know, my, my, I mean, you know, one of the optimistic, you know, aspects of the book is to say, well, maybe museums as distinctive sorts of public space really offer unique spaces where we can have that conversation, and can maybe also try to think of it in terms of a site of conscience, in terms of how to, how to remember, you know, these acts. Was there a catalyst? Was there sort of a political impetus to get rid of those skulls? Was there a sort of 1940s equivalent of roads must fall within the curatorial discipline amongst museums and galleries? I mean, I think it was simply, you know, good science. You know, the scientists are ahead of us on this as compared to culture workers. You know, scientists understood, actually, this is nonsense. There aren't, there is, we are, we are a single species. We're not going to display these old Victorian lies, you know, anymore that tell the story of difference. 1946 was clearly, there's a change political context. So it can't just be purely the science, can it? So, so it's the science, but also I think there was an atmosphere in the 1920s and 30s in Oxford and other such institutions, where such was the, the, the, the fascism, you know, you know, in the environment that it would have been very hard, I think, actively to take those things apart. So 1946, actually, science could win over and the facts of the matter could be stated. I think it's important to remember that to put a, you know, to put a display up like that was an act, you know, there was a particular thing going on with the white supremacists from the 1890s into the, say, the 1920s, where outdoors in the built environment statues, but indoors in museums in terms of displays, there was an attempt to naturalize these sorts of, you know, racist lie. And so it's our job really, you know, not to ignore those anymore, and to realize they also affect, you know, art and culture, as well as only, you know, if, if, if you like, sort of natural history. I'm really, I'm really grateful you've mentioned the naturalizing element because it brings together what you touch on in the book is a great similarity, it seems, between Confederate statues in the southern states of the USA, and the role of various objects that you might find in the Pitt Rivers Museum. Can you talk about that a bit more? Because for the average person watching or listening to this will say, well, a statue of General Lee Lee, it's quite a clear provocative political statement saying, I think the abolition of slavery is a bad idea. I think black people are inferior to white people. Whereas a museum seems far less arresting as a political sort of declaration, as a proposition, if you know what I mean. These are people just trying to remember history rather than recreate its meaning. Or is that, or is that wrong? And so I think it's wrong. And I think it's a part of the reason that we know it's wrong is because of the twin, you know, movements, which are, you know, which are African movements of the fallism movement and the restitution movement. And they have a deep and long history that go back to the 1930s, you know, to Algeria in the 1960s. And have, I think, increasingly in the public mind, you know, around the world in the past year or so have been joined up, but have always had had an interrelationship. So the fallism movement underlining that the naturalization of white superiority is, you know, dangerous, that something as apparently, you know, banal as a statue, as our built environment serves really, you know, to make it seem that it was ever thus. In a museum, the same thing can happen. So the role of a curator often is, I think, misunderstood or we as a profession, you know, misunderstand our role, you know, to keep everything the same, to start as a conservator, you know, to make sure the moths aren't eating the fabrics and that things don't fall apart. But there's this weird extension of that idea to think that our role is to halt history around the museum itself, you know, happening. And in the past years, of course, the world around the Pit Rivers and indeed other museums like it has changed. So we can see that violence as being in, you know, I think not only, you know, remembered, not only naturalized, but also reenacted every time we open our doors. So for me, it was the Rosemary's Fall movement, Oxford, in 2016, that moment, that observation that the Pit Rivers is the most violent space in Oxford. You know, for me, that was a tweet by this was a tweet from the Rosemary's Fall Oxford's, you know, movement, an African movement, which, which, which had emerged out of the Cape Town, you know, activism, you know, the Pit Rivers emerged as a really important site as part of the wider conversations and the demands for the decolonization of Oxford. You know, as a curator, I'd never seen it that way at that point. I really haven't ever been shown to me as obviously, that it isn't just that we need to understand the histories or tell the histories somehow, you know, better, you know, but actually, even telling the histories, even the presence of these objects can, for many visitors, and indeed a lot of people that will never even set foot inside the Museum of this kind, that it, that it is an act of violence that continues the violence of the 19th century. And that was really for me, you know, the reason I wanted to begin, you know, to dig into the history of actually what happened in Nigeria in the 1890s, and to, and to do, in some ways, really try to do my job better, which is to understand the objects, understand how they were understood and valued by other people, and, you know, share knowledge about, you know, what I know and what I can find out. So given all that, do you think it's fair to say that the Museum is a form of weapon? So that's certainly something that the book, you know, argues. So if you go onto the upper floor of the Pitt Rivers, there is a gallery of weapons where the argument that Pitt Rivers first made from his experience in the, the Crimean War, where the fact that, you know, that his side, he fought in the Crimean War, his side had rifles and the Russians and, you know, muskets, that small alteration in a technology led to a decisive, you know, victory. He extended that idea across by, in actually, amazingly, the museum collections, not only of the Royal Armouries, but also of the USI, you know, the Organization, which is now Rusey, the, you know, right-wing think tank, who knew that once upon a time, you know, they had a museum, the United Services Institution. So for people who weren't aware, Rusey's kind of like Chatham House, it's like a right-wing foreign policy security think tank. They had a museum. So they had a museum in, in central London, and a lot of the objects that were kept there and in the Royal Armouries are now in the Pitt Rivers, because Augustus, Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers acquired them and assembled them initially in his house and then in a series of displays in East London and then Kensington that told the story of, you know, evolution of objects initially via weaponry. So there was a, there was inherent sense in which sort of violence was there, but actually in reality, what these objects were were the things that have been taken from those, you know, indigenous people, Africans, Australians, Americans, you know, First Nations Americans, who had been defeated in war, you know, by the British over the previous 200 years or so. And can I just interrupt? I'm sorry, but you said Henry Lane Fox is this chap. Yeah, Augustus Henry Lane Fox, yeah. And there's a Robin Lane Fox and a Martha Lane Fox in British Civil Society today. Are they descendants of his? They are relations of his. Yeah, there's a very complicated family history. It's still quite a prestigious family and sort of amongst the British establishment. So there's the Lane Fox side and there's the Pitt Rivers side as well, of course, who continue to go to own the estate on. So we are very much still living in this world. There's a think tank that had this museum, their descendants are still, you know, figures in British society. This is not, you know, five, 600 years ago. This is very much a world we've inhabited and herited. So I think the really important thing about the Benin, you know, attack is how recent it was. 1897, you know, you know, the book goes into the restitution, you know, one of the early sort of recent wave of restitutions, which is from a an individual, a private individual who inherited objects that were that were looted by, you know, inherited immediately from his father, from his father. So the grandfather of a man who's alive now served in that expedition. The fact it's that near in family, you know, histories and that Mark Walker is absolutely attempting now, you know, to do the right thing by returning those objects. That shows us what's going on in that family history is something that's also important for institutions and indeed, maybe more generally for society. It is incredibly near in terms of our history. And yet it's so interesting, you know, how do we not understand the histories of, you know, the late 19th century? I mean, often when we think about the role of the UK in international relations in international warfare, international actions, we often, you know, like the National Trust is at the moment, you talk about abolition and emancipation. And then there's this big sort of Queen Victoria sized sort of gap often. And then all of a sudden you're, you're, you know, World War One and it's 1914. And yet in every year of Victoria's reign, from the 1830s up until 1901, there were what the Victorians called the Little Wars and as well as we're here, actually the Little Wars of which obviously the attack in Nigeria was only one of them. They weren't little, they were serious operations and they were largely in Africa but also in other parts of the world. They were really involved in the corporate world. They were involved in a new level of technology on the military side and they were about the dispossession of Africa at a wholly new level. So that dispossession, as I've learned, was not only about, you know, as it was earlier about human beings under the Atlantic trade, it wasn't only about land, it wasn't only about goods, it was also about art and weirdly art and its display for racist purposes in the West found its way as a key part of that way in which Africa was involved as a continent. There's two things. I mean often you'll hear in conversations about the period preceding the First World War, about how from the Congress of Vienna, 1815, all the way through to 1914, the First World War, people say this was the longest period of protracted peace in European history. You know, this speaks to the balance of powers and the multilateral system that held together peace in Europe. And what you're saying is this masks a great deal of violence merely because it was inflicted on places beyond Europe. Well it's amazing that we're able to tell in such intimate detail each of the battles, each of the moment on a sort of day by day basis, you know, you know, instance in the First World War and the Second World War and yet only a matter of years earlier, you know, often the same soldiers have been serving in Africa that found their way in, you know, the First World War, where unable, we don't even, I mean, who has heard of these, you know, various expeditions in Uganda, the Bunyoro expedition of 1892 in Uganda, you know, who has heard of the Battle of Onderman in Sudan, who has thought about the bombardment of Zanzibar. Yeah, your church hall is all, yeah, I mean, they're all, yeah, Baden Powell is in some of these in the Ashanti, you know, yeah, I mean, there's a whole, there's a whole social class of, you know, those individuals that are later officers in the 20th century who were making early appearances in the historical records, you know, in these African conflicts. I mean, this was a, this was, you know, major operation that was going on. It was a big part of, you know, military activity, you know, naval, of course, in the case of the Benin expedition and also army in terms of Ashanti and others. Let's talk about the Benin punitive expedition, but I just want to quickly say the formulation here, I don't know where it comes from, who's it is, but you say effectively this expedition takes place in the context of World War Zero. So we know about World War One, we know about World War Two, but you're saying really, correct me from wrong here, really from maybe the late 80s, mid-1880s, all the way through to the early 20th century, there's this World War Zero. What does that mean and who are the people fighting it and what's it over? So, I mean, you know, we do, I think, as a culture and a society understand something of 1884, the Berlin Congress, that idea of the scramble for Africa in that, you know, euphemistic sort of term that we use. I mean, it sounds, you know, relatively unoffensive, doesn't it? The scramble was just to see who could carve something out on some abstract map, whereas, of course, the physical scramble and the carving out involved actually, you know, very much not simply, you know, redrawing a map, but a whole host of operations, which importantly saw the re-emergence of the company, you know. So we'd had, I mean, we were aware in the 17th century for slavery of the role of the Royal Africa Company, as indeed we were reminded of in Bristol only recently, with that late 19th century commemoration of Via Colston, who was involved in that, I think we're aware also of the importance of the East India Company, which of course was, you shut down earlier in the 19th century. 1857. 1857, because of how horrific, you know, the level of violence, the level of the dispossession that corporate colonialism involved. But then in the later 19th century, in most, obviously, maybe in terms of recent conversations, you know, Cecil Rhodes activity with the South Africa Company, but also activity in East Africa and, you know, importantly for West Africa, the Royal Niger Company, the founding of this, the role of this sort of corporate interest in the founding of the protectorate, in the extraction and the development of the palm oil trade, of the rubber trade to some degree of the ivory trade, the corporate nature of empire in the wake of 1884, leads really to what I have called in the World War Zero, that 30 year period in between 1884 and 1914, when so much of this military, you know, activity happened, in the case of the Benin expedition, I do my, I mean, because there aren't the historical records, I do my best to count up through simply the bullet count, through simply how many Maxim machine guns there were, how many rocket launchers, how many of the warships were involved. 1890s is incredibly sophisticated military technology. It is, that's exactly why, so the warships, and of course, remember, these abnormality activities, which are in the case of the Nigeria attack, but also a number of other attacks that, yeah, that happened, this was the source of, you know, the ongoing, this was the ongoing, you know, naval operation that had begun to suppress Atlantic trade after abolition, you know, in 1807, but there's this kind of mission creep for that naval operation. I want to come back to this. And so, yeah, but certainly the scale of what happens in 1897 and a number of other activities, you know, really under the coalition, the government of 1895, yeah, to 1900, so there were really nasty bunch of people that's end up in charge of this country, you know, Salisbury as, as your prime minister, and then as the, and then essentially a Chamberlain, you know, involved as well. They really in the final years of Victoria, in an attempt to celebrate her jubilee year in 1897, it's just a land grab. Well, not only a land grab, it's a it's this enormous, you know, attack upon West Africa, upon other parts of Africa, the sheer level of violence hits, it's a new peak. So that's what I'm saying is really, you know, World War Zero. A sublime of violence, almost. It does feel like just, this is kind of unprecedented in, in terms of intensity and the asymmetry of capacity is just, it's hard to imagine, maybe, I suppose, maybe 15th century, 16th century in the Western Hemisphere, in the Americas. Well, a lot of it is really the invention of the machine gun. Yeah, yeah. So you talk about, and this is initially, it's a punitive expedition, it's done because I think nine British soldiers killed. Well, I mean, the book actually queries how many people were, were killed by, say, small number of, of personnel were, were killed. And in retaliation, how many bullets are used from these Maxim guns? If we count the whole bullets across, not in the Maxim guns, but the rifles, but they're all of the bullets, we're talking three million or so are involved in this expedition. And so how many, how many casualties could we be looking at, sort of, a realistic estimate? So really, you know, one of the things that I thought that really came to mind a lot in the writing of the book was in Michelle Wolf, Rilo's idea of silencing the past. There is silence in terms of the casualties, in terms of the refugees, in terms of the deaths. We can only estimate, and of course, what, what Rilo said was that to silence the past is, is akin to silencing a gun. The silences aren't just emissions, they are acts to, to, to not say something is as much a speech act as really to say something. So we can only do our best, you know, to, to attempt to work out those numbers. For the northern Nigeria operation, which I go into that happens at the same moment in time, we're fairly sure we're talking about the tens of thousands. This, that was a very different sort of warfare where, you know, the cavalry essentially a medieval technology that's just moaned down by your machine guns. The sheer numbers in the jungle warfare, the bush warfare are hard to tell, but you know, almost certainly, and the book goes into this in some detail, we're talking tens of thousands of people. They are just shooting sort of with complete indifference into jungle. Into the jungle and advancing and they're clearing the, you know, the bush and they're moving ahead and just, you know, voli-firing and they're using the machine gun to, you know, to rake, you know, whatever is there. And of course this is, you know, you know, remember the kingdom has been working, has, you know, treaties have been signed, you know, the king, you know, the, the, the oboe, as he's known, has been working with the British in a whole host of different ways. And suddenly there's this attempt to remove sort of sovereignty. So of course the, the, the beanie people are rising up in order, in order to attempt to, to essentially, essentially fight back, you know. So the numbers, yeah, we expect to win tens of thousands. And very quickly, what was the, the kingdom of Benin at this time? What area did it sort of comprise? How, how large was it? And what happened once these soldiers got to the capital city itself, Benin city? Yeah. So the Benin kingdom is, you know, one of a number of your West African kingdoms that's, that's emerged in, you know, a phase of urbanization that dates right the way back, you know, to the 15th century, you know, the first oboe, and the, you know, the long line of oboes is earlier than, then, then, in, in little bit the first, you know, this is a long tradition of sovereignty. And the art and the making of art was a key part of this royal sacred landscape where the, the, the ancestral homes of the oboes are retained in a ruinous form and, and altars are set up with the famous heads and the plaques, but also your carved ivory tusks that tell the history of the oboes, a whole set of other, you know, just amazing art. So this is a, this is a sacred landscape. It's a, you know, which, which, which is at the heart of, you know, the kingdom. And so the attack upon it really is an act of, if you like, you know, desecration as much as it's also an act of extreme, you know, you know, ultra violence against people. And the taking of those objects, the taking of those ancestral objects from this civilization, you know, I mean, absolutely, you know, without a doubt, these West African kingdoms were incredibly, you know, sophisticated and, and, you know, to turn, as the book says, to turn them into archaeology. This is what that act of violence did. The coming together of the museum and the gun served to say, well, actually, if we just kill everybody and we take all their art and we display it in a museum alongside and initially in the British museum, you know, these objects are on display in the Assyrian and Egyptian galleries. So like, oh yeah, you know, the argument is, well, really the kingdom is now just like the ancient, you know, like it's antiquity. It's antiquity. So there's what I call a chronopolitics here, whereby the lie that Africa is in the past and not in the present, which is still with us as an idea starts with the, with the use of the museum in order to display a living culture as if it was dead, hand in hand with, with actual, actual death. And they sack the city. They destroy the city. They loot all these, these objects. I mean, I suppose the analog would be if somebody were to go into Florence and burn down the Piazza de la Signoria or the Palazzi, take all the paintings and the statues and say, well, this was all a very long time ago. Well, that's right. But also the thing that actually I I found most upsetting about, about the research for the book, because I hadn't actually realized this, I'd always been told and I believed what I've been told that there was a kind of cruel logic to the looting, because the loot, the looting was then used to defray the costs of an expedition that had been necessary because it was a punishment for an earlier infraction. Now having, you know, looked at it, you know, researched the book and written it, I understand a series of things about this. Number one, the idea of the punitive expedition was only a pretext and it was a pretext. It's an ideology, which, which I call, you know, white projection, the, the sort of your projection upon others of your own violence, of your own barbarism. It's an argument, it's an idea that finds its way all the way into the 20th century to Ireland and to, and to Kenya in the idea of the reprisal. At the same time, there is that sense that, you know, not only is it an act of, you know, reprisal and, and a fake, you know, pretext, but also the looting was absolutely a free-for-all. It was chaotic. A tiny number of the plaques ended up in the British Museum, you know, 200 are now on display, a further 100 were sold. That's out of 10,000 objects that were taken largely by individuals, you know, soldiers that kept them, sold them for money and they ended up in, and indeed even into museums and the museums are then sold off, you know, themselves. So, so the history of these 10,000 objects, the sheer violence of that attack then leads into a shuttering of this art to 150 and more, you know, locations around the world and that's, that's the context in which I then, in the book, you know, come to the question of the return of these, of these artworks. So when World War Zero is happening, 1890s, end of the 19th century, a great deal of war making, militarism, how does that relate to a kind of a humanitarian underpinning, a license to do all of these things? Yeah, so that certainly, and I think there are, you know, here there really are echoes of more recent years. You know, what seems to be going on in the 1890s is that part of the pretext is not only some incident in which, you know, some people may or may not have been killed, but also more general existential questions of the existence of slavery, the sense of your traditional religion existing rather than Christianity. So these are, this sense that Africans need to be helped is really constantly used as a refrain to justify such enormous levels of violence. So I think being aware of that role, even the squadron itself was known as the, which undertook this, you know, work was historically known as, if you like, the squadron was known as the humanitarian squadron. So yeah, that I think something that we're aware of in more recent years, that there is a militarist angle to the humanitarian sort of movement actually is here. There's a kernel of that here in the 1890s. There's obviously been a lot of talk in recent months and years, particularly the Edward Coulson statue, that actually Britain was responsible for ending the slave trade. And yet what you're saying here is that even in ending the slave trade, even in sort of being sort of the military instrument of abolitionism abroad, this leads to a great deal of violence and suffering on the behalf of black people fundamentally. Yeah, that's right. I mean, you know, there is a writing narrative out there that talks about the sacrifices made by the Royal Navy to end slavery, to continue that work. But of course what it misses is the mission creep of the humanitarian squadron as it was known with no hint of irony as they increasingly started to attack, to bombard, to patrol up and down rivers and to have this role really for maintaining your trade and sort of instigating trade, this corporate role as the years went on. And they're constantly using it as a license for regime change. That's what we call it today, isn't it? That's absolutely right. So that interesting interaction in certain contexts of informal empire or indirect rule, however we would refer to the protectorate and these sorts of, you know, they're not quite colonial sort of set ups, they're just on the border of that. And in those sort of border zones, you get these activities in which, yeah, the argument always is that people need to be kept in line and, you know, the military force has a key role in that. So yeah, that sort of mission creep of the humanitarian squadron is a really central element of the book. Finally, and this is, I presume the reason why you've written the book is there's obviously a big conversation right now about what you refer to as restitution, cultural restitution in the book. And in this country in particular, but across Europe, across the global north, there are many of these spaces with objects which have been stolen from elsewhere. We've just talked about how that's tantamount to a form of weapon. Should a museum like the Pitt Rivers Museum even exist? And if it should exist, and that's a moral should, what kind of space should it be? So I mean, I really feel we've never needed something like a world culture museum, you know, more than we do now. We need spaces where we can celebrate and understand art and sort of culture outside of the conventional Eurocentric lens. But that doesn't mean that that period of time in the past, when these these these institutions were turned into devices for oppression, for robbery, it doesn't mean that that should be okay, that that's okay, that we just ignore it. And indeed, it doesn't mean that the people who are trying to undo, to dismantle, to repurpose, to reimagine these institutions, that doesn't mean that we are attacking the institution in terms of its existence. What we're doing, exactly like anyone attempting to reform and to and to address institutional racism, you know, to face up, you know, to the past and to take action on that. Actually, we're just attempting to do our job. We're trying to be the creators who, of course, you know, have to, you know, the idea that museums always got to remain the same is a surprisingly recent idea. It's an idea that comes out as the book says, in the wake of your 9-11, when you've got, you know, the cultural world being instrumentalized for a particular Blair rights or a Bush Blair idea of, you know, the museum as a meeting space for cultures that just, you know, not only hides but also sort of reignites the relationship in between the museum and the corporate, you know, empire and that extractivist, you know, mode of thinking. So yeah, it's a case-by-case basis. But of course, we need to give things back when they're asked for. And we need to be much better at sharing the knowledge of what is in the collections. Here in the UK, you're never more than a hundred miles away from a looted African object. And this is a conversation we need to have a big argument in the book is let's absolutely, you know, de-center the most powerful, the most well-funded and the loudest institutions in this conversation in the British Museum, New York or wherever. Let's have this conversation in the regions. Let's see the Benin objects in the regions and from sort of Derby to, you know, Edinburgh, from Oxford and Cambridge to Bristol and Exeter. Let's have a national conversation about actually why these objects are here and how we can return them. And you want to, you want to decolonize the museum. That's where we keep on hearing decolonize. Is there a risk that this becomes subsumed within broader categories like inclusivity or diversity? Because decolonizing museum is a is a pretty radical path to go down, isn't it? Well, I'd say for a lot of, I think it's a word that is loved by many museum directors. And for that reason, we need to be incredibly cautious and suspicious of this term. I don't, I don't actually use the term. I talk about restitution. I talk in the book. And indeed in my, in my working life, I talk about the positive action we need to take to diversify our sector to start to look like and indeed really to represent the, the communities that we claim we serve, that that's how we begin to dismantle the white infrastructure, which is anthropology. So you would reject the idea of decolonizing museums? You talk about a post-colonial museum and that's kind of interchangeable. But you, I think there's a, I think there's a very, you know, what, so there are some national museums that will tell you that the decolonization of a museum is about holding on to stuff, but sort of you're telling the story better. Lots of, you know, rewrite the label. You know, that is not what I mean. I'm talking about, I mean, the words I, I choose to use are to dismantle, to repurpose and to reimagine. You know, I think, of course, the, and the decolonial movement as it started in Africa, the anti-colonial movement, you know, is incredibly important. But there's a generational shift, you know, what, what a Shill and Bembe calls a negative moment, which is the moment at which the Rosemary's Fool movement happened, which was a generation after apartheid, right? That, and yet, you know, inequalities are there still. And he talks about the negative moment emerging when long standing inequalities are there and further inequality is layered upon that. Here in museums, we have the same issues. So it's being led by African voices. It's, our job as the curators is to share, understand what's in the museums and share that knowledge, and then to listen and to take action on what Africans ask for. You know, writing this book, I, I guess I had to address the question of who cares about art? You know, you know, is this some side show to the really important work of how to address racism, the ongoing, you know, effects of empire in our museums? Whereas actually what I found out is that in this case, art has a central role to play in world history. Art was, was actually used as, as a form of racial violence, as a part of the wider dispossession of Africa. And so it's returned now and the restitution movement is a key element that's all of us on the left actually really need to be fighting for. It's a great way to end it, Dan. Your new book is out. I think it's this week, wasn't it? In all good bookstores, folks, particularly on Benin, but I think for anybody interested more broadly in that, that restitution movement, I think that's, that's a great place to start. If you've enjoyed this video and you want to see more like it and support our work, please go to enviromedia.com or slash reports, make a one off payment or a monthly subscription. We like to ask for I think one hour's waged work a month. We really appreciate it. It helps us to produce more of this content. And of course, we're going into 2021, which if it's plausible, could be even worse than 2020. There's never been a more important time to create a new media for different politics to platform precisely conversations like the one we've had today. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dan. Best of luck with the book. Thank you. My name is Aaron Mestani. You've been watching Navara Media.