 It's great to see everybody out here this evening. My name is Scott Taylor. I'm the director of the African Studies Program at Georgetown University. Sorry for that echo. Thanks for coming this evening. I was honored to be asked to call this event to order and to welcome you and to introduce our speakers. And in particular, I'm particularly delighted to hear the discussion between tonight about navigating change in African art, a particularly compelling theme, a hot topic, among Africanists today. I've still got a bit of an echo. Tonight's featured speakers are here to consider the dramatically changing aspects of the field of African art. And beyond tonight's discussion, this evening is just the start of a series of conversations shared between the National Museum of African Art and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. So that looks forward to continuing over several sessions, both here in Washington, DC and in the UK. Allow me to thank and present three individuals. Forgive me again for this back echo there. First, Nizam Uddin, who will talk briefly about the partnership between SOAS and the National Museum of African Art. Nizam Uddin is a trustee on the board for the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He received his bachelor's degree in economics and politics from SOAS, during which time he was elected president of the University of London Students Union. He received his master's degree in public policy from King's College London. His career has been dedicated towards addressing the challenges faced by minority communities. He has helped us to establish the Patchwork Foundation, an organization devoted to improving the political representation of underrepresented groups in the United Kingdom. Mr. Uddin is a member of the Mayor of London's Equality Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Group. He is also senior head of mosaic and community integration at the Prince's Trust, a group founded by the Prince of Wales to help young people from disadvantaged Muslim communities. In 2019, he was awarded a Yale Greenberg World Fellowship in order to further his social activism. And I can confirm that because he gave me a business card that had Yale on it. And following Nizam, we will hear from the director of the museum for a few minutes in order to address what's going on around us, specifically here at the museum, and explain the sheet rock. And look forward to that. And many of you, of course, I think all of you know Dr. Augustus Gus Casely Hayford, who joined the museum in February 2018. His background features a breadth, a wealth, and depth of experience in writing, lecturing, broadcasting on Africa's arts and cultures. He is a frequent on-air contributor about Africa, presenting Tate Britton's Great British Walks series for Sky Arts, two series on the Lost Kingdoms of Africa for the BBC, and a variety of other venues. He has delivered TED Global Talk on Pre-Colonial Africa and is the author of Timbuktu, part of the Ladybird Expert series. Dr. Casely Hayford was educated at the School of Oriental and African Studies, so us, at University of London, where he received his doctorate in African history and was later awarded an honorary fellowship. He remains a SOAS Research Associate and is a member of its Center of African Studies Council. Then joining Gus in a larger conversation about this evening's topic will be the events featured guest, Dr. Kwame Anthony Apia. Renowned British Canadian philosopher, prolific author, and scholar, he received his bachelor's degree in philosophy from Cambridge University, spent initial years teaching at the University of Ghana before returning to graduate school and receiving his PhD in philosophy from Cambridge. Since 2014, Professor Apia has served as professor of philosophy and law at New York University, teaching both at NYU's New York campus and the campus in Abu Dhabi. Professor Apia's published works, which have been translated into over 15 languages, focus on cosmopolitanism, identity, ethics, and African and African-American culture. From 2012 to 2018, he served on the advisory board of the National Museum of African Art. Just as he began his time with the museum, Professor Apia was presented with the National Humanities Medal in 2012 by President Obama for his, quote, contributions to philosophy and pursuit of truth in the contemporary world. His most recent book, The Lies That Bind, Rethinking Identity, was released in 2018, became a bestseller, a Washington Post notable book of the year, and won the New York Times Book Review described as fresh, even beautiful, stating, we need more thinkers as wise as Apia. I second that notion. So let me just welcome first my friend and colleague, Nazim Wadi. Good evening. It's refreshing. That's the last American accent you're going to hear this evening. It gets British from now on. I'm really pleased to welcome you all to this wonderful institution tonight for what promised to be an incredible conversation on navigating change in African arts. I'm Nazim Wadiin. I am representing Sowas here. Formerly, I have moved temporarily to the East Coast. I am here representing both Sowas and Baroness Valerie Amos, who's our director. She regrets that she's not able to be here. She sends her apologies. We had a trustees meeting today. I'm a very bad trustee. I missed the meeting, but it's one of the reasons why she couldn't be here today. One of the things I do for my day job as has been mentioned is I run something on behalf of the Prince of Wales in the UK. And it very much focuses on building social integration and building harmonious societies in the UK and increasingly internationally. And what's remarkable to me is the work I've been doing recently and the role of arts, the role of identities. If you haven't listened to the 2016 Rease Lectures by You Have To, it's a must. It formed my thinking around the work that I do now. And it's also why I want to really talk about why this partnership between our institutions around the theme of contemporary African art is so important. In terms of the relationship, it's going to include many things, including an exciting series of conversations that starts here today. In February 2020, it will be in London, so you will have to come along. We are open. We promise you, despite the conversations, we are not quite brested yet, so you're very, very welcome. But I want to take a moment to highlight the significance of such a partnership. And my organization is like the Smithsonian and this National Museum of African Art and SOAS, and the role we have to play in terms of being more proactive in bridging, playing a bridging role in a world of increasing division and misunderstanding. It's at the heart of what I do. It's at the heart of why I'm here on the East Coast looking at how we can build a stronger world. We are uniquely placed to use the medium of art to help make cultures and peoples accessible to not only strangers to a continent and its diaspora, but also to those diaspora communities themselves. It's at the heart of what I do in the UK. I work with minority communities. I spend a lot of time across America working with minority communities, and there is a clear identity crisis that is ongoing, exacerbated by this information age that we live in, and the role of art in humanizing those cultures and those places is crucially important. It's interesting, I wasn't going to share this, but I remember SOAS helped me. I fell in love with a Sudanese girl, and this is going in a bad direction. And I really wanted to impress her. And if it wasn't for SOAS, my absolute passion now is for Ibrahim El-Sallahi, who's a Sudanese artist. I followed his work for a long time and he really allowed me to open into myself and also into the continent. And if it wasn't for the institution of SOAS and this failed love, I would not have had that opportunity. And what's really amazing for me now, one of the things I'm studying at Yale, I get to audit classes, is actually looking at African reconciliation narratives. So we're focusing on Rwanda, on Nigeria, on South Africa, and looking at how and what happened and took place to build communities in terms of reconciliation. And the role of art is something which I hadn't appreciated. That's something of the last month I've been really looking at. And what's fascinating is, when we talk about Africa, the Middle East, or Asia, it's always a one-way transfer of knowledge. And actually, where Europe and the West is headed, there's a ton of things that we can take the other way. And that's something which I really want to promote. So we're delighted, as SOAS, to begin this evening with a leading intellectual and scholar, Antony Kwameh Apia, in conversation with Gus, who we've heard about, who's also an honorary SOAS alum. So I'm gonna be very, very brief and thank Gus and his team for putting this on. We're gonna be continuing the conversation in London in February 2020. We hope you'll be able to attend. If you are part of the SOAS community, you are very welcome. If you're not, you're also very welcome. And I look forward to meeting many of you later this evening. I'll hand over to Gus and to Kwameh. Thank you so much. I'm just gonna be very brief. I just want to say how welcome you are. It's just so wonderful to see so many people that I love and respect in this one place. And also to come here at this moment as we go through a period of change. I mean, this is a conversation that is dedicated to thinking about navigating change. And we are, as an institution, going through a period of change. And I can't think of anyone more perfect than our dear friend, Anthony Kwameh, Anthony Appier. You know, one of the most generous and interesting people that I have ever met. But I think also the perfect person to help us to navigate some of these themes. But also the perfect person, I think, to help us in this inaugural event to celebrate our partnership, SOAS and Namafa. It's a partnership which I am so delighted that we have brokered. I am so proud of my past at SOAS. And I am so proud that we have managed to broker this partnership. And we are going to do wonderful things together. Thank you so much, Nizam Angelica, in her absence, Baroness Amos as well for making this possible. And all our other colleagues from SOAS, you've been magnificent partners. And thank you for helping us to bring this program into being. And our remits, I think about SOAS and Namafa, our remits, our ambition, our underpinning beliefs and cultures are so beautifully aligned. Between us, we cover two thirds of the world's geography, 80% of its global population. But also in my mind, we are about its future. The catalyst for critical future economic growth, for human invention, for cultural dynamism. And anyone who visits global art fairs would have seen African artists who were within very recent memory contained on the very margins of art reporting and commercial attention. But now they're celebrated as being absolutely key figures in contemporary art. And so it's so exciting, I think, this time, this place, this community of people to come together to think about navigating the future. And you are so welcome. And you gather here as we reopen this pavilion. We're beginning, we're two thirds of the way through the refurbishment of it. And it's actually the first time since this building was finished, that it's had such a major renovation. I'll just tell you a little bit about what you will see if you come back in a few weeks when it is complete. Along this wall at the back here will be an installation by one of my favorite contemporary artists, Elias Sime, an Ethiopian artist who is doing absolutely wonderful things with found objects. He began his practice working with plastic bottles and buttons that he found in the markets around Addis Ababa. But he repurposed that rubbish in such beautiful ways and made a kind of new practice that is stunning, not just in terms of its looks, but also in what it says about contemporary Africa. And he has now moved on and most of his practice is inspired and uses circuit boards, motherboards from computers, pieces of computers. And he fashions them into what look like maps, beautiful maps, relief maps that seem to chart a new moment for Africa and its relationship to the world. And these are amazing things that he would find in these markets. But if you think they probably originated much of their original form as in terms of materially would have probably have come from Africa. They would have traveled to other parts of the world to be fashioned into new technologies and then come back in a way as rubbish, potentially to be repurposed. But he has found ways of refashioning them into beautiful maps, helping us navigate this complex period. And that is what we want to discuss today, how we navigate this complex moment and think about our futures. And in this space, we want to reinvent a sense of what it will be like to be in a museum space. But we want, as we go forward in a few weeks if you come back, here there will be large touch tables which will give us an opportunity to navigate our collection digitally. In those two cases at the end, we will have some of the highlights from our collection. And against that wall, we will also have a screen which will hopefully bring voices from across the world into this space in events like this one today. But we are all about navigation, both of our histories, but also of our future. And I cannot think of anyone better to be here today as this space, as this institution goes through a transformation inspired by the idea of navigation to help us think about that very theme. I'm so delighted to invite up to the stage Anthony Kwame Apia. Absolutely thrilling to have you here. I'm delighted to be here. You are such a hero of mine. Someone who shares some aspects of a genealogical history that we are both of Garnet and Descent. And it is wonderful to have you here in this space that you have dedicated quite a bit of time to because you are someone who's been on the board here, an advisor, a friend. I mean, you obviously have a love of African art. Do you collect? I wouldn't call what I have anything as grand as a collection. I do have some things that I value very much from a great variety of places and actually the one thing I would say about the art that's in our homes is that it's from everywhere. Really? So we've just been joined by a Buddha, Chinese Buddha. We have a wonderful Romanian painting from the 30s of a peasant woman knitting. We have, of course, because of where I come from, we have gold weights and we have aquaba figures and figures from Congo and some Yoruba stuff. I have a Yoruba brother-in-law. So I have access to the secrets of Nigeria and so on. So I mean, I would say I learned about all this in Kumasi in Ghana where I grew up because my mother was a major collector of a Santee art and gold weights in particular. And also with Alex Cheromatin, who should be better known than he is, who was one of the people who really was the driving intellectuals force behind the cultural center in Kumasi, who was, as it happens, also our neighbor when we were growing up. And so I grew up with his kids. But so, yeah, I grew up in a household where my mother was constantly being visited by mostly Hauser speaking traders who were going into the villages and bringing stuff out. And she was only interested in the gold weights as they soon discovered. So they didn't bother to bring anything else after a while. And she would discuss them with them. She would not just buy things that she liked and buy collections. She would say, where does this come from and so on. And as a result of all of that, she eventually published some work about these things. And the main thing she did was to collect the proverbs that are associated with the gold weights. I'm sorry to have my back to you. The proverbs associated with the gold weights. So she and I published 7,500 proverbs in my father's tree language in tree. And then we translated them with also with some help from somebody who's actually from the family of the linguists of the king of a Santee. So we certainly grew up in our household. And I should say as well that my mother was very much involved. So there's an art department at the university in Kumasi. And one of whose alumni is El Anatsui. Oh, really? And my mother used to go to the annual, my mother who had been to art school herself in England and in Florence, went to the annual shows. So we had some contemporary, contemporary that is in the 60s and 70s contemporary paintings and so on that she caught on those things. I don't remember, she used to take me, I don't remember seeing, unfortunately, I don't remember seeing El Anatsui's show, his first show when he was graduating. And if I'd known what was going to happen, I certainly would have made sure to invest in him at an early stage. So yeah, we grew up caring about these things. And living with art? Living with art, yes. Is that sort of, do you think that's informed what you've done, what you've become, your attitude to art? I mean, just having... I think you can't be shaped by, and as I say, what we have comes from all over the place. But so did what we had in Ghana come from all over the place. Yes. The most, I guess the most kind of collectible thing in global terms that we had was a painting by Augustus John of Jamaican, which my grandfather bought from John in the 1930s. So it had been in the family since it left the hands of the painter. And I think it's one of his best paintings, not just because I own it now, but because in that period when he was in Jamaica for I think six months to a year, he did some fabulous paintings. And there's a wonderful painting that he did in that period of Sri Jamaican women, which I think is in one of the public museums in the Midlands. And we went to see an Augustus John show in Salisbury this summer, which also had some things. And that's why I can say that I think our painting is one of the best, because I enjoyed the show, but I thought, oh, you got something that's at least as good as most of this. So we didn't just grow up. And we had Chinese, my mother had traveled in China when she was young, and in Russian, because my mother and my grandfather had been the British ambassador in Moscow. So we had stuff from lots of places. And the way you talk about art is the way that... It is the thing that I love about it. And it is, for me, kind of very evocative of memories that I have of aunts unraveling wonderful cloths and telling me stories. And the interpretation of that work was utterly fluid. On different days it would be different. But it was about the way in which art could bind us together, irrespective of where we were. We had a sense of being connected to something that was rooted in Ghana. Yes, I think the place, that sense, so we loved this center that Dr. Thierry Martin was the inspirer of, because it was... It was made by the people of Kumasi. Yes, and it had dance classes, it had carving classes. You could watch people making gold weights, you could watch people weaving kente. There were just parties, weekends, when young people would come and dance. And in the middle of it was a small museum which contained, among other things, some of the legacy, the material legacy of Akon Fonachi, who was the priest who co-created a santi with the first king of a santi, a sater to the first. So it was kind of ours in a deep way. It also housed the local branch of the National Archives. So it had print material and non-print material. And it had a gallery where paintings and sculpture were shown and so on. And it was just across the valley from our house you could get there in 15 minutes. And so we grew up going there very often and I think, certainly for me, I can't imagine a life in which, I can't imagine a life without museums. And it's not just museums because Akon Fonachi is this figure who drives the idea of narrative, being critical to community. And you say that where you grew up, it wasn't just that there was amazing art and material culture around you, but there was also an archive. It's about narrative, about interpretation. And I guess that is the thing that great museums do, is that it's not just the art, it's also about the ways in which we animate that through consideration, through interpretation. I mean, I think, so one of the great things about interesting artworks is that you never, you can't say everything there is to be said about them. They can always be interpreted, reinterpreted, placed side by side with different companions, which then lead you to think about them in different ways. And I think the other thing is, each of us is free to do our own interpreting. You know, there's all, there's every kind of museum. There's museums that provide you with huge amounts of contextualizing information. And then there's museums that just put something in front of you and say, look at this. And these are both important things. I mean, I think it's important to get people to grasp that what is sometimes condescendingly called connoisseurship is actually important because one constraint on sensible interpretations of works of art or indeed of cultural artifacts more generally is that you shouldn't say things that depend upon falsehoods. You shouldn't say, oh, that's a nice smile if in fact what it is is, well, I was going to say the other way around, downstairs in this building there's a thing with the foul teeth of a woman. She's, that looks fierce apparently to the Europeans who started looking at it. But that's because, but they're filed like that because that's a model of beauty in that culture. She's not fierce, she's beautiful. Well, so you got to get that right. You can't just make up anything you like. But still, even if you know everything that's to be known about an object, there are things to be said that haven't been said. And so I think that sort of inexhaustability is I think what I, it's a particular things the things we think of as great works of art. They have that kind of inexhaustability. You want to keep saying things about them. You want to keep thinking about them. They prompt you to have interesting ideas. And that's, you know, and that's why we go, at least that's why I go to art galleries and museums is because these objects invite you to use your brain and your heart. Yes, and I think it's that, it's that very drive that I think is at the core of the transformation we want to make in this institution. And so in us reconsidering this space, it is all about allowing people, whether they actually attend or whether they don't, but to in some way be engaged in the conversations that happen here. And I think that's one of the reasons why Elias Sime, who creates these amazing maps that are about a kind of clash of multiple different narratives that seems to be very much part of contemporary Africa as it navigates this period of incredible change. And one, you do get a sense that African artists are grasping these complexities in a way that few other artists, you know, are doing with equivalent, I don't know, just the level of analysis and thought, I just think is pretty much incomparable. I think of Eleanat Sui, I think of Yinka Shonibare, people who are helping us to think about where we sit today and the relationship to the past and the responsibility to narrative. And I think it's maybe not so surprising. I mean, because it's such an interesting situation at the moment if you're an artist from or in Africa. Yes. Finally, there's people paying proper attention, but you've been paying attention to the arts of the world all along. I mean, well, the people who taught at Eleanat Sui and in Kumasi, some of them were Ghanans, but they were Russians and British and French and all kinds of people. And so that the young artists who were trained there, they knew, as it were, the world's repertory and they could decide what to do with it. They could ignore it, they could do something with it. And usually what they did was take, use it, but in a way shaped by their own particular background and traditions as like Anat Sui's echoing of the Kente tradition, for example. But the things he's using to make it, well, the bottle tops weren't invented in Nigeria. They were made in Nigeria, but those bottle tops were invented by people like the Heineken Brothers who invented bottled beer. So I think that sense of, I mean, I think certainly I grew up very much with the feeling that we were very conscious of the wider world. When I was a kid, for example, because of Pan-Africanism, we got to, so Richard Wright visited us when I was a child as part of the circulation of African Americans through Africa that was invited by Nkrumah, basically, and he wrote Black Power, an amazing, strange book about that period. C. L. R. James came by, again, West Indian. So I think, but also people came from India and Russia and so on. We knew people from everywhere and we were interested in what they were doing, even if they weren't, I mean, the ones who came to us were obviously interested in us, but even if most Americans and most Russians and most Chinese and most Indians weren't interested in what we were doing, we were interested in what they were doing. We had a kind of cosmopolitan attention and I think that's obviously shaped poetry and novels and the plastic arts of places like Ghana, a great deal. And it's that, now, this is, I think, it's worth pointing out that this is completely normal for how the arts work, right? I mean, take the non-English things out of Shakespeare and see how far you can get. No Danish princes, no Roman noblemen, that gets rid of Julius Caesar, Mennonius, and Coriolanus and so on. Or take Basho, arguably the greatest Japanese poet, at least historically, he writes in Japanese, of course, but he uses a Chinese script because he has to because that's the word script. And he's a Buddhist, the Buddha was in Japanese, the Buddha was an Indian, or what we now think of as an Indian. So art is like that, poetry and literature are like that, the sort of creativity that you see, that great explosion of creativity in European modernism in the early 20th century, that was about, as Picasso didn't say, but is often said to have said, stealing from everywhere. Yes. So I think that's normal, and I think that for African artists, it was wonderful to be in that period when you were learning about, you could learn about the world's great traditions, but also feel free to draw on what you had distinctively to consider, to contribute. And I think that's the, the great cosmopolitan thought is, we are going to be profoundly enriched if we interact with the civilizations of elsewhere, but that's because we have a civilization to bring, right? It's the interaction. We're not going out there because we have nothing, we're going out there precisely because we have something to offer in exchange. But because there hasn't always been an equality with which we've been able to bring our culture to the wider world, that it has left a great deal of misunderstanding, but also additionally, if one travels in Africa and you look at the state of museums and the way in which valuable, wonderful historical narrative is neglected, that it's heartbreaking. And that does impact things and that it is in part legacies of colonialism that have left us with some of this and we have to find ways of dealing with that. Right. I mean, that's completely right. The, this very exciting cultural center that I grew up with, it was being created as I was a kid, is a little bit rundown now. It's not as exciting as it was. Obviously the enterprise of creating it was more exciting than the enterprise of maintaining it. That's always true with these sorts of things. But, and there is an interesting question about what the audience is in a city like Kumasi or Akra or Dakar. What the audience is for what? What would young people in Akra want to see? And I think they, it's not clear to me that most of them would want necessarily to see what I think of as the kind of classical heritage of the arts of Ghana. I don't know how interested they are in what has come to be thought of as sculpture and so on. So, but that's in part because the opportunities for learning and exposure haven't been there. Again, the main museum in Akra is not really in super condition. So I think for me, I always, because I have in my life gained so much from interacting with Italian art or Ming China or beautiful calligraphy in Arabic. I'm always thinking how could we make available to young people, or to people generally, but especially the young people, I think, in a place like Ghana, a wider sampling of the possibilities of human creativity. You can think what you like about the new Louvre in Abu Dhabi. You can think what you like about how it came to be and what the background is and all that. But going there and thinking, people in Abu Dhabi can take their kids and see Roman, classical Chinese, Greek, Egyptian stuff. They can see fantastic African, just a few, but fantastic African large scale sculpture. They can see great, the early photography, European photography of the 19th century. They can see paintings by painters whose names we know, European painters whose paintings we know. They can see contemporary sculpture in the sculpture garden outside by artists who are still around and alive. That's wonderful to me. And that should be available, in my view, to everybody everywhere. But most Ghanaians might protest that they don't even have the work from Assanti and Fanti and they don't have work that is local and that they look at other parts of the world in which there seems by comparison to be an embarrassment of riches. And I mean, do you feel that there are opportunities to recalibrate some of that, to rebalance some of that, too? I mean, there are wonderful things from Assanti in this building, in the British Museum. Yes. On the Museum Insel in Berlin and at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. And it'd be nice if the standard experience of a Ghanaian museum goer in Ghana included stuff like that, stuff of that quality. There is some stuff of that quality. It's not very well displayed at the National Museum, but still, there is stuff of that quality. It's not that we don't have anything. And in particular, because some of our, I mean, I have a particular fondness for reasons that are obvious for goldweights because my mother collected them. And the thing about goldweights is they're not royal art. Yes. They're the art, these things were made for use by ordinary people. And there's a lot of them. And the reason my mother was able to collect them was because when they stopped being used to weigh gold because gold does cease to be the currency, a lot of the people who earned them lost interest in them because they were interested in them for their function. I mean, they wanted nice ones, but they had them because they could use them for this function. But there's lots of them left. And so the possibility of, and also that tradition isn't entirely dead because as I said, there are people being making goldweights at the National Cultural Center. And you always think that you knew the last great maker of one of these traditions. And there was a wonderful guy who made Fantastic Star for Man called Cromo, which is the tree word for a Muslim. So he was a, a Santi Muslim, who was a farmer in the farming season. And then in the off season, he made beautiful lost wax works, which, and he got to know my mother. And so she ended up often buying them from him. And she also connected him with a British sculpture named Christine Fox, who went and apprenticed herself to him. And she wrote a wonderful book about his methods and about how he actually did it. And he was, of course, he said, well, I'm just passing this on because, you know, this is how they've always done it, which is what these people often say. But he was in fact, fantastic creative. Some of the things he made, nothing like anything anyone's ever made before. So there is stuff. And, but I agree that in a, there's a special reason for having some of the great Ghanaian art in Ghana. It's because Ghanaians have a special connection to it. It's as simple as that. But that doesn't mean that, and I think most people in Ghana wouldn't say, okay, we want it all back because they want, they're proud of it. So they're glad that some of it's in the great museums. But did you see Black Panther? There is that moment. Oh, yes. Fairly near the beginning of the film. When Eric Kilmunger, he walks into a museum which is a barely disguised British museum and there's the director there. And she shows him a mask and she suggests it's fuller. And he then corrects her and says, no, actually. It's Wakanda. And she then tells him that you took this from my people, like you took everything else. And then when I saw that in the cinema, that as he said those words, there was a kind of a ripple of applause from across the audience. And I did feel kind of hurt because I mean, one of the reasons that I've wanted to work in this particular area is I wanted to share what I felt was the very best practice with the widest possible audience. And I thought that was a good thing. And it's painful when you begin to realise that ambiently, this isn't just amongst small groups of professionals, that there is real resentment for some of what. Yes, so good. I mean, I think, look, it's important to get it right here. Right. Not to go overboard in any one of the many mad directions that you could go. So the Goldweights are a good example. They were sold to traders by people who set the price. And some of it happened in the colonial context, some of it happened in the post-colonial context, but it wasn't as if anybody was holding a knife to anyone's throat or a gun to anyone's head. These objects came to be more valued by somebody over here than somebody over there. So they travelled. But maybe that the grandchildren of the people over here would like them back. I would like the grandchildren of the people over here to be rich enough just to go out in the market and buy some so that they can get them back that way. But so some of it, you have to do real provenance research. You can't declare everything that came out of Africa to have been stolen. That's condescending to Africans, some of whom sold this stuff because they thought the money they were getting was worth more than the thing that they were selling, often because they could just make another one. As far as they were concerned, because they were, when these things have ritual functions, from the point of view of the person doing the ritual, what matters is the function. It's not having any particular one. And if somebody wants a lot of money for this one, there's a guy down the road who makes them. So I think we've got to be sort of serious. I reviewed for the new review books a book about, well, a book called La Fri Fontaine, Phantom Africa, which was written by the guy who accompanied one of the great collecting expeditions of the French museum system from Dakar to Djibouti. They went across the whole of the French Sudan, as it were. Some stuff in there was stolen. They said so in the book. The correct response to theft is to return something to its owner. But clearly, a lot of it was bought. So I think we need to be serious if we're gonna ask a historical question. We need to do serious historical work. I've been involved a little bit with the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, which is now sort of the context for the presentation of the German colonial collections. And they are committed to, and I'm glad they are, to proper provenance research for everything they own. They wanna know how they got it, where it came from. And some of these stories are gonna be horrible because they have Namibian stuff and what the Germans did in Namibia was appalling. But we need to know the truth. And one reason why I don't think you should sort of be in the frame of mind too. I have this attitude to the Italians. The Italians are constantly trying to get stuff back to Italy, but Italy is crammed full of Italian art. They don't need any more Italian art. What they need is more Egyptian art. They need more Chinese art. They need some proper representation of the Muslim world in their very, very Christian museums. So I think we don't have enough. And one of the reasons, for example, we don't have certain things is because they were taken in punitive expeditions by Sagan at Woolsey or, and most people don't know that Baden Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, had a splendid visit to my hometown and she destroyed museums and stole stuff. And it's very funny, actually, his account of it because he says he's describing British soldiers or soldiers under British orders, some of them were from other parts of Africa, grabbing stuff from rooms. And he says, it's very orderly. They took all this material without any looting. And you think, well, what does he think looting is? If you're going, so there's a lot of horrible stories and a lot of things were stolen and so on. But I think most people in Comasi who thought about it think that it's great that people in the British Museum can learn how terrific our stuff was. We'd like some of it back, but we don't want it all back because we want people to know about us. So I think I would like us to, what I feel is great about the present and about the sort of thing you're doing is, we're shifting from a mode of thinking about these things which is all focused on who owns what, which is very uninteresting, to the question, who has access to what? How can we give everybody a suitably cosmopolitan access to these incredible world treasures? You are looking after, in my view, in this building, you're looking after a portion of humanity's treasures. And you should be looking after it for humanity, not for Washington DC, not for the United States, not for African-Americans, not for Africans, but for all of us. And if we can get the museums of the world who have these great treasures, there are still treasures out there that aren't in museums, I think that's good. I think it's good that people are living with great art. But there's enough in the great museums to guarantee most people in the world a pretty good experience if we think carefully about how to share this stuff. But in order to do that, we have to deal with the problem you raised, which is that the institutions for looking after things in much of, outside South Africa and Egypt and Morocco maybe, but I mean, are not in good shape. And you simply could not responsibly take one of the world's treasures and put it in a place which may be close to where it came from, but isn't equipped to look after it. So if President Macron wants to do something useful, I suggest that he commits his government of persuading the other governments of Europe to put serious money into building the museum homes in Africa for this stuff that he wants to send back and that he promises that he will do what the Louvre has done in Abu Dhabi, that he'll, yes, he'll send some of the Mali and stuff back to Mali, but it'll come with a manne. It'll come with some excellent Chinese painted, painted calligraphy, poetry. It'll come so that, now, it'll take a while to build the audience of these things because people aren't used to this. But look, the British Museum only started doing this a couple hundred years ago. Before that, people, most people in England wouldn't have had any idea what to do, presented with what's in the British Museum. They wouldn't even have had the idea of the museum. They would have had the idea of an art gallery, and they would have had the idea of a church, both of which are full of art, but they wouldn't have had the idea of a museum. So I think, one, sorry, I'm saying too much, but one thing that I like to remind people of, or tell people if they don't know, is that in my hometown, when Saganet Wolsey arrived, there was a large museum, and it was there because one of the early 19th century of Santihinis heard about the British Museum and said, I want one of those. And it had, and there's a wonderful accounts in the newspapers, as it's being looted by these British troops, of what was in there. And they had Persian rugs, copies of the London Times from a hundred years ago, of course, some stuff made locally, swords, they had the uniform of a West Indian colonial soldier. I mean, it was a real museum. So it didn't take more than 10 minutes to persuade this of Santihini, that that's a good idea. But then, of course, it was all destroyed and taken away. So I think we can do that, I think we can create a world in which, which is more equal in the sense of access, in the sense of saying to people, art matters to you because it's connected with you, but it also matters to you when it isn't connected to you. And you will, one reason I can appreciate what's so terrific about the gold weights is because I have a context for that, which includes a lot of other work in metal from a lot of other places. And that doesn't make me any less proud of gold weights, it makes me more proud of gold weights because I think we've made a contribution that nobody else has made. Yes. Well, one of the things we're trying to do as an institution to address this is that we are inviting colleagues from across the world, both from across Africa and Europe and North America to come together to think about how we might deal with this as a single sector. And there's a kind of a very strange situation in which many museums in the West that one of the biggest challenges they have is of storage because of the sheer size of their collections and the complexity of them. And yet one travels in many parts of Africa and they suffer from a terrible paucity in terms of... But we have to get to a place in which that kind of level of exchange is possible. Yes. And so we want to come together as a sector to make proposals to fund us so that we can begin to get a level of equity in terms of provision. And then we can begin to swap expertise, to begin to co-develop exhibitions and to begin to build a sector that feels like it is unified by a single set of standards and a single shared feeling that this is something that we're doing together. And I think that is the thing that led to the instantaneous ripple of applause in that auditorium when we were watching the film is that feeling that we are somehow doing this to the exclusion of others and almost enjoying the fact that there is such a division in terms of provision. But it is exactly the opposite of that. We are desperate to see greater equality and more sharing. And in my tenure, we'll do whatever we can to try to make sure that we address them. And you will, of course, like the British Museum, you will be constrained by the attitudes of the society around you. Because among other things, we're in a government quango, as I used to say, a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization. And this is because the British Museum's main problem is that and why Neil McGregor was constantly saying to me, well, I wish he wouldn't talk about ownership because he could share things with people as long as they didn't say they wanted to own them. And then if he wanted them to own them, he had to get an act of the British Parliament. And you can imagine how easy that would be. So I think if the sector can think about these things in the right way, it'll be able to create an atmosphere in which it's possible to get the stakeholders, which include governments, to understand, but this is good for everybody. So one thing that there's a shortage of in say London is kind of mid-level Nigerian art. You can see the top level and you can see what's called tourist art. And I don't use that term as barragingly, but that is the stuff made for tourists. And that's a loss because you can't interpret, you can't interpret El Anatsui, really, unless you know something about the world of Nigerian, I mean, he's a gunman, but he mostly worked in Nigeria, that he, what's the context, what the reference is? And that, so there are things that people could learn. People who already grasp that there's something interesting about El Anatsui could learn if they had a more successfully integrated system sharing with them. I mean, I like, you know, as I said, I went to this Augustus John show in Salisbury. It's a minor, a small show by a minor artist, but that's part of one's aesthetic experience too having all shows by minor artists. And there's a whole area of African aesthetic experience that is completely unavailable to people in less institutions like this, bring it to them. So I think we can let people see that there's, it's precisely because it is everybody's, everybody gets, even though it's differently related to different people, in the end it's our human heritage and everybody's entitled to have access to it. It doesn't mean everybody will want to come. So that's fine. But if somebody, you know, in, in Wagadugu wants to have access, wants to see something of Quattrocento painting, I think they ought to be able to. And the only way to do that is to send some of it there because many people in Wagadugu can't afford a plane ride to Rome. So I think that's my vision. My vision is of a networked world in which each museum is a kind of, it's a site of knowledge and curation and preservation and storage and display. And, but it's all part of a big connected system. And it has to be, this won't work unless the system is fundamentally much fairer than it is today. And of course that's true, not just of the aesthetic world of the world in general that it would be better if it were a more equal world. And one of the wonderful things is that you look at areas like healthcare in Africa where people have really engaged with digital opportunities for trying to really change their healthcare options. And one doesn't wonder if in the future we couldn't begin to deploy some of that ourselves because as you say, there may be someone in Wagadugu, but the technologies and the bandwidth is there. I've stood in the middle of the desert and in the Sahara and got five bars on my mobile phone. And the ways in which people are engaging with those possibilities are utterly innovative and exciting and thrilling. And if we could bring some of that here, and that's what I would love this space to become, a kind of interface onto that activity where we can both convey the sorts of things that we are thinking about, but also bring some of that here. Yes, absolutely. I mean, I was for some years on the Board of Art Store, which is an organization that exists to take digital representations of artworks and make them available. And part of the project was to make them available to everybody on the planet in principle, not just to make them available for American universities or British universities. And so that the price of access, if you're an African institution, is extremely low. That's great. And the same is true now on the Board of the New York Public Library. All of our digital collections are not just available to New Yorkers. If the intellectual property issues are solved, anybody on the planet can use the New York Public Library to look at anything we've got. Yes. And so, yeah, there's lots of exciting possibilities in these technologies. And of course, as in all things, this is a place where artists are the head of the queue to think about how to do these things, making artworks that can be shared across space and time through these new technologies. That's the sort of thing that artists are doing constantly. Yes. It's an exciting time. I'm just going to open it up to some questions now. If you... It'll come. Hi. Thank you very much. My question would be, what are your thoughts on the virtual art experience or using new technologies to bring art to different people instead of having the art come to them, bring the art to them? Do you have any ideas on that and how that shapes access for disadvantaged people to art? Well, it's certainly we should do it. That's what something like Art Store does. It allows you to... Anybody in the world can look at Leonardo through Art Store, but at least with the current technology, there's something you're not going to get if you don't actually go to a museum and be physically embodied in the same space as the object. There may be objects of which that isn't true, but in general, there's a reason why... Yes, we have catalogs and we take them home and we love them, but they're a kind of memorial of something and the real thing happens when you're in the presence of the object. Now, this is partly because we have an aesthetic ideology which is very widely distributed, and I share it, of the aura, of the nothing... Look, you can get to Paris now, I suppose, from New York for a few hundred dollars, and then you have to pay for a hotel, and then you have to pay for the entrance to the Louvre, and then you can get to see, as many people do, the Mona Lisa. For that money, you could buy a replica of the Mona Lisa, indistinguishable to your eye, because the technology is now that good. Why are these people wasting their money going to Paris? Well, because they want to be in the presence of the painting, and so do I. I mean, not that particular painting, because it's too crowded and I haven't seen it before, but there's a difference, in other words. So that isn't a reason for not doing it because something is better than nothing, and if your main concern is, as I've alleged, mine is, access. Then yes, this is a wonderful... That's why I think art stores are so wonderful, it allows people... If you're at the Cape Town University Art Department, you have access to the same images as the guy at the Harvard Art Department. That's great, I love that, but if you're going to be an art historian, you're going to have to be in the presence of some, I think, of some actual art, not just pictures of art, not just re-representations. It's like the difference between... I mean, all of us now can listen to performances of, say, you know, Chopin Walses or Beethoven Sonatas that are way, way better than the typical, very good performance of those things in a performance in the 19th century, because we have recordings of them. But does that mean you don't want to go to any concerts? No, you want to be in the physical presence of an artist making the music, I think. And so the auditory experience may be indistinguishable from the auditory experience of sitting in the room, except that you can cough and contribute in the room, but you can cough and contribute while you're listening to the DVD or listening to the thing on your phone. So I think, yes, we must take all these advantages as much as we can, but we shouldn't lose track of the fact that for many of us, at least, the object itself, being in the presence of the object, what Benjamin called the aura, is just part of what we care about. It's part of what it is to take art seriously. I just want you to go back to the issue of repatriation, because it's a very interesting one. There is so much debate around it. And it really made me think what you said about, because I was more about this idea of returning. Now, hearing from you, this idea actually you write about having major masterpieces around the world is actually a very important element as well. But it comes to the question of about what kind of story we are telling about this object in this museum outside of the sort of original place. I'm thinking of the Benin bronze in the British Museum, which are basically in a basement room, and the story around those objects, it doesn't seem to be very well said. So I think there is still the issue. I really appreciate the point that you really made me think about it, but there's still some contentious around who's creating it, who's telling the stories of those objects. Yes, so I mean, that's another thing, because I said, because objects of art are infinitely interpretable, it matters, as in all things, that they be interpreted by a diverse range of interpreters. And what a Marri artist says about a Marri work matters in a special way, even if the Marri artist doesn't have a degree in art history. Because she's probably going to tell us something about what it means to her, and what it means to her, since she's also Marri, is one of the things that I would care about in thinking about the work. So yeah, we've got to be pluralizing who does the interpreting, not because the people from the place have an epistemic privilege, it's not because, as it were, what they know is truer than what the well-informed historian who's actually done the work and done the carbon dating knows, but because it's a valuable part of what needs to be done. I mean, the point about the British Museum and the Ben and Bronze is, and of course there are Ben and Bronze is here, and there are Ben and Bronze is on the Museum Enzo, and a lot of places, and in New York, is that if they're not interestingly enough displayed there, that's a tiny part of the problem, because the British Museum is full of things that are never going to be displayed at all, because it has this vast archive. We shouldn't throw them away, even if we're not going to display them, and they're obviously there available for research, which is also an important function of museums, but I think that instead of this kind of collectors have this impulse, that's fine, they're part of the ecology, but museums shouldn't. Museums are making the collection, that they should be in the business of making the collection available, not of owning it, but of making it available. In order to make it available, you have to own it as a matter of law, but, or somebody has to own it as a matter of law, but that doesn't mean that that person should be the only person who ever shows it. And so I think, now, look, sending jumbo jets full of art around the world is not very green. There are, if we had this massive system of circulation, however, some people wouldn't, some other people could see stuff that they would have had to travel to see at home. So maybe we could actually make it work out, even from an ecological point of view. Hello, thank you so much for both your thoughtful comments and very engaging, dynamic conversations. So my question is a bit of a practical matter. So what is it that, in your opinion, we can learn from some of the successes and failures that might have happened recently on a small scale in terms of shared ownership and stewardship, and as well, what are the roles that other institutions can play? I say this having in mind observing, going to museums in Canada and being aware that they've adopted a shared ownership with indigenous communities, but I do lack the insight there to see what sort of things were successful and what things failed in that context. And I'd really, really love to understand what's energizing about that as we continue to navigate the changing space of art and the mission of having a shared ownership or shared accessibility, if you will. And the other part of it that I also find fascinating is traveling to see museums in Morocco. It's really, really surprised by some of the active involvement by national banks and other institutions. So I just would love to hear thoughts on what roles other institutions can play as well as what we've already been able to learn more recently about how these initiatives have already taken shape. That's definitely a question for Gus. I think one of the great examples of this is the Alongay project, which we've invested in here over a number of years, which is Alongay was a photographer who captured Benin in a period of real transition and left behind a body of photographs which are utterly exquisite. And we as an institution were able to acquire these plates and to share with the people of Benin the body of this work in a way that would not have otherwise been possible. And it's a project which more than just being about the work has built a kind of trust, brokered a model of the work a model of a relationship which will mean that we can deploy further, well, we can engage in other kinds of opportunities to share objects and expertise with those peoples because we've built up that trust over a decade. And I think that it's in that way, that kind of beginning with collaboration around program, working toward acquisition, the beginning to share the, just begin to share certain sorts of areas of priority as well in terms of the development of institutions, that we can really align institutions across the sector in such a way that the feeling of ownership will actually not be, it'll be almost mute. It may well be something which is important for legal reasons, but it may not be something which actually encumbers us from actually thinking about how we do what we do. And at the moment I feel that for a lot of our sector that there is such a feeling of dissonance because most, in fact, all the people that I work with are people that I have such high regard for, that these are people who are driven to do what they do mainly because they believe in it. It's a kind of moral imperative that grounds them. And the idea that somehow we, because we have failed to navigate this historical appalling baggage that we weren't actually responsible for creating is doubly intolerable. And we must now find ways of navigating our way through this so that we can build a sector which is not just equitable, but which is more pleasurable to work with and that we don't have that sense of dissonance. And I think we as a generation have the personnel, the belief, we have the resources and the technologies to deliver that. And I think that really does thrill me. That makes me feel so excited. And the conversations we're going to begin this year and continue next year, I'm hoping are just the beginning of making those sorts of changes. You remind, something I said reminded me of something that I'm going to get wrong because I don't remember the details exactly, but there's a great example here actually from the museum, the Humboldt Forum, so the, which is connected with the German colonial museums. And there's a group in Latin America, some of whose material culture was collected by a German collector in the 19th century. The curator of that work has been going back and forth in this community. And what's interesting is when the moment of all this talk of repatriation came, they said, no, you're doing a good job looking after it. You can keep it there, but here's what we would like. And they developed, they wanted to make a movie to explain some of this stuff. They wanted to develop children's books that talked about their culture. And the sensibly and wisely and also justly, that's what they did. The curator is now part of a relationship between the collections and the people whose ancestors made the objects, in which, of course, they're acquiring interesting new cultural material out of this as well. But the main sort of motive was to make the people at the other end, the people who's of the culture of origin, feel that they were getting something out of it too. And it turned out that what they wanted wasn't what you might have thought they would have wanted. I had the same experience, actually. I went to the opening of the Cape Orly Museum, which is where all the French colonial collections now are. And I went to a panel, I mean, listen, I wasn't on it, to a panel about stuff from the French Polynesia. And the people from there were saying, what we want is to be allowed to come and use these things in the museum. We don't have at the moment, we will, but right now, we don't have the places for them. We can't look after them. You're doing a great job of looking after them. We'd like, some of them, you may not know this, they said, but some of these objects have the following functions. And when certain things happen in our society, we need to be able to commune with the objects. But we don't have to send them to us. You just send us a ticket, we'll come and we'll do it here. Again, I mean, so, if you are having the right conversations with people, you'll discover what they actually want. Now, eventually, of course, they'll want some of it back. And that, as I say, that doesn't worry me. It's gonna worry people who are worried about ownership. If it does go back, it'll still be the case that those people caring about it will want the world to know that they have produced these things. And so they'll want it to travel again, too, eventually. And in a world of circulating material culture, this will be normal, I think. One last question. Can I have to get the last one? I'm a lowly economist. I'm like the opposite of an artist. I'm so embarrassed. But I wanted to get back to this question about why do we value what we value? I'm very fortunate to travel around Sub-Saharan Africa for my work, and I'm like the guy from Monty Python. I'm always bidding up objects in markets, which I think are worth much more than what are being charged. So I don't see, in my 20-year career, no one has ever said, ah, the British Museum should give this back. I'm the one saying it. I would like my African colleagues to say, we value these things. We think they're beautiful. How do we think we go about that? A lot has changed, but how do we keep basically this conversation about what is worth something? What is beautiful? Because I see a lot of beautiful things that aren't valued. I think judgments, aesthetic judgment is bound to be partly relative to a background, a cultural background. I don't think there is some, as it were, universal framework against which we can say, this is more beautiful than this, and this is slightly less beautiful, and so on. Nor do I think, of course, and I'm sure you don't either, that beauty is the only thing that matters in art. A lot of art is not beautiful, but very challenging and thought-provoking, and so on. What I think is we need a better global conversation in which people talk about what they value in things, and in which, well, everybody can talk. The important thing is that other people listen. That's the thing, that we need to have, again, this is about something like equity, that the conversational equivalent of equity is what people say in a museum in Komasi about Komasi stuff, is an important part of the conversation about that stuff, and it hasn't been treated as an important part of the conversation about that stuff, and if we had this more cosmopolitan conversation in which we were attending to what other people were saying, first of all, you'd learn possibilities, I think, I mean, just for an example, an instance, think about what it would take to be able to make a judgment about whether peaking opera is worth listening to, right? I mean, it sounds horrible if you're not used to it when you first hear it, I think, but that's the main feeling you think, oh, this sounds like a lot of people's screeching. Well, a lot, and you'd have to talk a lot to a lot of Chinese experts and ordinary people to figure out what was going on here, and then if you did figure that out, you'd find yourself probably, eventually it might take a long time and you'd have to learn some languages, but you might be able to come to a point where you could say, I can now tell that this performance is better than that in this tradition, but that can take an awful lot of knowledge of a sort that comes from living against the background of certain aesthetic practices and so on. My grandparents, either of my grandparents, my gun and grandparents, or my British ones, would all find some of the things that are perfectly routine in art galleries today puzzling. They would think, why is this in an art gallery? Might be interesting, might not, probably not, but why is it here at all, right? Well, that's because art practice has a history and develops and new things come into the sphere of art and whether something's in the sphere of art is, or not, is something that's sort of negotiated by communities, it's not really negotiated by everybody in the world all at once, there are specialist communities of various sorts. So I think more exposure to a wider range of stuff, more people in Africa would mean the conversations, African voices would enter the conversation in a different way. One of the people who did the restoration of some of the work in the Florence Floods in the 80s, was it, was a Ghanaian guy who just happened to be a great expert on how to restore paintings. His view of those paintings would be extremely interesting to know because he had both the expertise, but also the angle, the different angle. So that's my thought, my thought is all of this is enriched by, not by looking for a correct answer, but for looking for a conversation in which we share our views, exchange our views about what the correct answer is, knowing that we won't come to consensus, knowing that there will continue forever, there will be people who think that the Mona Lisa is not much of a painting. And we won't be able to persuade them. And that's fine. In fact, I would love to talk to some people who think that it's not an interesting painting. I would love to know why, what sorts of things make a painting interesting to them and what's wrong with that one. So I think that's, it's part of the general idea that if you have a good cosmopolitan conversation around the objects, you share the objects, we respect other people's points of view about the objects, we've got a much better art world that way. Art can play a better role in human life and in the interactions between communities if we do it that way. But as an economist, do you have a sense of, you know, your sense of value in terms of the arts? Because, and I find it fascinating that. I find things that I think will be one time. Oh really? It's one time now. I also think that. Yes. So I would love, interestingly I was thinking I was just in Nairobi and they're trying to do a Maasai grant for the Maasai Mora. This was presented at a conference and a lot of my colleagues were kind of squeamish. And they're like, oh, it's awful, it's supposed to be lovely. You go to the Maasai Mora, my many of my African colleagues are like, this is great, let's sell it. I'm so glad we're there. I don't see any more exposure. And I don't think there are beautiful things that are just universal. Okay, just. We just need to keep it to value things. So one interesting thing about the way in which what we think of as the paradigms of African art have been valued is as a kind of source of spiritual, something or other, kind of. And, that's that may make sense for some of them because some of them were made to do that. But it's not a good general theory of what makes art interesting that it embodies spiritual power, I think. So another thing we need to, will happen in these more diversified conversations is that people will realize there are lots of ways of valuing African art, not just the ones that have dominated in the official discourse about African art. Thank you so much. Thank you, it's lovely to meet you. Thank you. I can't think of a better topic for us to be discussing, navigating change and having someone as thoughtful and as inventive intellectually as Anthony has just been a real pleasure and a privilege to be part of this evening. And I am so grateful to you but also grateful to our colleagues and so as for this partnership. And together, I think, as a partnership, I think we can begin to build a greater kind of consortium of institutions that do believe in the sorts of things that Anthony was talking about, the kinds of collaboration that will create the sorts of answers that we all would like to see. It's such an exciting time for African art and I feel so privileged to work here amongst this glorious group of people and the sorts of transformations that you will see here if you come back, just the sorts of possibilities. When they come back. Yes, when you come back. It is such an exciting time and thank you Scott as well for introducing us and thank you all for coming because you are our community. You are why we do this and what makes it really kind of feel like we are gaining traction. We are so grateful to you and we look forward to seeing more of you in the future and please, if you have thoughts about how we can change, improve, how we can begin to make the sorts of changes that we'd all like to see, then please do get in touch. You are so welcome and I look forward to seeing you again. But thank you Kwame. Thank you. Thank you.