Apologising for our past and present

Subject: Apologising for our past and present.





As museums are being asked to decolonise their exhibits  the question of the purpose of a museum has to be questioned. Museums are collections of objects from the past, brought together and given a narrative so that we better understand the role people played in countries across the world. Anthropological questions raised on the evidence of the things found in regions where human activity had historical meaning and were collected rather than left in archaeological fallow circumstances and instead formed the categories we see in our museums. This interrogation of our past and the Homo sapiens place in it, settling and developing into the civilisation we know today would probably not have happened in the arid lands of early civilisation.  Or, if as history tells us the great museums and libraries founded by the early Ottoman Empire (at a time when we ourselves were running around in animal skins),  were subject to brutal pillage. Over time we emerged as a power in our own right with both an academic interest and with the removal and categorisation of fossil remains and other artefacts used in early history which were brought for safe keeping to museums in the west the academic specialisation could prognosticate our forefathers. It has sparked rancour with emerging national awareness in those countries and is seized upon by the latent apologists for anything we did in our past.  This incessant criticism of so much of our historical blundering, having to continually apologise for not apparently being fully aware of the  the sensitivities of what we saw at the time as being a relatively primitive situation.

If colonialism has a fault it’s that we carried it around with us as a concept of our superiority which was born of our tradition rather than being actually relevant to the position we found ourselves in at the time. We were stuck in a time warp living off old battles won which were not the ones we needed to fight. We needed to amalgamate with the the local indigenous society and because we didn’t develop that rapport and learn to work together the impetus in nation building floundered such that today, our conquests are now challenged and the ‘baubles’ we packed and sent home are now demanded to be returned by return post.