VOLUME 53, NUMBER 2 · FEBRUARY 9, 2006

Feature

Whose Culture Is It?
By Kwame Anthony Appiah

1.

“There is no document of civilization,” Walter Benjamin maintained, in
his most often-quoted line, “that is not at the same time a document
of barbarism.” He was writing—some sixty-five years ago—with
particular reference to the spoils of victory carried in a triumphal
procession: “They are called cultural treasures,” he said, but they had
origins he could not “contemplate without horror.”

Benjamin’s provocation has now become a commonplace. These days,
museum curators have grown uneasily self-conscious about the origins
of such cultural treasures, especially those that are archaeological in
nature or that come from the global south. A former curator of the
Getty Museum is now on trial in Rome, charged with illegally removing
objects from Italy, while Italian authorities are negotiating about the
status of other objects from both the Getty and the Metropolitan
Museum. Greece is formally suing the Getty for the recovery of four
objects. The government of Peru has recently demanded that Yale
University return five thousand artifacts that were taken from Machu
Picchu in the early nineteen-hundreds—and all these developments
are just from the past several months. The great international
collectors and curators, once celebrated for their perceptiveness and
perseverance, are now regularly deplored as traffickers in, or
receivers of, stolen goods. Our great museums, once seen as
redoubts of cultural appreciation, are now suspected strongrooms of
plunder and pillage.

© K. Anthony Appiah, 2006. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.nybooks.com/authors/124

And the history of plunder—the barbarism beneath the civility—is
often real enough, as I’m reminded whenever I visit my hometown in
the Asante region of Ghana. In the nineteenth century, the kings of
Asante—like kings everywhere—enhanced their glory by gathering
objects from all around their kingdom and around the world. When
the British general Sir Garnet Wolseley traveled to West Africa and
destroyed the Asante capital, Kumasi, in a “punitive expedition” in
1874, he authorized the looting of the palace of King Kofi Karikari,
which included an extraordinary treasury of art and artifacts. A couple
of decades later, Major Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell (yes,
the founder of the Boy Scouts) was dispatched once more to Kumasi,
this time to demand that the new king, Prempeh, submit to British
rule. Baden-Powell described this mission in his book, The Downfall of
Prempeh: A Diary of Life with the Native Levy in Ashanti, 1895–96.

Once the King and his Queen Mother had made their submission, the
British troops entered the palace, and, as Baden-Powell put it, “the
work of collecting valuables and property was proceeded with.” He
continued:

There could be no more interesting, no more tempting work
than this. To poke about in a barbarian king’s palace,
whose wealth has been reported very great, was enough to
make it so. Perhaps one of the most striking features about
it was that the work of collecting the treasures was
entrusted to a company of British soldiers, and that it was
done most honestly and well, without a single case of
looting. Here was a man with an armful of gold-hilted
swords, there one with a box full of gold trinkets and rings,
another with a spirit-case full of bottles of brandy, yet in no
instance was there any attempt at looting.

Baden-Powell clearly believed that the inventorying and removal of
these treasures under the orders of a Bri-tish officer was a legitimate
transfer of property. It wasn’t looting; it was collecting.

The scandals in Africa did not cease with the end of European
empires. Mali can pass a law against digging up and exporting the
wonderful sculpture made in the old city of Djenne-jeno. But it can’t
enforce the law. And it certainly can’t afford to fund thousands of
archaeological digs. The result is that many fine Djenne-jeno terra
cottas were dug up anyway in the 1980s, after the discoveries of the
archaeologists Roderick and Susan McIntosh and their team were
published. The terra cottas were sold to collectors in Europe and

North America who rightly admired them. Because they were removed
from archaeological sites illegally, much of what we would most like to
know about this culture—much that we could have found out had the
sites been preserved by careful archaeology—may now never be
known.

Once the governments of the United States and Mali, guided by
archaeologists, created laws specifically aimed at stopping the
smuggling of stolen art, the open market for Djenne-jeno sculpture
largely ceased. But people have estimated that in the meantime,
perhaps a thousand pieces—some of them now valued at hundreds of
thousands of dollars—left Mali illegally. In view of these enormously
high prices, you can see why so many Malians were willing to help
export their “national heritage.”

Modern thefts have not, of course, been limited to the pillaging of
archaeological sites. Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of art has
been stolen from the museums of Nigeria alone, almost always with
the complicity of insiders. And Ekpo Eyo, who once headed the
National Museum of Nigeria, has rightly pointed out that dealers in
New York and London have been less than eager to assist in their
retrieval. Since many of these collections were well known to experts
on Nigerian art, it shouldn’t have taken the dealers long to recognize
what was going on.

In these circumstances—and with this history—it has been natural to
protest against the pillaging of “cultural patrimony.”[1] Through a
number of declarations from UNESCO and other international bodies,
a doctrine has evolved concerning the ownership of many forms of
cultural property. In the simplest terms, it is that cultural property
should be regarded as the property of its culture. If you belong to that
culture, such work is, in the suggestive shorthand, your cultural
patrimony. If not, not.

Part of what makes the grand phrase “cultural patrimony” so
powerful, I suspect, is that it conflates, in confusing ways, the two
primary uses of that confusing word “culture.” On the one hand,
cultural patrimony refers to cultural artifacts: works of art, religious
relics, manuscripts, crafts, musical instruments, and the like. Here
“culture” is whatever people make and invest with significance through
their creative work. Since significance is something produced through
conventions, which are never individual and rarely universal,

interpreting culture in this sense requires some knowledge of its social
and historical context.

On the other hand, “cultural patrimony” refers to the products of a
culture: the group from whose conventions the object derives its
signifi-cance. Here the objects are understood to belong to a
particular group, heirs to a transhistorical identity. The cultural
patrimony of Nigeria, then, is not just Nigeria’s contribution to human
culture—its contribution, as the French might say, to a civilization of
the universal. Rather, it comprises all the artifacts produced by
Nigerians, conceived of as a historically persisting people: and while
the rest of us may admire Nigeria’s patrimony, it belongs, in the end,
to them.

But what does it mean, exactly, for something to belong to a people?
Most of Nigeria’s cultural patrimony was produced before the modern
Nigerian state existed. We don’t know whether the terra-cotta Nok
sculptures, made sometime between about 800 BC and 200 AD, were
commissioned by kings or commoners; we don’t know whether the
people who made them and the people who paid for them thought of
them as belonging to the kingdom, to a man, to a lineage, or to the
gods. One thing we know for sure, however, is they didn’t make them
for Nigeria.

Indeed, a great deal of what people wish to protect as “cultural
patrimony” was made before the modern system of nations came into
being, by members of societies that no longer exist. People die when
their bodies die. Cultures, by contrast, can die without physical
extinction. So there’s no reason to think that the Nok have no
descendants. But if Nok civilization came to an end and its people
became something else, why should they have a special claim on
those objects, buried in the forest and forgotten for so long? And even
if they do have a special claim, what has that got to do with Nigeria,
where, let us suppose, most of those descendants now live?

Perhaps the matter of biological descent is a distraction: proponents
of the patrimony argument would surely be undeterred if it turned out
that the Nok sculptures were made by eunuchs. They could reply that
the Nok sculptures were found on the territory of Nigeria. And it is,
indeed, a perfectly reasonable property rule that where something of
value is dug up and nobody can establish an existing claim on it, the
government gets to decide what to do with it. It’s an equally sensible
idea that, when an object is of cultural value, the government has a
special obligation to preserve it. The Nigerian government will

therefore naturally try to preserve such objects for Nigerians. But if
they are of cultural value—as the Nok sculptures undoubtedly are—it
strikes me that it would be better for them to think of themselves as
trustees for humanity. While the government of Nigeria reasonably
exercises trusteeship, the Nok sculptures belong in the deepest sense
to all of us. “Belong” here is a metaphor, of course: I just mean that
the Nok sculptures are of potential value to all human beings.

2.

That idea is expressed in the preamble of the Convention for the
Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict of May
14, 1954, which was issued by a conference called by UNESCO:

Being convinced that damage to cultural property belonging
to any people whatsoever means damage to the cultural
heritage of all mankind, since each people makes its
contribution to the culture of the world….

Framing the problem that way—as an issue for all mankind—should
make it plain that it is the value of the cultural property to people and
not to peoples that matters. It isn’t peoples who experience and value
art; it’s men and women. Once you see that, then there’s no reason
why a Spanish museum couldn’t or shouldn’t preserve a Norse goblet,
legally acquired, let’s imagine, at a Dublin auction, after the salvage of
a Viking shipwreck off Ireland. It’s a contribution to the cultural
heritage of the world. But at any particular time it has to be in one
place. Why shouldn’t Spaniards be able to experience Viking
craftsmanship? After all, there is no lack of Viking objects in Norway.
The logic of “cultural patrimony,” however, would call for the goblet to
be shipped back to Norway (or, at any rate, to Scandinavia): that’s
whose cultural patrimony it is.

And in various ways, we’ve inched closer to that position in the years
since the Hague convention. The Convention on the Means of
Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of
Ownership of Cultural Property, adopted by the UNESCO General
Conference in Paris in 1970, stipulated that “cultural property
constitutes one of the basic elements of civilization and national
culture, and that its true value can be appreciated only in relation to
the fullest possible information regarding its origin, history and
traditional setting”; and that “it is essential for every State to become
increasingly alive to the moral obligations to respect its own cultural
heritage.”

A state’s cultural heritage, it further decreed, included both work
“created by the individual or collective genius of nationals of the State”
and “cultural property found within the national territory.” The
convention emphasized, accordingly, the importance of “prohibiting
and preventing the illicit import, export and transfer of ownership of
cultural property.” A number of countries now declare all antiquities
that originate within their borders to be state property, which cannot
be freely exported. In Italy, private citizens are free to own “cultural
property,” but not to send it abroad.[2]

That notion of “origination” is interestingly elastic. Among the objects
that the Italian government has persuaded the Getty to repatriate is a
2,300-year-old painted Greek vase and an Etruscan candelabrum.
(There are at least forty more objects at that museum that the Italians
are after.) In November, the Metropolitan Museum in New York
seemed close to a deal with the Italians to return a
two-and-a-half-millennium-old terra-cotta vase from Greece, known
as the Euphronios krater. Rocco Buttiglione of the Italian Culture
Ministry has declared that the ministry’s aim was “to give back to the
Italian people what belongs to our culture, to our tradition and what
stands within the rights of the Italian people.” I confess I hear the
sound of Greeks and Etruscans turning over in their dusty graves:
patrimony, here, equals imperialism plus time.

Plainly, special legal problems are posed by objects, like Nok art,
where there is, as lawyers might say, no continuity of title. If we don’t
know who last owned a thing, we need a rule about what should
happen to it now. Where objects have this special status as a valuable
“contribution to the culture of the world,” the rule should be one that
protects that object and makes it available to people who will benefit
from experiencing it. So the rule of “finders, keepers,” which may
make sense for objects of less significance, will not do. Still, a sensible
regime will reward those who find such objects, and give them an
incentive to report not only what they have found but where and how
they found it.

For an object from an archaeological site, after all, value comes often
as much from knowing where it came out of the ground, what else was
around it, how it lay in the earth. Since these articles seldom have
current owners, someone needs to regulate the process of removing
them from the ground and decide where they should go. It seems to
me reasonable that the decision about those objects should be made

by the government in whose soil they are found. But the right
conclusion for them is not obviously that they should always stay in the
country where they were buried. Many Egyptians—overwhelmingly
Muslims who regard the religion of the Pharaohs as
idolatrous—nevertheless insist that all the antiquities ever exported
from Egypt’s borders are really theirs. You do not need to endorse
Napoleon’s depredations in northern Africa to think that there is
something to be said for allowing people in other countries the chance
to see, close up, the arts of one of the world’s great civilizations. And
it’s a painful irony that one reason we’ve lost information about cultural
antiquities is the very regulation intended to preserve it. If, for
example, I sell you a figure from Djenne-jeno with evidence that it
came out of the ground in a certain place after the regulations came
into force, then I am giving the authorities in the United States, who are
committed to the restitution of objects taken illegally out of Mali, the
very evidence they need.

Suppose that from the beginning, Mali had been encouraged and
helped by UNESCO to exercise its trustee-ship of the Djenne-jeno
terra cottas by licensing digs and educating people to recognize that
objects removed carefully from the earth with accurate records of
location are of greater value, even to collectors, than objects without
this essential element of provenance. Suppose they had required that
objects be recorded and registered before leaving, and stipulated
that if the national museum wished to keep an object, it would have to
pay a market price for it, the acquisition fund being supported by a
tax on the price of the exported objects.

The digs encouraged by such a system would have been less well
conducted and less informative than proper, professionally
administered digs by accredited archaeologists. Some people would
still have avoided the rules. But mightn’t all this have been better than
what actually happened? Suppose, further, that the Malians had
decided that in order to maintain and build their collections they
should auction off some works they own. The partisans of cultural
patrimony, instead of praising them for committing needed resources
to protecting the national collection, would have excoriated them for
betraying their heritage.

The problem for Mali is not that it doesn’t have enough Malian art. The
problem is that it doesn’t have enough money. In the short run,
allowing Mali to stop the export of much of the art in its territory has
the positive effect of making sure that there is some world-class art in
Mali for Malians to experience. But an experience limited to Malian

art—or, anyway, art made on territory that’s now part of Mali— makes
no more sense for a Malian than it does for anyone else. New
technologies mean that Malians can now see, in however imperfectly
reproduced a form, great art from around the planet; and such
reproduction will likely improve. If UNESCO had spent as much effort
to make it possible for great art to get into Mali as it has done to stop
great art getting out, it would have been serving better the interests
that Malians, like all people, have in a cosmopolitan aesthetic
experience.

3.

How would the concept of cultural patrimony apply to cultural objects
whose current owners acquired them legally in the normal way? You
live in Ibadan, in the heart of Yorubaland in Nigeria. It’s the early
Sixties. You buy a painted carving from a young man—an actor,
painter, sculptor, all-around artist—who calls himself “Twin Seven
Seven.” Your family thinks it’s a strange way to spend money. Time
passes, and he comes to be seen as one of Nigeria’s most important
modern artists. More cultural patrimony for Nigeria, right? And if it’s
Nigeria’s, it’s not yours. So why can’t the Nigerian government just
take it, as the natural trustees of the Nigerian people, whose property
it is?

The Nigerian government would not in fact exercise its power in this
way. (When antiquities are involved, though, a number of other states
will do so.) It is also committed, after all, to the idea of private
property. Of course, if you were interested in selling, it might provide
the resources for a public museum to buy it from you (though the
government of Nigeria probably thinks it has more pressing calls on its
treasury). So far cultural property is just like any other property.

Suppose, though, the government didn’t want to pay. There’s
something else it could do. If you sold your artwork, and the buyer,
whatever his nationality, wanted to take the painting out of Nigeria, it
could refuse permission to export it. The effect of the international
regulations is to say that Nigerian cultural patrimony can be kept in
Nigeria. An Italian law (passed, by the way, under Mussolini) permits
its government to deny export to any artwork currently owned by an
Italian, even if it’s a Jasper Johns painting of the American flag. But
then most countries require export licenses for significant cultural
property (generally excepting the work of living artists). So much for
being the cultural patrimony of humankind.

Such cases are particularly troublesome, because Twin Seven Seven
wouldn’t have been the creator that he was if he’d been unaware of
and unaffected by the work of artists in other places. If the argument
for cultural patrimony is that the art belongs to the culture that gives it
its significance, most art doesn’t belong to a national culture at all.
Much of the greatest art is flamboyantly international; much ignores
nationality altogether. A great deal of early modern European art was
court art or was church art. It was made not for nations or peoples but
for princes or popes or ad majorem gloriam dei. And the artists who
made it came from all over Europe. More importantly, in a line often
ascribed to Picasso, good artists copy, great ones steal; and they steal
from everywhere. Does Picasso himself—a Spaniard— get to be part
of the cultural patrimony of the Republic of the Congo, home of the Vili
people, one of whose carvings Matisse showed him at the Paris
apartment of the American Gertrude Stein?

The problem was already there in the preamble to the 1954
Hague Convention that I quoted a little while back: “…each people
makes its contribution to the culture of the world.” That sounds like
whenever someone makes a contribution, his or her “people” makes a
contribution, too. And there’s something odd, to my mind, about
thinking of Hindu temple sculpture or Michelangelo’s and Raphael’s
frescoes in the Vatican as the contribution of a people, rather than the
contribution of the artists who made (and, if you like, the patrons who
paid for) them. I’ve gazed in wonder at Michelangelo’s work in the
Sistine Chapel and I will grant that Their Holinesses Popes Julius II, Leo
X, Clement VIII, and Paul III, who paid him, made a contribution, too.
But which people exactly made that contribution? The people of the
Papal States? The people of Michelangelo’s native Caprese? The
Italians?

This is clearly the wrong way to think about the matter. The right way
is to take not a national but a trans-national perspective: to ask what
system of international rules about objects of this sort will respect the
many legitimate human interests at stake. The reason many sculptures
and paintings were made and bought was that they should be looked
at and lived with. Each of us has an interest in being able, should we
choose, to live with art—an interest that is not limited to the art of our
own “people.” And if an object acquires a wider significance, as part,
say, of the oeuvre of a major artist, then other people will have a
more substantial interest in being able to experience it. The object’s
aesthetic value is not fully captured by its value as private property. So

you might think there was a case for giving people an incentive to
share it. In America such incentives abound. You can get a tax
deduction by giving a painting to a museum. You get social prestige
from lending your works of art to shows, where they can be labeled
“from the collection of…” And, finally, you might earn a good sum by
selling it at auction, while both allowing the curious a temporary look
at it and providing for a new owner the pleasures you have already
known. If it is good to share art in these ways with others, why should
the sharing cease at national borders?

Here is a cautionary tale about the international system we have
created. In the years following the establishment of the Taliban regime
in Afghanistan, curators at Afghan’s National Museum, in Kabul, grew
increasingly worried about the security of the country’s non-Islamic
antiquities. They had heard the mounting threats made by Islamic
hard-liners who considered all figurative works to be blasphemous,
and they confided their concerns to colleagues in other countries,
begging them to take such artifacts out of Afghanistan for
safekeeping. They knew about the destruction of an ancient Buddhist
temple and its artworks by fundamentalist soldiers. They knew that
centuries-old illuminated manuscripts kept in a library north of Kabul
had been burned by Taliban zealots. They had heard the rumblings
about a new wave of iconoclasm, and they took them seriously.

Finally, in 1999, Paul Bucherer, a Swiss scholar who was the director
of the Fondation Bibliotheca Afghanica, negotiated an arrangement
with more moderate Taliban officials, including the then Taliban
minister for information and culture, along with President Rabbani of
the Northern Alliance. The endangered artifacts would be shipped to
a museum in Switzerland that had been set up specifically for the
purpose of keeping these works out of harm’s way while the danger
persisted. In the fall of 2000, Dr. Bucherer, with the help of Afghan
museum officials, had crated up these endangered artifacts, ready to
be shipped to Switzerland for temporary safekeeping. Switzerland, as
a signatory of UNESCO treaties, simply required UNESCO approval to
receive the shipment.

But while Paul Bucherer and his Afghan colleagues had managed to
negotiate around the Taliban hard-liners, they hadn’t counted on the
UNESCO hard-liners. And UNESCO refused to authorize the shipments.
Various explanations were offered, but the objection came down to
the 1970 UNESCO Agreement on the Illicit Traffic of Cultural Objects,

and its strictures against involving moving objects from their country of
origin. Indeed, at a UNESCO meeting that winter, experts in Central
Asian antiqui-ties actually denounced Dr. Bucherer for trying to
destroy Afghan culture.[3]

People I know who have visited the National Museum in Kabul recount
what the staff members there have told them. Museum workers were
ordered to open drawers of antiquities by Taliban inspectors, in the
wake of Mullah Omar’s February 2001 edict against pre-Islamic art.
Here were drawers of extraordinary Bactrian artifacts and Ghandara
heads and figurines. My friends recall the dead look in a curator’s
eyes as he described how the Taliban inspectors responded to these
extraordinary artifacts by taking out mallets and pulverizing them in
front of him.

Would the ideologues of cultural nativism, those experts who insist that
archaeological artifacts are meaningless outside their land of origin,
find solace in the fact that these works were destroyed by Afghan
hands, on Afghan soil?

Only in March 2001, after the notorious demolition of the Bamiyan
Buddahs, did UNESCO officials relent. Fortunately, Afghan curators,
with nobody to turn to, took it on themselves to hide some of the most
valuable archaeological finds.[4] These curators, including Omara Khan
Massoudi, who is now director of the National Museum, did heroic
work, and, today, UNESCO is helping with the restoration of damaged
art. The problem in Afghanistan under the Taliban wasn’t so much the
behavior of UNESCO bureaucrats as the conception of their task
imposed upon them by the community of nations. The threat comes
from the idea that even endangered art—endangered by a state
whose government threatens it precisely because they don’t think it is
a proper part of their own heritage—nevertheless properly belongs in
the state whose cultural patrimony it is.

This is the ideology of the system to which the United States
committed itself with the Senate’s ratification in 1972 of the UNESCO
Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit
Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property.
(Characteristically, perhaps, it took another decade for this decision to
turn into an actual act of Congress.) UNESCO, like all UN bodies, is the
creature of the system of nations; while it speaks of World Heritage
Sites, it is nevertheless bound to conceive them as ultimately at the
disposal of nations. Because what it unites are nations, not human
beings, it is impotent when what humanity needs is not what some

state has decided to do. We will do well to recognize that iconoclasm
is as much an expression of nationalism as idolatry: the human
community needs to find ways to protect our common heritage from
the iconoclasts, even when they are the masters of nations.

When we’re trying to interpret the concept of cultural property, we
ignore at our peril what lawyers, at least, know: property is an
institution, created largely by laws, which are best designed by
thinking about how they can serve the human interests of those whose
behavior they govern. If the laws are international laws, then they
govern everyone. And the human interests in question are the
interests of all of humankind. However self-serving it may seem, the
British Museum’s claim to be a repository of the heritage not of Britain
but of the world strikes me as exactly right. Part of the obligation,
though, is to make those collections more widely available not just in
London but elsewhere, through traveling collections, through
publications, and through the World Wide Web.

It has been too easy to lose sight of the global constituency. The
American legal scholar John Henry Merryman once offered some
examples of how laws and treaties relating to cultural property have
betrayed a properly cosmopolitan (he uses the word “internationalist”)
perspective. “Though we readily deplore the theft of paintings from
Italian churches,” he wrote, “if a painting is rotting in a church from
lack of resources to care for it, and the priest sells it for money to
repair the roof and in the hope that the purchaser will give the
painting the care it needs, then the problem begins to look
different.”[5]

So when I lament the modern thefts from Nigerian museums or Malian
archaeological sites or the imperial ones from Asante, it’s because the
property rights that were trampled upon in these cases flow from laws
that I think are reasonable. I am not for sending every object “home.”
Many of the Asante art objects now in Europe, America, and Japan
were sold or given by people who had the right to dispose of them
under the laws that then prevailed, laws that were perfectly
reasonable. It may be a fine gesture to return things to the
descendants of their makers—or to offer it to them for sale—but it
certainly isn’t a duty. You might also show your respect for the culture
it came from by holding on to it because you value it yourself.
Furthermore, because cultural property has a value for all of us, we
should make sure that those to whom it is returned are in a position to

act as responsible trustees. Repatriation of some objects to poor
countries with necessarily small museum budgets might just lead to
their decay. Were I advising a poor community pressing for the return
of many ritual objects, I might urge them to consider whether leaving
some of them to be respectfully displayed in other countries might not
be part of their contribution to cross-cultural understanding as well as
a way to ensure their survival for later generations.

To be sure, there are various cases where repatriation makes sense.
We won’t, however, need the concept of cultural patrimony to
understand them. Consider, for example, objects whose meaning
would be deeply enriched by being returned to the setting from which
they were taken—site-specific art of one kind or another. Here there
is an aesthetic argument for return. Or consider objects of
contemporary ritual significance that were acquired legally from
people around the world in the course of European colonial
expansion. If an object is central to the cultural or religious life of a
community, there is a human reason for it to find its place back with
them.

But the clearest cases for repatriation are those where objects were
stolen from people whose names we often know; people whose heirs,
like the King of Asante, would like them back. As someone who grew
up in Kumasi, I confess I was pleased when some of this stolen art was
returned, thus enriching the new palace museum for locals and for
tourists. Still, I don’t think we should demand everything back, even
everything that was stolen; not least because we haven’t the remotest
chance of getting it. Don’t waste your time insisting on getting what you
can’t get. There must be an Akan proverb with that message.

There is, however, a more important reason: I actually want museums
in Europe to be able to show the riches of the society they plundered
in the years when my grandfather was a young man. And I’d rather
that we negotiated not just the return of objects to the palace museum
in Ghana, but a decent collection of art from around the world.
Because perhaps the greatest of the many ironies of the sacking of
Kumasi in 1874 is that it deprived my hometown of a collection that
was, in fact, splendidly cosmopolitan. As Sir Garnet Wolseley prepared
to loot and then blow up the Aban, the large stone building in the
city’s center, European and American journalists were allowed to
wander through it. The British Daily Telegraph described it as “the
museum, for museum it should be called, where the art treasures of

the monarchy were stored.” The London Times’s Winwood Reade
wrote that each of its rooms “was a perfect Old Curiosity Shop.” “Books
in many languages,” he continued, “Bohemian glass, clocks, silver
plate, old furniture, Persian rugs, Kidderminster carpets, pictures and
engravings, numberless chests and coffers…. With these were many
specimens of Moorish and Ashantee handicraft.”

We shouldn’t become overly sentimental about these matters. Many of
the treasures in the Aban were no doubt war booty as well. Still it will
be a long time before Kumasi has a collection as rich both in our own
material culture and in works from other places as the collections
destroyed by Sir Garnet Wolseley and the founder of the Boy Scouts.
The Aban had been completed in 1822. And how had the Asante king
hit upon the project in the first place? Apparently, he had been deeply
impressed by what he’d heard about the British Museum.[6]

We understand the urge to bring these objects “home.” A Norwegian
thinks of the Norsemen as her ancestors. She wants not just to know
what their swords look like but to stand close to an actual sword,
wielded in actual battles, forged by a particular smith. Some of the
heirs to the kingdom of Benin, the people of South West Nigeria, want
the bronze their ancestors cast, shaped, handled, wondered at. They
would like to wonder at—if we will not let them touch—that very thing.
The connection people feel to cultural objects that are symbolically
theirs, because they were produced from within a world of meaning
created by their ancestors—the connection to art through identity—is
powerful. It should be acknowledged. But we should remind ourselves
of other connections.

One connection—the one neglected in talk of cultural patrimony—is the
connection not through identity but despite difference. We can
respond to art that is not ours; indeed, we can only fully respond to
“our” art if we move beyond thinking of it as ours and start to respond
to it as art. But equally important is the human connection. My
people—human beings— made the Great Wall of China, the Sistine
Chapel, the Chrysler Building: these things were made by creatures
like me, through the exercise of skill and imagination. I do not have
those skills and my imagination spins different dreams. Nevertheless,
that potential is also in me. The connection through a local identity is
as imaginary as the connection through humanity. The Nigerian’s link
to the Benin bronze, like mine, is a connection made in the
imagination; but to say this isn’t to pronounce either of them unreal.
They are surely among the realest connections we have.

Notes

[1] I owe a great deal to the cogent (and cosmopolitan!) outline of the
development of the relevant international law in John Henry
Merryman’s classic paper “Two Ways of Thinking About Cultural
Property,” The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 80, No. 4
(October 1986), pp. 831–853.

[2] James Cuno, “US Art Museums and Cultural Property,” Connecticut
Journal of International Law, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Spring 2001), pp.
189–196.

[3] See www.theartnewspaper.com/news /article.asp?idart=7995;
Carla Power, “Saving the Antiquities,” Newsweek, May 14, 2001, p.
54.

[4] Carlotta Gall, “Afghan Artifacts, Feared Lost, Are Discovered Safe in
Storage,” The New York Times, November 18, 2004.

[5] Merryman, “Two Ways of Thinking About Cultural Property,” p. 852.

[6] The quotations from the Daily Telegraph, London Times, and New
York Herald, as well as the information about Osei Bonsu, are all from
Ivor Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century: The Structure and
Evolution of a Political Order (Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp.
200–201.

Copyright © 2006 by Kwame Anthony Appiah

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