Harare Review of Books

256 pages. Published April 11, 2024 by Octopus Publishing Group. Non-fiction.

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It’s an open secret among museum workers that colonial and ethnological museums are prone to hauntings.

Imagine that your ancestors are held hostage by a foreign nation, so foreign that they mostly don’t look like you and live on some island that’s very far away and inaccessible. They have your ancestors because they feel they have the right after invading your land and fighting wars of conquest or punishment, wars where they burnt down your palaces and beheaded your kings. You’ve been pacified, although you won your independence back, and these days you and those foreign nations profess friendship so they can continue to extract your wealth and give you handouts that you sign for in suits they taught you to wear, with handshakes and smiles. And yet—and yet—when it comes to what was stolen from you, those nations will not hear anything about returning what’s yours: your gold, the bones of your chiefs and kings, snuffboxes, guns, reliquaries, war cloaks, walking sticks and sceptres. Lots of human remains.

And these your friends have arrangements, laws they’ve promulgated so that what was looted now belongs, through murky means, to them.

Your friends don’t even really know what they have—partly because they didn’t ask you for meaning and context, assuming as they went; and partly because they stashed tons and tons of things in dark, dusty basements, and never really inventoried these things.

And they will put up every barrier between you and them to prevent your even visiting your heritage, the wealth of your people, the bones of your ancestors, the symbols of your very identity. You’ll likely never get a visitor’s visa to their faraway island.

This is the story of the British Museum (BM), and similar ethnographic museums across Europe. I’ve never been to the house of horrors that’s the British Museum, but Noah Angell has, and he’s done the Lord’s work in his book, which is the only tour, virtual or otherwise, that you’ll ever need. It’s a book about ghosts, and, in the wider sense, the hauntings that come from the afterlives of looted heritage. The British Museum, according to Angell, is full of restless relics. There’s a concept that material objects take on, for lack of a better term, “psychic vibes” even if they were not formally used in ways that call on forces from the other side. In other words,

Haydyn Williams, a former research assistant at the British Museum, put it that, “Objects carry memories, same as people do. They inherit feelings, if you like, recorded in them.”

And that’s one reason why the BM is haunted. There are millions of objects from all over the world and many cultures stored—perhaps abandoned is a better term—there, in plastic bags and crates.

With a mere 1 per cent of an “estimated” 8 million artefacts on display, the British Museum is only marginally an exhibition space; in material terms it’s mostly a site of disappearance.

Angell has interviewed former and current workers—some curatorial staff, but mostly people like janitors and security officers, people who are there after hours and who spend a lot more time with the artefacts. They have grand and spooky stories to tell: doors closing by themselves, inexplicable temperature changes, haints walking the halls and galleries, and more. There’ve even been a few deaths at the museum, although you won’t hear much about them officially.

There’s another reason for the haunting, though: the BM is a cemetery, a place where human remains are kept. Bones, skulls, and more, some local to the UK but much, much more from its former colonies. It’s baffling why this is still the case in the year of our Lord 2024, long after the end of colonialism (but did it ever really end? This is an argument that it never did.). Some of these remains were brought in with their tombs, whole mausoleums; others were not, shipped from the colonies after “pacification” operations or punitive expeditions. Many of these remains are not on display (nor should they be, because we are not ghouls); so, who does this hoarding serve? And, as many of these remains were in pursuit of now-disproved race science theories, why hold onto them? More importantly: should these people not be laid to rest, in their own lands, by their own people, according to their burial customs? Shockingly,

…[By] its own count, the British Museum holds over 6,000 “sets” of human remains.

Angell also mentions, in the Afterword, the scandal at the BM in 2023, when Peter Higgs, a senior curator, was accused of stealing hundreds of artefacts over the course of a decade and selling them on eBay. He was sacked when he was finally caught. It appears that the BM, not really knowing what they have in storage, and keeping poor inventory, didn’t even realise the theft was happening, and is not sure what exactly was stolen. Some of these items, according to the article above, were “not of major importance”—which again begs the question: why did the BM have them in the first place?)

It’s a time of reckoning for Western museums, and the details of this book make excellent additions to the list of reasons why. The British Museum remains the “murky prison” for foreign antiquities that former Greek President, Prokopis Pavlopoulos, said it was. Returning looted material heritage on loan to countries requesting their stuff back is just adding salt to centuries-old wounds. Britain may never be free from haunting, or find healing for its blighted soul: that’s the hauntology of colonialism and Empire.

Also, this is a fun read about ghosts.

Many thanks to Noah Angell for the review copy.

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Further reading:

1. An excellent article on the future of Western museums:
   Alírio Karina (2022) Against and beyond the Museum, Third Text, 36:6, 651-662, DOI: 10.1080/09528822.2022.2145049. Against and beyond the Museum: Third Text: Vol 36 , No 6 – Get Access
2. A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonising the Museum x Françoise Vergès
3. Fifteen Colonial Thefts – Sela Adjei, Yann LeGall (link tk)

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