Hey, that's our stuff: Maasai tribespeople tackle Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum
Hey, that's our stuff: Maasai tribespeople tackle Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum
Western museums are full of plundered objects. So what happened when a Maasai delegation travelled to the UK to discover where their sacred belongings ended up?
Yohann Koshy
Tue 4 Dec 2018 10.39 EST Last modified on Thu 6 Dec 2018 05.57 EST
Around a large table in a bright room in the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, four members of the Maasai tribe from east Africa are inspecting a small object. It has been carefully placed in front of them by a curator wearing special handling gloves. The Maasai say that it is a bracelet, an orkatar. They talk between themselves, in the maa language, about what the bracelet is used for. “This is something that cannot be sold or given,” says Yannick Ndoinyo, a junior elder from Loliondo, northern Tanzania. The orkatar symbolises the death of a father and is a form of inheritance that passes down the generations. How did it end up in a museum in Oxford? Perhaps it was stolen from the original owner or given away under duress. According to the database, it was “donated” to the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1904 by Alfred Claud Hollis, a colonial administrator in British East Africa.
This encounter between the Pitt Rivers, one of the most important ethnological museums in the world, and the Maasai is part of a process of cultural decolonisation. The relationship began when Maasai activist Samwel Nangiria visited the museum in November last year for a conference. The Pitt Rivers has more than 300,000 objects in its collection, many of which were “acquired” by colonial functionaries, missionaries and anthropologists in the heyday of the British empire. The museum itself is curated in a peculiar style – in line with the request of benefactor Augustus Pitt Rivers – with objects organised according to type rather than place of origin. This Victorian aesthetic has been consciously upheld: the Pitt Rivers is often referred to as a “museum of a museum”. There are shrunken heads from the Amazon and rudimentary tools from India; a magisterial totem pole from the Haida nation in Canada towers above the central, darkened atrium.
Nangiria walked through the museum and stopped when he saw something he was not expecting: his own culture, entombed in a glass cabinet. “When I saw objects from the Maasai community I was a little bit shocked,” he tells me. “[They were] poorly described, with a lack of what the object is meant for [and its] cultural significance.” His heart started beating so fast that it felt like it was vibrating: “Because I know our culture is not dead. It’s a living culture.”
Nangiria, a purposeful and diplomatic presence, expressed his displeasure to the museum’s director, Laura Van Broekhoven. She sent him a copy of the museum’s strategic plan for the future and invited him back. Keenly aware of its problematic origins, the Pitt Rivers, like many museums, engages “originating communities” – in the museum-world lingo – to allow them to reclaim the narrative around their objects. Last month, Nangiria, with four other Maasai from Tanzania and Kenya, and help from the Oxford-based NGO InsightShare, returned to do so.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/dec/04/pitt-rivers-museum-oxford-maasai-colonial-artefacts