Mediating the ‘colonial gaze’

Several years ago, I participated in a symposium in Oxford concerned with colonial photographs in museum collections. Curatorial staff from a number of major European museums made presentations.

In the discussions following one session, I was surprised to hear a curator express the view that photographs depicting colonial violence should not be available to the public, and that since they should not be publicly accessible they should be removed from public collections.

While I understood the ethical dilemmas faced by museum staff who have a duty of care to the public as well as to collections, the suggestion that the historical record should be censored in this way would, I thought, surely constitute a failure of one of the primary responsibilities of public museums and archives.

Despite the upsetting and potentially offensive nature of the photographs, do we not need to confront these difficult histories and their toxic legacies, rather than hide from them – or, worse, have them hidden from us?

The ‘Government Anthropologist’ 

I have been reminded of that symposium debate numerous times over the past five years as I have led a research initiative called [Re:]Entanglements. This project has sought to re-engage with the archival legacies of a series of early 20th-century anthropological surveys in what were then the British West African territories of Southern Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

Between 1909 and 1915, Britain’s first ‘Government Anthropologist’, Northcote Thomas, led four lengthy expeditions, during which he and his local assistants took thousands of photographs, made hundreds of sound recordings, and amassed large collections of artefacts and botanical specimens.

For the first time in over a hundred years, we have been re-evaluating the significance of these materials through sustained engagement with different stakeholders. This has included retracing the colonial anthropologist’s journeys and returning copies of the photographs and sound recordings to the communities in Nigeria and Sierra Leone whose heritage they document.

Entanglements revisited

As well as working with communities in West Africa and the UK, we have collaborated with Nigerian and Sierra Leonean artists, musicians and storytellers, inviting then to interrogate the collections through their creative practice.  
 
Exhibitions, too, have been central to our methodology. These have included co-curated exhibitions in Benin City, Nsukka and Lagos, but also informal ‘pop up’ displays in the towns and villages where the photographs were originally taken.  
 
The project is culminating in an exhibition at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge entitled [Re:]Entanglements: Colonial Collections in Decolonial Times.

‘Physical type’ portraits

In times when statues are being toppled and looted antiquities are being returned, how does one negotiate the ethics of displaying images, artworks and other materials assembled in the context of a colonial expedition? Is there not a danger that if we exhibit colonial representations of West African people, for example, we might inadvertently reproduce the ‘colonial gaze’ rather than critique it?  
 
This is especially challenging when considering parts of the collections we have been working with that are most overtly expressive of colonial racial ideologies: the thousands of full-face and profile photographs of people, known as ‘physical type’ portraits.  
 
Some of the subjects of these photographs have number boards held above their heads, reminding one of criminal ‘mug shots’. Such images objectify their subjects, transforming individuals into mere specimens of racial or tribal ‘types’ to be collected by the anthropologist.

The exhibition as a public space of dissent 

One of the ways we have tried to avoid reproducing the coloniality of the sensitive archives and collections featured in [Re:]Entanglements is to frame each of the exhibition’s installations through questions. What are these images and objects? Why are they here, in a Cambridge museum? How were they assembled? For what reason? What is their status today? Where do they belong? What can we learn from them about colonialism?  
 
Rather than providing authoritative answers and interpretations, such a strategy intentionally undermines the museum’s institutional authority and seeks to open up the exhibition as a public space of reflection, discussion and dissent. 
 
Sometimes these questions are posed explicitly in accompanying texts, but more often this interrogatory mode is invoked by juxtaposing the colonial collections with contemporary artworks and creative re-engagements produced collaboratively during the project.  
 
On one wall of the exhibition, for instance, a selection of Northcote Thomas’s physical type portraits is displayed alongside a 20-minute film in which Londoners of West African heritage debate the photographs. Responding to the various portraits, one participant sees a victim of colonial oppression, while another sees resilience. Each photograph connotes something different to each of the film’s respondents, challenging the idea that any singular reading is possible. 

Acknowledging the difficult history

Another approach has been to mine the collections for material metaphors, metaphors that speak to violence of the colonial context in which they were collected. In one installation a large clay pot decorated with a figure of Olokun, an Edo deity, is displayed amongst a mass of broken pottery shards and a contemporary brass reproduction pot, cast using the traditional cire perdue method in Benin City.  
 
The clay original was acquired at a market in Benin City by Thomas in 1909, but, like many of the ceramic objects he collected, it was broken when it was shipped to Britain. As part of the [Re:]Entanglements project and exhibition, the pot has been repaired using the latest conservation methods, but care has been taken to ensure that the repair remains visible and the damage is legible.  
 
Meanwhile, the brass replica references the infamous ‘Bronzes’ looted from Benin in 1897 (examples of which are displayed elsewhere in the Museum) and the restitution debates that surround them. It speaks of continuities (in art traditions, for example) as well as the transformations wrought by colonialism; just as the reassembled clay original acknowledges the need to repair, but to do so without erasing that difficult history. 
 
Paul Basu is an anthropologist and curator, currently Visiting Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. 
 
 [email protected] 
 https://re-entanglements.net 
 
[Re:]Entanglements: Colonial Collections in Decolonial Times is at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge until 17 April 2022.