Latest news with #decolonisation
The National
2 days ago
- General
- The National
English museum asks visitors if it should display 2,700-year-old Egyptian mummy
The Manchester Museum in northern England is asking visitors whether it should withdraw an ancient Egyptian mummy from its displayed collections, 200 years after it was first shown. The mummified body of a woman called Asru, who lived in ancient Thebes 2,700 years ago, has been on regular display at the museum since she was unwrapped from her wooden sarcophag i in 1825. Now, a small plaque has been placed next to her body, asking visitors to decide whether or not to keep displaying the artefact. 'Asru's mummified body was unwrapped at the Manchester Natural History Society in April 1825. She has regularly been on display for two centuries since. 'In that time, we have also changed as a museum and are thinking more about how we care for people. 'To mark 200 years since her unwrapping, we would like to start a conversation about her future.' Visitors are invited to share their thoughts online or through a small postal box next to the display. It is part of a wider conversation that museums in the UK are having about their colonial histories behind their collections. Ancient artefacts were often taken by European archaeologists and explorers from their sites and displayed back home, in acts which today would be considered art theft and looting. The Manchester Museum says that 'decolonising' is an 'integral part' or its mission. 'Decolonising is a long-term process that starts with acknowledging the true, violent history of colonialism and how it shapes our world and this museum,' it says on its website. British cotton merchants Robert and William Garnett acquired the coffins with the mummy in the ruins of Thebes in Egypt in the early 1800s and later donated it to the museum. Their father John Garnett was a known slave trader. Curator Dr Campbell Price described the sacred rituals through which Asru was first buried. 'When she died, transformative rituals of mummification were performed on her body, which was carefully wrapped in layers of linen cloth,' he said, in a video about the work. Hieroglyphs on the coffins, one inside the other, give the names of her mother, Tadiamun and her father an 'important official' Ta-Kush. The decision to unwrap her in 1825 was typical of the period's fascination with artefacts, the body and pseudosciences that were popular at the time. 'Such a decision was not uncommon as a form of investigation and entertainment, in 19th century learned societies' Dr Price writes in a blog post about Asru.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- General
- The Guardian
Manchester Museum asks visitors if Egyptian woman's body should be taken off display
One of Europe's leading museums is asking visitors if it should continue to display the body of an ancient Egyptian woman 200 years after it was brought to the UK by cotton merchants, as it 'decolonises' some of its most famous exhibits. Manchester Museum, which in May was named 2025's European museum of the year, is running a consultation on the future of Asru, a woman who lived in Thebes, the ancient city in the location of modern-day Luxor, 2,700 years ago. A plaque at the museum asks: 'Should we continue to display the body of Asru?', inviting visitors to submit answers in a postbox underneath. It adds: 'Asru's mummified body was unwrapped at the Manchester Natural History Society in April 1825. She has regularly been on display for the two centuries since. In that time, we have also changed as a museum and are thinking more about how we care for people.' The story of Asru's body is one of several that show how the development of the UK museum sector benefited from colonialism and transatlantic slavery, at a time when the ethics of displaying human bodies and spoils from imperial expansion are being questioned. In March a report by MPs from the all-party parliamentary group for Afrikan reparations called for bans on selling ancestral remains and publicly displaying them without consent. Asru's finely decorated wooden coffin reveals a few biographical details. An affluent woman who was about 60 when she died, her father was called Pa-Kush, which means 'the Kushite', a Black man from modern-day Sudan. Pa-Kush worked as a scribe, a high-status role, when Egypt had Kushite pharaohs. Asru's name means 'her arm is against them'. In the 19th century, Asru's sarcophagus was acquired by Robert and William Garnett, the sons of a former trader in enslaved African people, who had followed him into the cotton industry, research by one of the museum's curators, Campbell Price, found. The Garnetts donated Asru's body to the Manchester Natural History Society, the forerunner to Manchester Museum. Alongside the Asru consultation, the museum has launched its Decolonise! Trail , named after the initiative in arts and culture that is being used to challenge stereotypical perspectives linked to empire and colonialism. The trail links displays of items from Africa and Asia, subverting traditional 'Eurocentric' narratives about them through artworks newly displayed alongside them. It is supported by a booklet that asks questions such as 'Should a desire for knowledge override the wishes of ancient cultures?', 'Do you know where the minerals in your technology come from?' and 'What is climate justice?'. Sign up to The Long Wave Nesrine Malik and Jason Okundaye deliver your weekly dose of Black life and culture from around the world after newsletter promotion Next to African spearheads – items that the booklet describes as having 'reinforced reductive and inaccurate ideas about African people' – is an LGBTQ+ comic strip story by the Congolese artist Edher Numbi. A mural by the British artists the Singh twins in the museum's south Asia gallery examines the link between enslavement and India's colonisation. It features a 1928 quote from the then UK home secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, who, speaking of India as a major export market for 'Lancashire cotton goods', said: 'We did not conquer India for the benefit of the Indians … We conquered India as an outlet for the goods of Britain. We conquered India by the sword, and by the sword we shall hold it.' Chloe Cousins, Manchester Museum's social justice manager, who created the trail, said: 'The trail is new but the concept of decolonising isn't new to Manchester Museum at all. Telling more accurate and nuanced accounts of the history of the collections is one of the ways we can care for the people and communities whose belongings, stories and histories are held here.'
The Guardian
3 days ago
- General
- The Guardian
Manchester Museum asks visitors if Egyptian woman's body should be taken off display
One of Europe's leading museums is asking visitors if it should continue to display the body of an ancient Egyptian woman 200 years after it was brought to the UK by cotton merchants, as it 'decolonises' some of its most famous exhibits. Manchester Museum, which in May was named 2025's European museum of the year, is running a consultation on the future of Asru, a woman who lived in Thebes, the ancient city in the location of modern-day Luxor, 2,700 years ago. A plaque at the museum asks: 'Should we continue to display the body of Asru?', inviting visitors to submit answers in a postbox underneath. It adds: 'Asru's mummified body was unwrapped at the Manchester Natural History Society in April 1825. She has regularly been on display for the two centuries since. In that time, we have also changed as a museum and are thinking more about how we care for people.' The story of Asru's body is one of several that show how the development of the UK museum sector benefited from colonialism and transatlantic slavery, at a time when the ethics of displaying human bodies and spoils from imperial expansion are being questioned. In March a report by MPs from the all-party parliamentary group for Afrikan reparations called for bans on selling ancestral remains and publicly displaying them without consent. Asru's finely decorated wooden coffin reveals a few biographical details. An affluent woman who was about 60 when she died, her father was called Pa-Kush, which means 'the Kushite', a Black man from modern-day Sudan. Pa-Kush worked as a scribe, a high-status role, when Egypt had Kushite pharaohs. Asru's name means 'her arm is against them'. In the 19th century, Asru's sarcophagus was acquired by Robert and William Garnett, the sons of a former trader in enslaved African people, who had followed him into the cotton industry, research by one of the museum's curators, Campbell Price, found. The Garnetts donated Asru's body to the Manchester Natural History Society, the forerunner to Manchester Museum. Alongside the Asru consultation, the museum has launched its Decolonise! Trail , named after the initiative in arts and culture that is being used to challenge stereotypical perspectives linked to empire and colonialism. The trail links displays of items from Africa and Asia, subverting traditional 'Eurocentric' narratives about them through artworks newly displayed alongside them. It is supported by a booklet that asks questions such as 'Should a desire for knowledge override the wishes of ancient cultures?', 'Do you know where the minerals in your technology come from?' and 'What is climate justice?'. Sign up to The Long Wave Nesrine Malik and Jason Okundaye deliver your weekly dose of Black life and culture from around the world after newsletter promotion Next to African spearheads – items that the booklet describes as having 'reinforced reductive and inaccurate ideas about African people' – is an LGBTQ+ comic strip story by the Congolese artist Edher Numbi. A mural by the British artists the Singh twins in the museum's south Asia gallery examines the link between enslavement and India's colonisation. It features a 1928 quote from the then UK home secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, who, speaking of India as a major export market for 'Lancashire cotton goods', said: 'We did not conquer India for the benefit of the Indians … We conquered India as an outlet for the goods of Britain. We conquered India by the sword, and by the sword we shall hold it.' Chloe Cousins, Manchester Museum's social justice manager, who created the trail, said: 'The trail is new but the concept of decolonising isn't new to Manchester Museum at all. Telling more accurate and nuanced accounts of the history of the collections is one of the ways we can care for the people and communities whose belongings, stories and histories are held here.'
Mail & Guardian
19-06-2025
- Politics
- Mail & Guardian
Making Knowledge African: Suren Pillay and the struggle to decolonise the university
What are the predicaments that hold us back from producing knowledge in African academic institutions? Is that something that lies at the heart of knowledge production or the accessibility of knowledge in Africa? And what is African knowledge? Suren Pillay's Predicaments of Knowledge: Decolonisation and Deracialisation in Universities seeks to answer these questions. Pillay's deeply grounded critical insights lead us to rethink the difference between accommodating knowledge and producing knowledge and what it means to engage with, or possess, knowledge in Africa. Though it has a particular focus on South Africa, the core issues debated in the book deal with the impediments to the process of decolonisation in Africa and its challenges in the institutionalisation of knowledge. The book is divided into six chapters, in which questions of modernity, the humanities, the university, epistemic injustice, anticolonial nationalism, justice, history and decolonial theory are discussed. The study alerts us to instrumentalisation — the use of knowledge as a tool to serve specific agendas rather than for deeper understanding. Drawing on Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, Pillay states that decolonisation is not reducible to identity politics and is about 'justice'. He cautiously warns scholars not to get trapped in atavistic and cosmopolitan sentiments. To be wary of these pitfalls, one should accommodate self-critique to renew understanding of the humanities. As he rightly says, 'Without self-critique, renewal will not happen' and it won't be appealing to students who have to navigate post-apartheid politics because the lack of self-critique in South Africa leads to ethical and political challenges as well. To create universality requires three commitments: 'an anthropological commitment to the particular; a philosophical commitment to the universal and historical commitment to the longue durée'. Writing about transformation, deracialisation and decolonisation, Pillay engages with debate on knowledge production. While the question of agency is a main part of the problem, he looks at the possibility of rewriting the African past, as the history of the continent is not recognised, and always dismissed in the world history books. These unthinkable silences which form African history should be addressed carefully. That's why transforming and decolonising knowledge should go hand in hand with remaking agency. The most compelling part of the book is the debate on decolonial theory. For Pillay, adapting decolonial theory in Africa, as many African scholars now aspire to employ Latin American experience in their reading, might lead to a deep epistemic discrepancy. The main problem of colonial difference is very central to the African experience of colonialism, which is not given importance by the decolonial scholars. For the means of decolonising varies from one place to another. The specific ways necessitated in different places should be applied. He argues that Western modernity is a European invention and dissemination of the Western knowledge should be questioned. For Pillay, Western modernity lies at a very specific historical conjuncture and animates in domination, so it becomes a means of power subsequently. Since Western knowledge is an accumulation of ancient cultures, and is not only the 'product of a racialised European genius', it has to acknowledge and recognise other cultures. If the West is the sole inventor and creator of knowledge, so is modernity. How can one debunk the whole knowledge to make it more accessible to Africa and the so-called Third World? It seems impossible even to challenge, since we are all bound by the very modernised school system. To situate the local, common experience or knowledge in this hegemonic system requires more challenge. The important question here is how to insert African wisdom and knowledge into world knowledge or how to diversify modern knowledge and make it more accommodative. It is important to rethink ways to navigate the norms surrounding the way we learn, the way we see the world and think of ourselves — even the way we treat each other. The distinction Pillay makes between Eurocentrism and Western knowledge is important to mention. Because the Eurocentric point of view is racialised and it needs to be separated from the Western knowledge. This move can only be actualised through decolonisation, as he notes. The book invites us to attend to the intricate dynamics of decolonising knowledge that requires confrontation with systemic knowledge inherited in colonial and modern institutions, not to replace but to revert the genealogy of knowledge in order to open up space to 're-narrate the history'. Predicaments of Knowledge is very comprehensive, intellectually grounded and deeply engaged with social and critical theory. Predicaments of Knowledge is published by Wits University Press.
The Guardian
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Phoenician Scheme is fantasy. It is also a remarkable engagement with the real-life conflict in the Middle East
The Phoenician Scheme, Wes Anderson's makebelieve treatment of the war-ravaged near east, reimagines the region as a sunlit Levantine fantasia of cypress trees, fez hats, camel-riders and kitsch hotels, all photographed with the lustre of an Ottolenghi cookbook. Meanwhile, livestreamed daily to our news feeds, the warlords of the Holy Land exhibit for us an equally spectacular dystopia of cities pummelled into sawdust, of skies scarred with scorching white phosphorus and gun-toting paragliders. How could these images be of the same place? What does it mean that they have been produced at the same time, and that we are consuming them alongside each other? The film is set in the Middle East of a parallel universe. It's 1950, but decolonisation, the Holocaust, the world wars – none appear to have taken place; history has stalled in a kind of perpetual belle époque, leaving only a pastiche of the orient in its imperial heyday, meticulously reconstructed in the film's geography and production design, its storylines and characters. In place of the warring states unleashed by Europe's botched withdrawal from its imperial mandates, the entire Levant forms a single nominally sovereign territory known as Modern Greater Independent Phoenicia, named after the ancient civilisation once inhabiting what would now be Lebanon, Palestine and Israel. Those national demarcations don't exist in the film, as you can see from all the quaintly displayed trademark Wes Anderson cartography, the whole region pristinely undivided – as it was before the first world war. All the ethnic and sectarian squabbles that beleaguer these lands in the real world are magically replaced by a peaceable patchwork of aristocratic families, each with their respective toeholds. Their inflated titles mean nothing, their names allusions to the toothless dynasties once patronised by imperial overlords. The film's King Hussein refers to more than one Hashemite monarch installed by Britain and Prince Farouk to Egypt's last king. The fact that a svelte Riz Ahmed has been cast to play a character, whose real-life inspiration, King Farouk, was a worldwide celebrity infamous for his fatness, tells us everything we need to know about the distorting mirror through which Anderson reflects the history of empire. Above all, the colonial order is represented by the film's devious protagonist Anatole 'Zsa-Zsa' Korda and his visionary scheme to build railways, tunnels, canals and dams across Phoenicia. The significance of infrastructure in colonial mythology cannot be overstated. Anderson says Korda was inspired by his father-in-law, the Lebanese construction magnate Fouad Maalouf, also the film's dedicatee. But Korda is as much an empire-builder in the mould of Cecil Rhodes or Ferdinand de Lesseps. With his African mines and railways, Rhodes brought to heel the better part of a continent. In building the Suez canal, a waterway in the deserted sands between Africa and Asia, De Lesseps performed Moses' miracle in reverse. Such magnificent infrastructure projects, said to be beyond the wit of the native, were the glory of empire and still feature in reappraisals of it ('What about the railways?'). It's in this context that Korda's Phoenician scheme must be understood: a plot to re-engineer the Middle East in his image. This is the east as a career, in Disraeli's famous words. And through such a career, the Palestinian literary critic Edward Said wrote, 'one could remake and restore not only the Orient but also oneself'. That sums up Korda, who is as motivated by megalomania as money. There's always been something grippingly cinematic about that. It was another Korda – the Hungarian Jewish émigré film director Zoltan Korda – who more than anyone demonstrated that, in colonial adventure films that he made with his brother Alexander in the 1930s, relating heroic adventures in a timeless orient under eternal British rule. In naming his hero Korda, Anderson proudly acknowledges his debt to a controversial narrative tradition. In its most pointed contrast with reality, its greatest hallucination about empire, The Phoenician Scheme unfolds in a cosmopolitan world that is, for all its lying and cheating and double-dealing, completely free of racism. Imperial cosmopolitanism is symbolised, of all things, in headwear. The fez is absolutely ubiquitous in the film, as it was among colonial elites, Muslim, Christian and Jewish. (There are photos of Israel's founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, as a fez-hatted law student in Istanbul.) It fell out of fashion in the postcolonial Middle East, becoming a symbol of colonial nostalgia. Sign up to Film Weekly Take a front seat at the cinema with our weekly email filled with all the latest news and all the movie action that matters after newsletter promotion Anderson positively luxuriates in that nostalgia, in the ecumenical fellowship of the fez, worn in the film by Frenchmen, Arabs, Armenians, all happily sharing cocktails. Korda appears to be Armenian (judging by the script on his birth certificate) but in a bizarre twist Korda dons the distinctive white fez and robes of Lebanon's Druze sect, just as pharaonic imagery strangely adorns Phoenician hotels: all part of the pastiche. This is history stylised beyond all proportion. It's meant to evoke the urbane world that existed under imperial rule, before the emergence of violent ethno-nationalism. The state of Israel is absent from the film, but Zionism, interestingly, isn't. One corner of Phoenicia, visited by Korda, has a kibbutz, replete with Hebrew signage, quotations from the Old Testament and the suggestive imagery of 'making the desert bloom', palm trees sprouting from the barren earth. It has its own visionary founder, a rival of Korda's, played by Scarlett Johansson, working the land in khaki shorts, like the pioneer kibbutzniks portrayed in early Zionist posters. Crucially, though, it's labelled a 'private utopian outpost'. Nationalism is such an anathema to the ethos of the film that Zionism is reduced to the personal enterprise of another one of those visionaries making a career in the east. It has no aspirations to statehood. Such nonpolitical strains of Zionism were originally favoured by followers of the movement, including Einstein and Kafka, and one suspects it's the kind most palatable to Anderson. But this sanitised, fantasy vision of Zionism is of a piece with Anderson's fantasy of empire. Historically in both, violence and racism were always simmering. The Phoenician Scheme may at once be Anderson's worst and most profound film, a beautifully textured engagement with the past, and an almost morally repugnant retreat from the present. Its transformation of tragedy into comedy feels perverse. To watch The Phoenician Scheme amid the devastation of Gaza – during which it was also filmed – is to see two images of history, two maps of our time, disorientingly superimposed over each other: the sweet fantasy of a much-promised land, and the bitter, bloody reality of how it's turning out.
