A row has brewed between a world-famous museum of anthropology in Oxford and a clutch of leading historians of Africa who think the museum’s director has naively put her “decolonising” zeal ahead of historical accuracy. The rift concerns a collection of artefacts in the university’s Pitt Rivers Museum that used to belong to the Maasai, a once militarily powerful ethnic group in Kenya and Tanzania. On its website the museum says it “acknowledges that objects in the collections were acquired through violence, looting and by the exertion of western colonial power on ‘subject’ people”. By way of “reconciliation and healing”, the museum has arranged for five lots each of 49 cattle to be granted to the descendants of allegedly maltreated families identified by means of a traditional laibon, or rain-making prophet, shaking out pebbles from his sacred calabash.
The historians say that the museum’s version of Maasai history and how the artefacts were gathered is a travesty of the truth. In particular, the Pitt Rivers’ website implies that the collection’s main donor, Claud Hollis — a colonial administrator, later knighted, who was also a widely respected early ethnographer of the Maasai — was a thief who must have been party to murder in order to acquire some of the more “culturally sensitive” artefacts.
“It’s the perception of the Maasai,” says Laura van Broekhoven, the museum’s director, who has been rattled by the historians’ assault on the Pitt Rivers’s respect — or disrespect — for historical accuracy. “It’s from their point of view,” she insists. Some historians have also expressed mocking scepticism over the validity of a diviner’s calabash for choosing how to select the lucky families to receive gifts of cattle worth tens of thousands of dollars.
The museum’s involvement began in 2017 when Samwel Nangiria, a Maasai campaigner from Tanzania, was a guest of an organisation based in Oxford called Insight Share, which trains activists to make videos in support of vulnerable indigenous communities around the world. During a visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Nangiria says he was shocked by the apparent mislabelling of artefacts and subsequently complained that some of them could have been acquired only through looting and murder. These claims were accepted at face value by the museum and were widely echoed in the media, including by the BBC and the Oxford Mail.
A series of visits ensued, with a seven-strong Maasai delegation being put up in Oxford’s grandest hotel. In return the museum has made several visits to Kenya, where celebrations were held to mark the gift of cattle, subsidised by a British family charity.
For van Broekhoven it has been an emotional journey. In a lecture in March she described how it was “extremely traumatic” for the Maasai campaigners visiting the museum to view the items for the first time. Some of them, she said, were “fainting and feeling unwell” (before being resuscitated by a special brew of peace-making medicinal tea). She likened the trauma to victims of the Holocaust once again seeing their possessions. “The whole part of their lineage had died out.” A fellow Maasai campaigner of Nangiria says that, as a result of the alleged theft around 120 years ago, “the cattle are still dying, dying”, as if cursed by the original theft.
Among the historians disturbed by the museum’s acceptance of the Maasai campaigners’ untested narrative are David Anderson, professor of African history at Warwick University and author of Histories of the Hanged, a searing account of Britain’s suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the Fifties; and Dr Lotte Hughes, author of Moving the Maasai: A Colonial Misadventure, an indictment of British treatment of the Maasai in the early 20th century. Richard Waller, a widely respected historian of the Maasai whose research spans half a century, praises the museum for seeking “to keep the Maasai identity and culture alive”, but says it has been “ill-advised and ill-prepared”. None of these experts can be accused of being apologists for colonialism. Anderson and Hughes have expressed dismay at what they see as the museum’s sloppy scholarship and naïveté in its decolonising zeal.
In a letter to the museum director, Hughes said that “some aspects of the Maasai project disturb and puzzle me from an historical point of view. Have you any supporting evidence, besides that produced by an en-kidong [the sacred calabash], that the artefacts were taken from these particular families? Have you any evidence that they were looted and Maasai were murdered in the process, as your Maasai contacts claim? Why would cattle still be dying and people suffering more than a century after the artefacts were taken? Why did the PRM take all these claims at face value, when any scholar with knowledge of Maasai history and culture could have advised you otherwise?”
Anderson is equally forthright. “Hollis was no murderer…This should be made clear by the PRM. All the indications are that he acquired his objects from members of those societies with whom he had close dealings… I am actually less concerned that the PRM have been duped into giving cattle to persons whom a laibon favoured — if they are stupid enough to do this, so be it — but I am concerned that they show so little understanding of what provenance research should be done in these circumstances.”
The historians reject the museum’s acceptance of the Maasai narrative that presumes the artefacts were acquired through colonial violence. In fact, the Maasai never opposed the British militarily, though some small-scale disturbances occurred after the period when the artefacts were collected and donated. The British also habitually hired Maasai warriors as levies to help suppress other tribes that did resist British rule in the first decade of the 20th century — a fact that modern Maasai myth-makers, keen to present a history of heroic anti-colonial resistance, tend to deny.
Moreover, in 1895, when the British formally declared a “protectorate” over what became Uganda and Kenya (which was designated as a colony in 1920), it would have been easy for British interlopers to buy or barter the sort of items collected by Hollis. Indeed, one of the five museum items considered especially valued was donated by William Taylor, an early missionary and lexicographer whose scholarship is still revered by the School of African and Oriental Language in London: hardly the profile of a looter.
“The historians reject the museum’s acceptance of the Maasai narrative that presumes the artefacts were acquired through colonial violence.”
Van Broekhoven rejects the historians’ objections, implying that they miss the point of the museum’s partnership with today’s Maasai communities. “It’s not transactional.” It has been agreed that the items, however relabelled, will stay at the museum rather than be returned to Kenya and Tanzania. “It’s all about peace and healing and reconciliation, not about bashing colonialism,” she explains, while adding that the Maasai “lament the effect of colonialism and capitalism, the loss of land, loss of property, lack of sovereignty”. As for the selection of the five families: “We tried to find ways for a difficult process; we tried to probe and understand; we asked the Maasai; it was responsibly done.”
Hughes particularly objects to the way the museum has allowed myth and legend to supersede hard evidence-based history. “Stories about the past are transmitted orally among the Maasai and passed down from one generation to the next, but they may not be true as history. As a result of indigenous rights activism, myth and memory have come to ‘stand for’ history, and are being used to galvanise the gullible and inspire support, replacing information about what actually happened with a fantasy version of past events that is more palatable, paints the community concerned in a more favourable light and is calculated to fit the ‘decolonisation’ agenda.”
In the Times Literary Supplement, a former Oxford lecturer on history, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, was still more sceptical: “To value the self-interested stone-rattling of a shaman over the objective expertise of a scholar is a form of silliness worthy of a post-truth world.” A Kenyan academic who declined to be named told me: “They [the Maasai campaigners] will certainly be coming back for more.” The museum, says Hughes, has been well-meaning — but has been “totally hoodwinked”.
On 15 May, the Pitt Rivers was awarded an annual prize by the Museums + Heritage, an organisation that supports museums, galleries and heritage events, for its “brave, sensitive and internationally significant partnership” with the Maasai Living Cultures Project. Perhaps not for historical accuracy.
