Dealing with the dishonorable and the inconvenient (4)

I'll post link when crummy Internet permits, but NPR reports that Washington Post has investigative series on the Smithsonian's brain collection...apparently brains belonged to foreigners such as Philippinos, but largest number are from African Americans... No doubt Native Americans, too.

Attitudes were different back then, but geez, how can they make that right?

(Today, the little info we have on hypothermia in humans comes from horrific German experiments on Russian POW... An Irish Catholic g'g'mother's body was taken by Cdn med students, as was a priest from the same cemetery. I would've donated my mother's brain to a research hospital--she died of a rare progressive nervous disease--but my dad couldn't bear the thought and said no, of course his decision.)

ETA
Key findings from The Post's Smithsonian brain collection investigation
14 August 2023
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/interactive/2023/takeaways-smithsonian-hu...

Opinion: This is how the Smithsonian will reckon with our dark inheritance
Lonnie G. Bunch III* | August 20, 2023
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/20/smithsonian-secretary-lonnie-...

* Lonnie G. Bunch III (born November 18, 1952) is an American educator and historian. Bunch is the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, the first African American and first historian to serve as head of the Smithsonian. He has spent most of his career as a history museum curator and administrator. | Bunch served as the founding director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) from 2005 to 2019. He previously served as president and director of the Chicago History Museum (Chicago Historical Society) from 2000 to 2005. In the 1980s, he was the first curator at the California African American Museum, and then a curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, wherein the 1990s, he rose to head curatorial affairs. In 2020, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society. (Wikipedia)

William Gladstone: family of former British PM to apologise for links to slavery (Guardian)

The family of one of Britain’s most famous prime ministers will travel to the Caribbean this week to apologise for its historical role in slavery. Six of William Gladstone’s descendants will arrive in Guyana on Thursday as the country commemorates the 200th anniversary of a rebellion by enslaved people that historians say paved the way for abolition. The education and career of William Gladstone, the 19th-century politician known for his liberal and reforming governments, were funded by enslaved Africans working on his father’s sugar plantations in the Caribbean. As well as making an official apology for John Gladstone’s ownership of Africans, the 21st-century Gladstones have agreed to pay reparations to fund further research into the impact of slavery... Early in his career, William spoke in parliament in defence of his father’s involvement in slavery... John Gladstone owned or held mortgages over 2,508 enslaved Africans in Guyana and Jamaica. After emancipation he was paid nearly £106,000, a huge sum at the time...

UK cannot ignore calls for slavery reparations, says leading UN judge (Guardian)

A leading judge at the international court of justice has said the UK will no longer be able to ignore the growing calls for reparation for transatlantic slavery. Judge Patrick Robinson, who presided over the trial of the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević, said the international tide on slavery reparations was quickly shifting and urged the UK to change its current position on the issue. “They cannot continue to ignore the greatest atrocity, signifying man’s inhumanity to man. They cannot continue to ignore it. Reparations have been paid for other wrongs and obviously far more quickly, far more speedily than reparations for what I consider the greatest atrocity and crime in the history of mankind: transatlantic chattel slavery,” Robinson said. “I believe that the United Kingdom will not be able to resist this movement towards the payment of reparations: it is required by history and it is required by law”...

These British descendants of a 19th-century slave owner came to Guyana to apologize {and to set up a financial fund}, but protesters want reparations instead of words. {???}

1:14 ( https://twitter.com/dwnews/status/1695715068288061663 )

- DW News @dwnews | 4:29 AM · Aug 27, 2023

‘Nobody was expecting it’: British Museum warned reputation seriously damaged and treasures will take decades to recover (Guardian)

Experts say loss of 1,500 items reveals lax cataloguing and boosts case for returning objects to countries of origin... But already serious damage has been done to the museum’s reputation, giving fresh momentum to arguments for the return of objects like the Parthenon marbles (also known as the Elgin marbles), Benin bronzes and Ethiopian tabots to their original homes... As Despina Koutsoumba, head of the Association of Greek Archaeologists, put it: “We want to tell the British Museum that they cannot any more say that Greek culture heritage is more protected in the British Museum”...

Totem pole begins ‘rematriation’ from Edinburgh to Nisga’a nation in Canada (Guardian)

The towering, hand-carved totem pole is being rematriated, not repatriated, and after being put into a sleeping state on Monday the 11-metre (37ft) object will be transported in a military aircraft from its current home in Edinburgh to what is, everyone involved agrees, its true home in Canada... The House of Ni’isjoohl memorial pole is being returned to the Nass Valley in what is now British Columbia following a request from the Nisga’a nation, one of the Indigenous groups who were the original inhabitants of Canada. The return of the pole has been agreed in less than a year and signed off by the Scottish government. It puts pressure on other museums and other governments to also return objects of significant cultural importance...

'Stolen' totem pole prepared for return to Canada (BBC)

A 36ft (11m), one-tonne totem pole will be returned to the Nisga'a Nation, one of the indigenous groups in what is now known as British Columbia on the west coast of Canada. The totem pole has been in Scotland for almost a century since it was sold to the museum by Canadian anthropologist Marius Barbeau. However, Nisga'a researchers say it was stolen without consent while locals were away from their villages for the annual hunting season. The museum believes it acted in good faith but now understands that the individual who "sold" it to Barbeau did so "without the cultural, spiritual, or political authority to do so on behalf of the Nisga'a Nation"...

Totem pole begins ‘rematriation’ from Edinburgh to Nisga’a nation in Canada (Guardian)

The towering, hand-carved totem pole is being rematriated, not repatriated, and after being put into a sleeping state on Monday the 11-metre (37ft) object will be transported in a military aircraft from its current home in Edinburgh to what is, everyone involved agrees, its true home in Canada... The House of Ni’isjoohl memorial pole is being returned to the Nass Valley in what is now British Columbia following a request from the Nisga’a nation, one of the Indigenous groups who were the original inhabitants of Canada. The return of the pole has been agreed in less than a year and signed off by the Scottish government. It puts pressure on other museums and other governments to also return objects of significant cultural importance...

'Stolen' totem pole prepared for return to Canada (BBC)

A 36ft (11m), one-tonne totem pole will be returned to the Nisga'a Nation, one of the indigenous groups in what is now known as British Columbia on the west coast of Canada. The totem pole has been in Scotland for almost a century since it was sold to the museum by Canadian anthropologist Marius Barbeau. However, Nisga'a researchers say it was stolen without consent while locals were away from their villages for the annual hunting season. The museum believes it acted in good faith but now understands that the individual who "sold" it to Barbeau did so "without the cultural, spiritual, or political authority to do so on behalf of the Nisga'a Nation"...

What Is Orientalism? A Stereotyped, Colonialist Vision of Asian Cultures
Your everyday yoga class is actually a textbook case study in Orientalism.
Namrata Verghese, Teen Vogue | 13 Oct 2021

...Don’t worry, you don’t have to quit your yoga class. After all, Orientalism doesn’t end when you roll up your yoga mat and head out for a smoothie. It follows you through the door. It saturates our world. Because Orientalism is a product of empire, resisting Orientalism goes hand in hand with the concrete, political work of decolonization. Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization looks like the end of settler colonialism, the repatriation of Indigenous lands, the erasure of borders, mutual aid networks, prison abolition, and disability justice. It looks like liberation for queer and trans people, Black people, Indigenous people, fat people, and Dalit people. It looks like wrenching the pen back from colonizers who have “represented” us for so long and, instead, writing our own stories. In Said’s words: “Stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history.”

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/what-is-orientalism-a-stereotyped-colonialist...

AOC urges US to apologize for meddling in Latin America: ‘We’re here to reset relationships’ (Guardian)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a prominent member of Congress and leading voice of the American left, has called on the US government to issue an apology to Latin American countries for decades of meddling in their affairs and causing instability in the region. The Democratic congresswoman from New York was speaking after a visit to Chile in advance of the 50th anniversary of the coup against Salvador Allende, a democratically elected socialist president actively opposed by Washington. “I believe that we owe Chile, and not just Chile but many aspects of that region, an apology,” Ocasio-Cortez told the Guardian in an interview at her campaign headquarters in the Bronx. “I don’t think that apology indicates weakness; I think it indicates a desire to meet our hemispheric partners with respect. “It’s very hard for us to move forward when there is this huge elephant in the room and a lack of trust due to that elephant in the room. The first step around that is acknowledgement and saying we want to approach this region in the spirit of mutual respect, and I think that’s new and it’s historic.” Since President James Monroe effectively announced a protectorate over the hemisphere in the early 19th century, known as the Monroe doctrine, the US has interfered in nations across Latin America, often in pursuit of its own commercial interests or to support rightwing autocrats against socialists...

Another piece of not too far distant history where the west has collective amnesia: The forgotten end of the second world war (Spectator)

So, the Pacific war and indeed the second world war ended on 15 August 1945? Wrong. Heavy fighting continued until 2 September and incurred, in just three weeks, the deaths of an estimated 350,000 to 400,000 people, including tens of thousands of Japanese civilians who died of illness and starvation. In aggregate, this was about the same number of British people who died during five years of war in Europe. Reflecting the usual western centric view of the second world war it is largely forgotten in the narrative of the second world war that our allies, the Soviet Union, continued to fight Japan after 15 August 1945 in areas as far afield as Mongolia, Siberia, Manchuria (Manchukuo), North Korea, the southern half of Sakhalin and the Kuril islands... The West’s ignorance of this bloody end to the second world war is par for the course as far as the historiography of the conflict goes. For many historians in Europe and America, the Pacific war was a sideshow to the main event – the war in Europe. In general coverage of the war, Asia occupies less than a third of most histories of the subject. Compared to the copious studies of the second world war in Europe, there are just a handful of histories of the second world war in Asia. Yet the casus belli that brought America into the war, thus precipitating a world rather than another European war, were in China not Europe. America’s embargo of oil exports from Standard Oil of California to Japan because of the Roosevelt administration’s abhorrence of Hirohito’s occupation of China, precipitated the attack on Pearl Harbor and concurrent attack on Malaya, which was a steppingstone to the oil fields in the Dutch East Indies. It was America’s policy of defending China that turned an Asian war into a world war. Thus, any objective narrative of the second world war should have it starting with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937, which heralded the start of Japan’s bid to conquer China, not the invasion of Poland in 1939...I

This article also refers to the Emperor's surrender speech, in which he says, "should we continue to fight, it would result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese, but it would also lead to the total extinction of human civilisation", a perhaps self-interested but nevertheless apt description of the destructive power of the era of nuclear weapons ushered in by the western allies.

Skulls taken from colonial Africa set to return from Berlin?
Stefan Dege | Stuart Braun |8 Sept 2023

After human remains taken from Africa were stored in Berlin for over a century, living descendants have been identified for the first time. Growing calls to repatriate the remains could soon be answered.

https://www.dw.com/en/skulls-from-german-colonies-offer-dark-lessons-from-the-pa...

Caribbean nations set to demand royal family makes reparations for slave trade (Guardian)

Caribbean nations are preparing formal letters demanding that the British royal family apologise and make reparations for slavery. National reparations commissions in the region will also approach Lloyd’s of London and the Church of England with demands of financial payments and reparative justice for their historic role in the slave trade... a lawyer and chair of the island nation’s reparations commission, said: “We are hoping that King Charles will revisit the issue of reparations and make a more profound statement beginning with an apology, and that he would make resources from the royal family available for reparative justice. He should make some money available. We are not saying that he should starve himself and his family, and we are not asking for trinkets. But we believe we can sit around a table and discuss what can be made available for reparative justice.” He added that the duty to offer reparations lay “at all levels, banks, churches, insurance companies like Lloyd’s, and universities and colleges that benefited”...

Britain likes to think it ‘stood alone’ against the Nazis. So why did it convict so few for war crimes? (Guardian)

Out of 274 suspects investigated in England, Wales and Scotland, there was only a single conviction...

Quobna Cugoano: London church honours Ghanaian-born freed slave and abolitionist (BBC)

Quobna Ottobah Cugoano was a respected abolitionist in 18th Century Britain - but, despite his significant role in the abolition of the slave trade and slavery, his story is not that well-known. Cugoano was born in the Gold Coast, today's Ghana. He was enslaved when he was 13 - captured with about 20 others as they were playing in a field. His destination was the sugar plantations of the Caribbean island of Grenada. On board the ship taking him across the Atlantic Ocean, there was, as Cugoano writes, "nothing to be heard but the rattling of chains, smacking of whips, and the groans and cries of our fellow-men." Forced to work on a sugar plantation after two years of "dreadful captivity... without any hope of deliverance, beholding the most dreadful scenes of misery and cruelty", he was brought to Britain and managed to gain his freedom in 1772... On 20 August 1773, 250 years ago, at the age of 16, Cugoano was baptised John Stuart in St James's Church Piccadilly, in the centre of London. But he published his book 13 years later under his original, African name. Lovelace's artwork in honour of Cugoano is being installed in the church entrance on Wednesday, 20 September...

Canada Nazi row puts spotlight on Ukraine's WWII past (BBC)

When Canada's parliament praised a Ukrainian war veteran who fought with Nazi Germany, a renewed spotlight was put on a controversial part of Ukraine's history and its memorialisation in Canada... this is not the first time that Ukraine's role in WWII has sparked a debate in Canada, which is home to the largest Ukrainian diaspora outside of Europe. Several monuments dedicated to Ukrainian WWII veterans who served in the Galicia Division exist across the country. Jewish groups have long denounced these dedications, arguing soldiers in the Galicia Division swore allegiance to Adolf Hitler, and were either complicit in Nazi Germany's crimes or had committed crimes themselves. But for some Ukrainians, these veterans are viewed as freedom fighters, who only fought alongside the Nazis to resist the Soviets in their quest for an independent Ukraine. The Galicia Division was a part of the Waffen-SS, a Nazi military unit that on the whole was found to have been involved in numerous atrocities, including the massacring of Jewish civilians... During WWII, millions of Ukrainians served in the Soviet Red Army, but thousands of others fought on the German side under the Galicia Division. Those who fought with Germany believed it would grant them an independent state free from Soviet rule, Prof Marples said. At the time, Ukrainians resented the Soviets for their role in the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33, also known as Holodomor, which killed an estimated five million Ukrainians. Far-right ideologies were also gaining traction in most European countries in the 1930s - including the UK - and Ukraine was no exception... Some Canadians of Ukrainian descent view these soldiers and the broader Galicia Division as "national heroes" who fought for the country's independence. They also argue that their collaboration with Nazi Germany was short-lived, and that they had eventually fought both the Soviets and the Germans for a free Ukraine. But the Jewish community views this differently. "The bottom line is that this unit, the 14th SS unit, were Nazis"... As this historical debate entered the 21st century, it was made more complicated by modern Russian propaganda, which falsely labelled the Ukrainian government as Nazis to justify its invasion of the country. Prof Marples said that while far-right extremism still exists in Ukraine, it is much smaller than what Russian propaganda tries to make people believe. And Ukrainian elected officials are not tied to any far-right group in the country. "Russia has greatly simplified the narrative"...

Former pupils demand apology from Irish school over Nazi teacher’s bullying (Guardian)

There was never any mystery about the fact that Louis Feutren, a French teacher at St Conleth’s school in south Dublin, was a Nazi collaborator. He had a taste for violent punishments and bizarre humiliations that terrorised pupils. He liked to reminisce about the second world war, when he had joined a Breton nationalist group that fought on the side of Germany. And he showed pictures of himself in uniform. To have a staff member who was a known Nazi collaborator and fugitive from French justice was accepted at St Conleth’s, which employed Feutren from 1957 until his retirement in 1985. He remained respected and feted as an educator until his death in 2009. Now, however, former pupils who endured and witnessed assaults by Feutren have demanded an apology from the school’s board of management... Feutren was a member of the Breton movement Bezen Perrot, which collaborated with Nazis during the occupation of France in hope of establishing an independent Breton state. The unit wore SS uniforms and guarded an interrogation centre at Rennes. Feutren was a junior officer with the rank of Oberscharführer. After the war the entire unit was sentenced to death for crimes against Jews and resistance fighters... Feutren escaped to Wales and then Ireland, where he studied at the University of Galway before becoming a French teacher at St Conleth’s, a prestigious school in Ballsbridge, south Dublin. “They said he wasn’t really a Nazi but a Breton separatist,” said Goñi. “My reaction was, yes, but many Breton separatists didn’t join the SS”...

Voice referendum: Indigenous rights vote is a reckoning for Australia (BBC)

On 14 October, Australia will vote in a historic referendum that cuts to the core of how it sees itself as a nation. If successful, the proposal - known as the Voice - will recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the constitution, while creating a body for them to advise governments on the issues affecting their communities. Yes advocates say it's a "modest yet profound" change that will allow Indigenous Australians to take "a rightful place" in their own country - which has often dragged its heels confronting its past. But those campaigning against it describe it as a "radical" proposal that will "permanently divide" the country by giving First Nations people greater rights than other Australians - a claim legal experts reject...

Islamophobia is not ‘freedom of speech’ (Al Jazeera)

If Western nations are truly committed to upholding and protecting human rights, they should stop using unfounded concerns over ‘freedom of speech’ as an excuse for inaction. This summer’s Quran burnings in Scandinavia were not anomalies but part of a disturbing trend. We are witnessing a sharp rise in Islamophobic hate, fuelled and funded by far-right political actors across the globe. Muslims are increasingly being _targeted, harassed and discriminated against just for being Muslims in Europe, in the United States, and beyond... such hateful incidents can devastate communities and damage national cohesion and trust...

King Charles to acknowledge ‘painful’ colonial past on state visit to Kenya (Guardian)

King Charles will acknowledge the “painful aspects” of Britain’s past actions in Kenya during a state visit later this month. The visit follows an invitation from the country’s president, William Ruto, whose country will celebrate the 60th anniversary of its independence from Britain on 12 December. The two countries have enjoyed a close relationship in recent years despite the violent colonial legacy of an uprising in the early 1950s, which led to a period known as “the emergency”, which ran from 1952 until 1960...

UK politicians and campaigners call for reparative justice for African slave trade (Guardian)

Politicians, campaigners and community groups are uniting for the first time to make “a very distinct and clear call for reparative justice” at an inaugural reparations conference this weekend. The all-party parliamentary group for Afrikan reparations (APPG-AR), a group of cross-party MPs, is hosting its first reparations conference in Euston in north London to collectively agree on a common statement with stakeholders and grassroots campaigners that can be used by MPs to push forward a policy for reparative justice in the House of Commons. Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the Streatham MP and chair of the APPG-AR, said: “We are bringing people from across the country – and there are international speakers as well – to make a very, very distinct and clear call for reparative justice.” As well as grassroots activists and community groups, politicians and representatives from the Scottish National party, Green party and Labour party are participating in the conference, she said. “It’s a conference of people who have been talking about these issues for a long time”...

The Tanzanians searching for their grandfathers' skulls in Germany (BBC)

Isaria Anael Meli has been looking for his grandfather's remains for more than six decades. He believes the skull ended up in a Berlin museum after his grandfather, Mangi Meli, along with 18 other chiefs and advisers, was hanged by a German colonial force 123 years ago. After all this time, a German minister has told the BBC the country is prepared to apologise for the executions in what is now northern Tanzania. Other descendants have also been searching for the remains and recently, in an unprecedented use of DNA research, two of the skulls of those killed have been identified among a museum collection of thousands...

The massacre of Herero and Nama people by German colonial forces in what is now Namibia was the first genocide of the 20th century, but very few people in the Global North have even heard of it.

Inside Charles and Camilla's state dinner: King and Queen enjoyed lobster ravoli and salmon with Champagne as part of eight-course feast in Nairobi
Rebecca English | 31 October 2023

... the King told the Kenyan people of his ‘greatest sorrow and deepest regret’ at Britain’s ‘abhorrent and unjustifiable acts of violence’ during the Colonial era.

In a keynote speech that went far further than many expected amid calls for an apology over government abuses under his late mother’s reign, King Charles said there was ‘no excuse’ for British ’wrongdoings’ in the east African nation, particularly against the Mau Mau rebellion.

Speaking at a state banquet in Nairobi, he told the Kenyan President and 350 guests: ‘It is the intimacy of our shared history that has brought our people together. However, we must also acknowledge the most painful times of our long and complex relationship.

‘The wrongdoings of the past are a cause of the greatest sorrow and the deepest regret. There were abhorrent and unjustifiable acts of violence committed against Kenyans as they waged, as you said at the United Nations, a painful struggle for independence and sovereignty – and for that, there can be no excuse.'

Charles continued: ‘In coming back to Kenya, it matters greatly to me that I should deepen my own understanding of these wrongs, and that I meet some of those whose lives and communities were so grievously affected.

‘None of this can change the past. But by addressing our history with honesty and openness we can, perhaps, demonstrate the strength of our friendship today. And, in so doing, we can, I hope, continue to build an ever-closer bond for the years ahead.’

The King stopped short of a direct apology, which carries greater legal culpability, because it is not British government policy to do so.

(14:39) King Charles speech in Kenya

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-12694559/charles-camilla-state-dinner...

Germany asks forgiveness for Tanzania colonial crimes (BBC)

The German president has expressed "shame" for the colonial atrocities his country inflicted on Tanzania. German forces killed almost 300,000 people during the Maji Maji rebellion in the early 1900s, one of the bloodiest anti-colonial uprisings. President Frank-Walter Steinmeier was speaking at a museum in Songea, where the uprising took place. "I would like to ask for forgiveness for what Germans did to your ancestors here," he said. "What happened here is our shared history, the history of your ancestors and the history of our ancestors in Germany"...

Plan is to change common, not scientific names, but some scientific names have peoples' names embedded in them? Still happening as new species are named--probably not happening with birds as much as fewer new species being discovered?

These American birds and dozens more will be renamed, to remove human monikers
Nell Greenfieldboyce | November 1, 2023
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/01/1209660753/these-american-birds-and-dozens-more-w...
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The Audubon's namesake, John James Audubon, was also a slave holder. Nevertheless, I would so hate to see his beautiful, irreplaceable paintings disappear from the public realm...Sure hope it doesn't come to that. ( https://www.audubon.org/news/the-myth-john-james-audubon )

Must be a statute of limitations on returning such things, but apparently the Vatican's 4,000 year old (funerary?) obelisk was brought from Egypt to Rome in 37AD by the Roman Emperor Caligula!

https://archaeology-travel.com/street/vatican-obelisk-in-st-peters-square/

Europe’s hollow apologies for colonial crimes stand in the way of true reparation (Guardian)

From Belgium to Germany and Britain, western countries still seek to dictate which colonial abuses are redressed and how...

‘The four centuries of slave trade shaped the spectre of racism and are woven into the fabric of global development’ (Guardian)

A lasting legacy of racism, oppression and colonialism is laid bare at a powerful exhibition in Cambridge. Confronting it can help us build a more equitable world...

I’m taking a class titled Appalachian Plants and People. We learned a bit more than most are taught about the North Carolina Cherokee Nation and their efforts to not be displaced.

We had our own celebration meal a few days ago, and the prof pointed to this story from Massachusetts (reprinted from the Washington Post):

This tribe helped the Pilgrims survive for their first Thanksgiving. They still regret it 400 years later

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation/this-tribe-helped-the-pilgrims-...

Is it ever ethical for museums to display human remains? (BBC)

Defining human remains within museums (or even using the term "human remains") is not straightforward. The UK's Human Tissue Act, for example, does not apply to nails and hair, and only requires consent for the use of human remains from people who died within the last 100 years. However, some UK museums take a broader definition. International standards vary as well. When the Human Remains Working Group of the German Museums Association drew up its first guidelines in 2013, "for our recommendations, it really didn't matter if a person died 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago", says ethnologist Wiebke Ahrndt, the chair of the working group. Human remains were defined as all physical remains of Homo sapiens, including hair, teeth or nails that may not have been attached to the person at the time of collection... the National Museum of Scotland has removed all images of (unwrapped) human remains from its online database. Different cultures also have different beliefs about how human remains should be treated... in many cultural traditions, to separate or disturb body parts is deeply harmful. Another area of debate is whether it's permissible to exhibit human bodies as long as they're completely enclosed. A good example is Egyptian mummies, which are often "seen more as artefacts than as people", says Lewis McNaught, whose curatorial work has included a stint in the British Museum's Department of Egyptian Antiquities. Though these mummies are ancient and often have no body parts exposed, there is an ongoing discussion about whether displaying these humans continues to objectify them, without increasing genuine understanding... Now, amid conversations around colonial legacies and responsibilities, there's actually more pressure from the German public and the media to speed up the repatriation of human remains acquired in colonial contexts... One key consideration with human remains in museums is the manner in which they entered the collection. If it's known that they were acquired illegally or unethically, Ahrndt believes that they shouldn't be presented to the public in any way. In the Übersee-Museum's experience, the human remains that have now been repatriated were not initially collected in good faith. "They were against the will of the people," says Ahrndt. "They were stolen, they were dug out, at nighttime." In Ayau's opinion, since consent cannot be presumed, museums have the responsibility never to display people who are deceased. He points out that when family members pass away and they are buried, for example, it is not with the intent that one day they will be put on display. Today there's also more scrutiny of whether there genuinely is any scientific or other academic value to retaining human remains. And where there may be an argument for scientific merit, that is now increasingly weighed against other considerations, including the dignity of the person and the wishes of the community of origin. Many of the human bodies in Western museums ended up there as justifications for colonialism and scientific racism. The examples are numerous, even just from early-20th-Century incidents...

Asante Gold: UK to loan back Ghana's looted 'crown jewels' (BBC)

The UK is sending some of Ghana's "crown jewels" back home, 150 years after looting them from the court of the Asante king. A gold peace pipe is among 32 items returning under long-term loan deals, the BBC can reveal...

Elihu Yale: The cruel and greedy slave trader who gave Yale its name (BBC)

Last month, Yale University issued a formal apology for the links its early leaders and benefactors had with slavery. Since then, one name that has come under intense scrutiny in India is that of Elihu Yale, the man after whom the Ivy League university is named. Yale served as the all-powerful governor-president of the British East India Company in Madras in southern India (present-day Chennai) in the 17th Century and it was a gift of about £1,162 ($1,486) that earned him the honour of having the university named after him... Often described as a connoisseur and collector of fine things and a philanthropist who generously donated to churches and charities, Elihu Yale is now in focus as a colonialist who plundered India and - worse - traded in slaves...

Sites of resistance: threatened African burial grounds around the world (Guardian)

Too often cemeteries for enslaved people have been all but erased from history but how we remember matters... For archeologists, what defines people as human is how we bury our dead. Imagine, then, a society that relegates a whole community as legally inhuman, enslaved with no rights. In spite of slavery, African burial grounds are tangible reminders of the enslaved and free – defying oppressive circumstances by reclaiming people’s humanity through acts of remembrance. When I first visited the British overseas territory of St Helena in 2018 and saw the burial ground in Rupert’s Valley, I was astounded by its size and significance. It unambiguously placed the island at the centre of the Middle Passage – tying the British empire to the institution of slavery in the US, the Caribbean, and globally... How we choose to remember these places matters. They are sites of reclamation and resistance, where revolutionary acts of remembrance will for ever mark our cultural landscape...

Harvard University removes human skin binding from book (BBC)

Harvard University has removed the binding of human skin from a 19th Century book kept in its library. Des Destinées de l'Ame (Destinies of the Soul) has been housed at Houghton Library since the 1930s. In 2014, scientists determined that the material it was bound with was in fact human skin. But the university has now announced it has removed the binding "due to the ethically fraught nature of the book's origins and subsequent history". Des Destinées de l'Ame is a meditation on the soul and life after death, written by Arsène Houssaye in the mid-1880s. He is said to have given it to his friend, Dr Ludovic Bouland, a doctor, who then reportedly bound the book with skin from the body of an unclaimed female patient who had died of natural causes... {Harvard} added it was looking at ways to ensure "the human remains will be given a respectful disposition that seeks to restore dignity to the woman whose skin was used". The library is also "conducting additional biographical and provenance research into the anonymous female patient", the university said...

‘Hidden in plain sight’: the European city tours of slavery and colonialism (Guardian)

From Puerta del Sol plaza in Madrid to the Tuileries Garden in Paris, guides reshape stories continent tells about itself. From Barcelona to Brussels, London to Lisbon, a cohort of guides has trained its lens on Black and African history, laying bare how the continent has been shaped by colonialism and slavery as they reshape the stories that Europe tells about itself. While California debates reparation bills aimed at compensating for generations of discriminatory policies, and the UK takes down tributes to slave traders and colonialists, similar conversations have been conspicuously absent across much of the continent. “We’re not lifting up anyone’s mattresses,” says Ondo. “This is history hidden in plain sight”... the conversation around Black history and colonialism in the Netherlands has shifted. In 2023, King Willem-Alexander apologised for his country’s role in slavery but stopped short of heeding demands for reparations, despite research suggesting his ancestors had earned the modern-day equivalent of €545m (£466m) from slavery. The apology was a “pretty watershed moment”, says Tosch, albeit one that was carefully timed to dovetail with the growing attention being paid to this history. In other words, it was more a credit to the crucial work many had been doing to uncover the history than any royal initiative... The locals who take her tours are often surprised to find out that Germany’s colonial empire once ranked as the third largest in Europe. “They’ve never learned anything about Germany’s colonial past, some don’t even know that the Berlin conference happened in Berlin,” she says, citing the 1884-85 gathering in which European imperial powers wrangled for control of Africa. “I think it is also shocking to them how those colonial continuities just live among us”... Germany – a country often lauded for its efforts to deal with its more-recent past – had failed to meaningfully reckon with its history of colonialism...

Macron to say France and allies could have stopped Rwanda genocide in 1994 (Guardian)

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has said France and its western and African allies “could have stopped” Rwanda’s 1994 genocide but did not have the will to halt the slaughter of an estimated 800,000 people, mostly ethnic Tutsis. In a video message to be published on Sunday to mark the 30th anniversary of the genocide, Macron will emphasise that “when the phase of total extermination against the Tutsis began, the international community had the means to know and act”, the presidency said on Thursday. The president believes that at the time the international community already had historical experience of witnessing genocide with the Holocaust in the second world war and the mass killings of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey during the first world war. Macron will say that “France, which could have stopped the genocide with its western and African allies, did not have the will” to do so, the official added...

General Roméo Dallaire's book Shake hands with the devil : the failure of humanity in Rwanda is instructive in this regard.

Rwanda genocide: World failed us in 1994, President Paul Kagame says (BBC)

Rwanda's president said the international community "failed all of us", as he marked 30 years since the 1994 genocide that killed around 800,000 people. President Paul Kagame addressed dignitaries and world leaders who had gathered in Rwanda's capital, Kigali, to commemorate the bloodshed. "Rwanda was completely humbled by the magnitude of our loss," he said. "And the lessons we learned are engraved in blood"... In a speech later, Mr Kagame thanked fellow African countries including Uganda, Ethiopia and Tanzania for their assistance in accepting Tutsi refugees and ending the genocide. "Many of the countries representing here also sent their sons and daughters to serve as peacekeepers in Rwanda," he said. "Those soldiers did not fail Rwanda. It was the international community which failed all of us. Whether from contempt or cowardice." The failure of other nations to intervene has been a cause of lingering shame. Former US President Bill Clinton, who was among the visiting leaders present, has called the genocide the biggest failure of his administration. In a video message recorded for the memorial, French President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged that his country and its allies could have stopped the genocide but lacked the will to do so... a report commissioned by Mr Macron three years ago concluded that France bears "heavy and overwhelming responsibilities"...

>34 John5918:

I have a copy of Shake Hands with the Devil, but I'm ashamed to say that I've never worked up the courage to read it.

Taiwan pledges to remove 760 statues of Chinese dictator Chiang Kai-shek (Guardian)

Taiwan’s government has pledged to remove almost 800 statues of Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese military dictator who ruled the island for decades under martial law, but whose legacy remains a point of contentious debate...

Portugal rejects suggestion to pay reparations for slavery after comments from president (Guardian)

Portugal’s government has said it refuses to initiate any process to pay reparations for atrocities committed during transatlantic slavery and the colonial era, contrary to earlier comments from President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa. From the 15th to the 19th century, 6 million Africans were kidnapped and forcibly transported across the Atlantic by Portuguese vessels and sold into slavery, primarily in Brazil. Rebelo de Sousa had said on Saturday that Portugal could use several methods to pay reparations, such as cancelling the debt of former colonies and providing financing. The government said in a statement sent to the Portuguese news agency Lusa it wanted to “deepen mutual relations, respect for historical truth and increasingly intense and close cooperation, based on the reconciliation of brotherly peoples”. But it added it had “no process or programme of specific actions” for paying reparations, noting this line was followed by previous governments...

Contains shocking historical photos...

Leopold II: Belgium 'wakes up' to its bloody colonial past
Georgina Rannard & Eve Webster | 12 June 2020

...By 1908, Leopold II's rule was deemed so cruel that European leaders, themselves violently exploiting Africa, condemned it and the Belgian parliament forced him to relinquish control of his fiefdom.

...When Leopold II died in 1909, he was buried to the sound of Belgians booing.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53017188

>38 margd:

I can't remember if I've mentioned previously King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild? Grim reading, but an excellent book on what happened in the Congo under Leopold.

Dorset auction house withdraws Egyptian human skulls from sale (Guardian)

An auction house has withdrawn 18 ancient Egyptian human skulls from sale after an MP said selling them would perpetuate the atrocities of colonialism. Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Afrikan reparations, believes the sale of human remains for any purposes should be outlawed, adding that the trade was “a gross violation of human dignity”... They were originally collected by the Victorian British soldier and archaeologist Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers...

Colonialism is challenged but also reinforced on university campuses (Al Jazeera)

Across the United States, universities have become the epicentre of student-led movements opposing Israel’s war on Gaza. Local authorities and university administrations have unleashed intense crackdowns on these demonstrations under the false pretences of protecting campuses and fighting anti-Semitism. But in the face of violence and threats, students have stood their ground, and protests are not showing any signs of subsiding. What we are witnessing from student protesters is not new. In fact, students have historically been at the forefront of resisting and denouncing colonialism and imperialism... From the perspective of the coloniser, such student mobilisation is dangerous. This explains the ongoing violent crackdown against the student protests in the US and some European countries, and it might also explain why all 12 universities in the Gaza Strip have been bombed and destroyed. But it would be naive to think that universities are only sites of dissent. As student protests have insisted, institutions of higher education actively facilitate and support colonial projects... Beyond their investment choices, universities also contribute to the colonial project by educating students to devise, justify and implement the means and mechanisms of colonialism... As students lead the way in challenging a system of higher education that is complicit in imperial wars and colonialism, we, the faculty, must consider the role we are playing within it. Ethical questions of how science and technology are enmeshed with colonial domination and militarism must be tackled in class. Universities have long served as a place where students learn to think critically and challenge the status quo; they have also supported and strengthened structures of colonial dominance. The current campus protests are yet another escalation of the tension between these two roles...

>41 John5918: Many, but not all, "local authorities and university administrations have unleashed intense crackdowns on these demonstrations". At U Michigan convocation last weekend, Palestinian flag-carrying demonstrators marched around huge stadium (capacity 100,000+), and were peacefully escorted to the back of the seated graduates. (ETA: Think I read that there were protesters outside the stadium as well.)

UoM is where the Peace Corps was launched and it had no shortage of protests back in the day. More recently this "hotbed of liberalism" has seen Iraq War and impeachment protests, and has been _targeted by Klan for its marches. Trained volunteers peacefully keep counter-protesters and Klan apart. Maybe Ann Arbor has just had more practice --hope they continue to be successful at encouraging peaceful, free speech.

DW News @dwnews | 4:25 AM · May 7, 2024 {X}:
Dozens of students waving Palestinian flags briefly disrupted a University of Michigan commencement ceremony.
They were met with a mix of cheers and boos from the crowd.
0:35 ( https://twitter.com/dwnews/status/1787760530796786000 )
Pro-Palestinian protesters disrupt ceremony at Michigan Stadium

Violent clashes make much more interesting news footage, I grant you...

>42 margd:

Thanks, yes. Al Jazeera also has an article about different approaches by different universities, and in the Israel thread in this group I have posted positive stories about Newcastle University in UK and Trinity College Dublin in Ireland.

>43 John5918: No shortage of Jewish students at U Michigan, plus there's an affiliated campus in nearby Dearborn, MI (110,000), the first majority Arab city in the US. Funny Al Jazeera didn't mention UoM's experience--I don't think UoM is even on their "different approaches" map? Surely the absence of violence in Gaza-protests warrants some analysis?

BTW, the "uncommitted" voter protest in Democrats' presidential primary was led by Arab-Americans in Dearborn, Detroit, etc.

Detroit's Rashida Tlaib (Dem, Muslim) is the only(?) Palestinian-American in current Congress, and is favourite _target of AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying group).

Former Rep. Justin Amash (R/now Libertarian, Christian Palestinian/Syrian-American) lives in west side of the state, voted for Trump's impeachment, and has relatives in Gaza, I think? He studied economics and law at UoM.

Fingers crossed for UoM's continuing peaceful protests. Maybe it's a good thing to not attract attention these days.

>44 margd: If I remember Amash and his family members in Gaza are Maronite Christians and some (19?) were killed early (November?) when the IDF bombed the church in Gaza City where they were taking refuge. It was like a very famous and ancient church they took shelter in. One you might think that a 'moral army' would avoid which is probably why they took refuge there. If I remember what happened right the IDF claimed that Hamas was firing rockets from the cemetery next to the church and like most of their claims it went unsubstantiated and the whole event lost in the deluge of all the events that have since followed it. I do remember that Amash posted some photos of his dead relatives on Facebook or something and that several Democratic pols reached out to him. I think he's been persona non grata among the entirety of Republicans since his earliest turn against Trump. I don't recall any of his former republican colleagues reaching out to him at all.

A couple corrections---it happened late October. Not Maronite Christians---Greek Orthodox. Says several relatives killed.

>44 margd: contd. "Maybe it's a good thing to not attract attention these days."

Uh oh. Hope University of Michigan President Santa Ono is up to partisan witch hunt this election year. "Santa Jeremy Ono is a Canadian-American immunologist and academic administrator who has been serving as the 15th president of the University of Michigan since October 2022." (Wikipedia)

Foxx calls on heads of Yale, UCLA, Michigan as part of House-wide antisemitism probe
Lexi Lonas - 04/30/24

Chairwoman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) on Tuesday called on the heads of Yale University, the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), and the University of Michigan to testify before her panel in May as part of a new House-wide investigation into antisemitism in the U.S.

...“Republican leaders have a clear message for mealy-mouthed spineless college leaders. Congress will not tolerate your dereliction of duty to your Jewish students. American universities are officially put on notice that we have come to take our universities back,” she said Tuesday.

“Everyone affiliated with these universities will receive a healthy dose of reality. Actions have consequences. One of those consequences is that I’ve given notice to appear to Yale, UCLA and Michigan to appear before the Education and Workforce Committee on May 23 for a hearing on their handling of the these most recent outrages,” she added.

...{Speaker Mike} Johnson lamented that universities are not inviting police into their campuses to take care of the protesters, saying that is one of the policy changes Republicans are looking to see. “Those are the policy changes that we’re demanding and if they don’t correct this quickly, you will see Congress respond in kind. You’re gonna see funding sources begin to dry up. You’re gonna see every level of accountability that we can muster and that’s what the work of these committees and these fine chairpersons are going to be involved in, and we’ll say stay tuned and you’ll see much more..."

https://thehill.com/homenews/education/4633638-foxx-yale-ucla-michigan-house-wid...

>46 margd: It's all showboating and Foxx FWIW voted against any kind of aid to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. She's a shitbird but they're looking for television time and they've found college administrators to be spineless and cringing and republicans are on a mission now to upend university and college campus's around the nation and put their on right wing stamp on education in this country.

Academic literacy is more than language, it’s about critical thinking and analysis: universities should do more to teach these skills (The Conversation)

In my long experience as a researcher and practitioner in the field of academic literacy, I have seen time and again that not only non-native English speakers struggle to transition from school to university. Many students, no matter what language they speak, lack the skills of critical thinking, analysis and logical reasoning. Academic literacy is a mode of reasoning that aims to develop university students into deep thinkers, critical readers and writers...skills that can transform their minds: critical and logical reasoning, argumentation, conceptual and analytical thinking, and problem solving... Without these skills, undergraduate students come to believe, for instance, that disciplinary knowledge is factual and truthful and cannot be challenged. They don’t learn how to critically assess and even challenge knowledge. Or they only see certain forms of knowledge as valid and scientific... Pragmatically, they also don’t develop the confidence to notice their own errors, attempt to address them or seek help...

‘It’s deeper than slavery’: Lisbon street project reclaims Portugal’s unseen black history (Guardian)

Plaques in city now mark the places where its African community has lived, worked and transformed the city...

Revealed: how Church of England’s ties to chattel slavery went to top of hierarchy (Guardian)

An archbishop of Canterbury in the 18th century approved payments for the purchase of enslaved people for two sugar plantations in Barbados, documents seen by the Observer have revealed. Thomas Secker agreed to reimburse a payment for £1,093 for the purchase of enslaved people on the Codrington Plantations, as well as hiring enslaved people from a third party. It was stated the measures were “calculated for the future lasting advantages of the estates”. The papers are among a cache of documents found in the archives of Lambeth Palace Library which detail the direct links between the Church of England and chattel slavery on plantations owned by its missionary arm, The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). In response to the Observer’s revelations, Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, said: “Every new piece of evidence around the Church’s involvement in the slave trade is sobering, and reading that a former archbishop of Canterbury was involved in the purchase of enslaved people is particularly painful. It is also a reminder that this work is not finished and there is more we need to do to examine our role in the trade in enslaved Africans, which was a blasphemy against God’s creation in treating men, women and children as less than human. While nothing can fully atone for these crimes, we are committed to finding out more, realising that this will take many years and could span generations.” He said research into “the most egregious aspects of our history” was “most welcome”...

UK within British empire is like last person left at a party, says David Olusoga (Guardian)

The historian David Olusoga has said the UK is the one country left in the British empire as he likened it to being the last oblivious person at a party. Asked at Hay festival on Sunday whether the British empire had ended, the broadcaster said: “There’s one country left in the British empire that needs to liberate itself and have its independence day from its own history, and that’s Britain.” He added: “It’s like we’ve had a party and everyone else left and we haven’t noticed. It infects our view of ourselves; it complicates and confuses our view of the rest of the world; it stops us from fully understanding how the rest of the world relates to us.” Olusoga said the attitude “infects” Britain’s institutions and was one of the reasons why there were debates over the honours system. “It’s just silly to have national honours named after an empire that doesn’t exist. It’s like having it named after Narnia,” he said. Asked if he had an OBE, Olusoga said: “I have, yeah, and it’s utterly silly.” Britain had not dealt with or been “open and honest” about its history, which led to such “ridiculous contradictions”, he said...

Let’s commemorate D-day – but not how Nigel Farage wants us to (Guardian)

A narrow, nostalgic view of the second world war that connects the conflict with culture war issues and a sense of contemporary British decline is frequently exploited by reactionaries such as Farage, both as a political tool and a stick with which to beat supposedly ignorant young people. Jibes that millennials and Gen Z are “too woke” to fight might in fact be familiar to anyone who has read letters between British commanders of the second world war. General Montgomery, one of the architects of the D-day invasion, wrote in 1942 that “the trouble with our British lads is that they are not killers by nature”. A 1943 army report, meanwhile, blamed books, cinema, plays and education for making soldiers weak under fire. Yet the generations are not so different as the harrumphing buffoons of today seem to think. Instead of insulting our young people, we can find new ways to remember those who fought and to make those events of long ago relevant. After all, there are stories about D-day and the wider conflict still to be told, many far from the fetishised narratives of British glory that Farage and his ilk want to force-feed us like wartime-rationed Spam. Some are poignant in their ordinariness, men and women just doing what they could to survive...

Edited to add:

Oxford University to return 500-year-old sculpture of Hindu saint to India (Guardian)

Oxford University has announced it is to hand back a 500-year-old sculpture of a Hindu saint to India... A claim for the 16th-century sculpture of the Tamil poet and saint from south India was made through the Indian high commission. It is believed the bronze may have been looted from an Indian temple...

Background: The traditional model of aid in Africa has long been dominated by a top-down approach, often rooted in the legacy of Western nations ‘helping’ Africa through humanitarian and financial assistance. This colonial model of subjugation has frequently resulted in dependency, ineffective aid delivery, and a lack of sustainable development. The conversation around decolonizing aid seeks to shift the paradigm towards a more equitable, participatory, and locally-driven approach, ensuring that the voices of African communities are at the forefront of their development narratives.

U.S. Catholic bishops apologize for church's role at Indigenous boarding schools
Russell Contreras | 14 June 2024

https://www.axios.com/2024/06/14/catholic-church-apology-indigenous-boarding-sch...
-----------------------------------------

Keeping Christ's Sacred Promise: A Pastoral Framework for Indigenous Ministry
UNITED STATES CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC BISHOPS | June 2024
56 p
https://www.usccb.org/resources/Indigenous%20Pastoral%20Framework%20-June%202024...

...Conclusion
...Because the issue of the “doctrine of discovery” has had such a profound impact on the lives of Indigenous populations in many different countries, we suggest that there should be an international conference to study its history and consequences, so that the effects felt even today by many Indigenous communities can be understood...

Stephen Fry likens removing Parthenon marbles to Nazi Germany taking the Arc de Triomphe (Guardian)

Stephen Fry has likened the removal of the Parthenon marbles from Greece to Nazi Germany stealing the Arc de Triomphe during the occupation of France, and he thinks it would be “classy” if the British Museum returned the ancient sculptures to their original home. Fry made the comments on the Australian TV series Stuff the British Stole... Fry argued that even if there was “the most scrupulously written document” that gave permission to Britain’s Lord Elgin to remove the Parthenon marbles from the Acropolis in 1802, “it’s like saying ‘Well, Germany claims it should have the Arc de Triomphe and there’s the document that proves it.’ But the Nazis were an occupying force. What right did they have to give away parts of France? It wasn’t theirs to give away.” For the past decade, the actor, comedian and writer has campaigned for the return of the 2,500-year-old sculptures to Greece. In 2023 he said their removal was the same as “removing the Eiffel Tower from Paris or Stonehenge from Salisbury”... “Wouldn’t Britain look classy for doing that?” Fry told Fennell in Stuff the British Stole. “Wouldn’t that be a fantastic feather in our cap? Because they mean so much more to Athens than perhaps we understand. What we look for in museums is that they should be ahead of us, not behind us, when it comes to … humankind and its meaning and stories, including the story of what the museum means. {Museums} reveal so much about us”...

Susannah's grandad ran Bengal when famine killed millions (BBC)

"I feel enormous shame about what happened," Susannah Herbert tells me. Her grandfather was the governor of Bengal, in British India, during the run-up and height of the 1943 famine which killed at least three million people. She is only just learning about his significant role in the catastrophe, and confronting a complex family legacy... The causes of the famine are many and complex. While John Herbert was the most important colonial figure in Bengal, he was part of a wider colonial structure. He reported to his bosses in Delhi, who reported to theirs in London. Dr Janam Mukherjee, historian and the author of Hungry Bengal, tells me Herbert "was the colonial official most directly linked to the famine because he was the chief executive of the province of Bengal at that time". One of the policies he executed during World War Two was known as "denial", where boats and rice – the staple food – were confiscated or destroyed in thousands of villages. It was done because of the fear of a Japanese invasion and the aim was to deny the enemy local resources to fuel their advance into India. However, the colonial policy was catastrophic for the already fragile local economy. Fishermen couldn't go to sea, farmers weren't able to go upstream to their plots, and artisans were unable to get their goods to market. Critically, rice could not be moved around... Repeated demands - in the middle of the war - to the war cabinet and Prime Minister Winston Churchill for food imports were denied or partially heeded at the time. The numbers who died are overwhelming... She starts to realise more about her grandfather. "There's absolutely no doubt that the policies he implemented and initiated contributed enormously to the scale and impact of the famine. "He had skills, he had honour. And he should not have been appointed to the post of running the lives of 60 million people in a faraway corner of the British Empire. He just should not have been appointed"... Susannah wants to know why her grandfather, a provincial MP and government whip, was appointed in the first place, when he had virtually no experience of Indian politics, beyond a brief spell in Delhi as a young officer. "It's part and parcel of colonialism and stems from an idea of supremacy," Janam explains.
"Some MP who has no colonial experience, who has no linguistic capacities, who has not worked in a political system outside of Britain, can simply go and inhabit the governor's house in Kolkata, and make decisions about an entire population of people that he knows nothing about"... At least three million people died in the Bengal famine and there is no memorial - or even a plaque - to them anywhere in the world... Britain tries to figure out what to do with this difficult part of its war story and colonial past.

Meanwhile, from the Russia thread:

russian occupiers in Crimea are preparing to take all museum collections from the peninsula to russia.
The heads of museum institutions of Crimea received a letter from the so-called "Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Crimea".
Managers were ordered to prepare museum valuables for "evacuation", that is, for theft.

Text Russian
https://x.com/EuromaidanPR/status/1801904715992555672/photo/1
https://x.com/EuromaidanPR/status/1801904715992555672/photo/2

- Ukraine Front Line @EuromaidanPR | 5:08 AM · Jun 15, 2024:
#1 Independent Citizen Media about Ukraine | runs by EMPR (EuromaidanPR) | Official Twitter of International PR Secretariat for HQ of National Resistance 2014

Especially menstruating women -- you don't want THEM to look at the GD mask. Good Gawd!

Jake Wallis Simons @JakeWSimons | 1:47 AM · Jun 18, 2024:
Editor, Jewish Chronicle. Author of Israelophobia (Telegraph book of the year). Columns for Sunday Telegraph and Spectator. Sky broadcaster

A University of Oxford museum will not display an African mask because the culture which created it forbids women from seeing it.
The decision by the Pitt Rivers Museum is part of new policies in the interest of “cultural safety”.
The museum has also removed online photos of the mask made by the Igbo people in Nigeria, which would originally have been used in a male-only ritual.
Masks are a central part of Igbo culture, and some masquerade rituals carried out by men wearing the ceremonial objects are entirely male-only and carried out in secret away from female spectators.
The new policy, a first for a major British collection, comes as part of a “decolonisation process” at the Pitt Rivers Museum, which is aiming to address a collection “closely tied to British Imperial expansion”. Via Telegraph

😶
https://telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/17/pitt-rivers-museum-oxford-university-afr...

>58 margd:

In response to Igbo-mask article in Telegraph, see:
https://prm.ox.ac.uk/collections {below}

Statement from Prof. Laura Van Broekhoven, Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, in response to Museum hides mask "not for women's eyes" article in the Telegraph, 18 June 2024:

"This is a non-story. The Igbo mask has not been removed from display, as it was never on display and no one has ever been denied access to it.

The Museum’s online collections now carry a cultural context message, which allows users, especially those from different cultures around the world, to actively choose which items they wish to see, and which to remain blurred from view. Only around 3,000 of our object records carry such a warning, so less than 1% of the overall collection. No digital assets are withheld from view from women."

Background information:
Contrary to an article which appeared in this morning’s Daily Telegraph, the Pitt Rivers Museum is not withholding an Igbo mask from display because it should not be shown to women. The mask in question is in storage in the museum, and there is no record of it ever having been put on public display. The museum displays around 50,000 items from its overall collection of around 350,000 objects.
Some collections and imagery of them are not appropriate for general public access online, and in this case, direct contact with the museum staff is encouraged to discuss the research need to consult them. Overwhelmingly this is for human remains, graphic or personal content, but also for copyright or other legal reasons. Only about 2,200 digital assets out of over 250,000 objects (less than 1%) are withheld from public view in this way.
The primary purpose of the sensitivity warnings is to protect people who may find these images culturally distressing, rather than from stopping visitors or researchers seeing them or doing research on them. We have a global collection and as such, have a responsibility to more than one community. Users of the online collections database can choose whether to proceed with or without these warnings.
The Museum is not working with groups to ensure that that objects are ‘selectively displayed’. We are working with groups to allow them to decide how their own cultures are represented.
A 15th century Indian statue has been claimed for return from the Ashmolean Museum collection, not the Pitt Rivers. Further information on this is available here.

Oct 2019!

They took part in Apache ceremonies. Their schools expelled them for satanic activities
Nicolle Okoren | 24 Jun 2024
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/jun/24/apache-students-s...

Canada owes First Nations billions after making ‘mockery’ of treaty deal, top court rules (Guardian)

An “egregious” refusal by successive Canadian governments to honor a key treaty signed with Indigenous nations made a “mockery” of the deal and deprived generations of fair compensation for their resources, Canada’s top court has ruled. But while the closely watched decision will likely yield billions in payouts, First Nation chiefs say the ruling adds yet another hurdle in the multi-decade battle for justice. In a scathing and unanimous decision released on Friday, Canada’s supreme court sharply criticized both the federal and Ontario governments for their “dishonourable” conduct around a 174-year-old agreement, which left First Nations people to struggle in poverty while surrounding communities, industry and government exploited the abundant natural resources in order to enrich themselves. “For almost a century and a half, the Anishinaabe have been left with an empty shell of a treaty promise,” the court wrote in the landmark ruling. The stark language reflects the enduring legacy of the colonial project first envisioned by the British government and continued after Canada gained independence and offers yet another example of major cases tilting towards Indigenous peoples. The court decision to highlight “egregious” ways in which governments have treated their agreements with nations could have far-reaching consequences, both for the affected communities and the country...

At least 973 Native American children died in government boarding schools, inquiry finds (Guardian)

At least 973 Native American children died in the US government’s abusive boarding school system, according to the results of an investigation released Tuesday by officials who called on the government to apologize for the schools. The investigation commissioned by the US interior secretary, Deb Haaland, found marked and unmarked graves at 65 of the more than 400 US boarding schools that were established to forcibly assimilate Native American children into white society. The findings don’t specify how each child died, but the causes of death included sickness and abuse during a 150-year period that ended in 1969, officials said. Additional children may have died after becoming sick at school and being sent home, officials said...

>62 John5918: No doubt there was abuse and neglect, but the biggest sin was taking kids from their families. And it took place in a backdrop of disease we westerners are thankfully unfamiliar with today. My dad once told me everybody he knew from early 20th c tested positive for exposure to tuberculosis. His young twin sister died of some unspecified illness. My mother was hospitalized with pleurisy as a youngster: for her pain they had only calcium, I was told. Even as an adult, a huge scar in her side from draining the fluid.

Candidates to lead Commonwealth urge reparations for slavery and colonialism (Guardian)

The three candidates to be the next secretary general of the Commonwealth have called for reparations for countries that were affected by slavery and colonisation. The candidates from the Gambia, Ghana and Lesotho expressed their support for either financial reparations or “reparative justice”, as they made their pitches to lead the 56-country organisation at a debate hosted by the Chatham House thinktank in London on Wednesday...

California passes legislation to formally apologize for slavery (Guardian)

California will formally apologize for slavery and its lingering effects on Black Americans in the state under a new law that the governor, Gavin Newsom, signed on Thursday. The legislation was part of a package of reparations bills introduced this year that seek to offer compensation for decades of policies that drove racial disparities for African Americans... “The state of California accepts responsibility for the role we played in promoting, facilitating and permitting the institution of slavery, as well as its enduring legacy of persistent racial disparities,” the Democratic governor said in a statement. “Building on decades of work, California is now taking another important step forward in recognizing the grave injustices of the past – and making amends for the harms caused.” California’s first constitution, passed in 1849, said that slavery would never “be tolerated in this State”. But it wasn’t accompanied by laws that explicitly made slavery a crime or that protected Black people’s freedom – creating legal ambiguity that was used to protect and empower enslavers. Then, in 1852, California passed a fugitive slave law, which allowed enslaved people who had escaped to be arrested and forced to return to the south with their enslavers...

What I found on the secretive tropical island they don't want you to see (BBC)

Diego Garcia, a remote island in the Indian Ocean, is a paradise of lush vegetation and white-sand beaches, surrounded by crystal blue waters. But this is no tourist destination. It is strictly out of bounds to most civilians - the site of a highly secretive UK-US military base shrouded for decades in rumour and mystery. The island, which is administered from London, is at the centre of a long-running territorial dispute between the UK and Mauritius, and negotiations have ramped up in recent weeks. The BBC gained unprecedented access to the island earlier this month...

UK will give sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius (BBC)

The UK has announced it is giving up sovereignty of a remote but strategically important cluster of islands in the Indian Ocean after more than half a century. The deal – reached after years of negotiations - will see the UK hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in a historic move. This includes the tropical atoll of Diego Garcia, used by the US government as a military base for its navy ships and long-range bomber aircraft... The US-UK base will remain on Diego Garcia – a key factor enabling the deal to go forward at a time of growing geopolitical rivalries in the region between Western countries, India, and China... The treaty will also "address wrongs of the past and demonstrate the commitment of both parties to support the welfare of Chagossians"... The UK will provide a package of financial support to Mauritius, including annual payments and infrastructure investment. Mauritius will also be able to begin a programme of resettlement on the Chagos Islands, but not on Diego Garcia. There, the UK will ensure operation of the military base for "an initial period" of 99 years...

Britain to return Chagos Islands to Mauritius ending years of dispute (Guardian)

The UK has agreed to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, ending years of bitter dispute over Britain’s last African colony. The agreement will allow a right of return for Chagossians, who the UK expelled from their homes in the 1960s and 1970s, in what has been described as a crime against humanity and one of the most shameful episodes of postwar colonialism. However, there will be an exception for the key island of Diego Garcia, which is home to a joint UK-US military base, and which will remain under UK control. Plans for the base were the reason the UK severed the Chagos Islands from the rest of Mauritius when it granted the latter independence in 1968 and forcibly displaced up to 2,000 people. There was a mixed reaction to the announcement from Chagossians, not all of whom are happy that sovereignty has been handed to Mauritius...

An attempt to halt the negotiations, on the basis that the Chagossians were not consulted or involved, failed. Chagossian Voices, a community organisation for Chagossians based in the UK and in several other countries, said of Thursday’s announcement: “Chagossian Voices deplore the exclusion of the Chagossian community from the negotiations which have produced this statement of intent concerning the sovereignty of our homeland. Chagossians have learned this outcome from the media and remain powerless and voiceless in determining our own future and the future of our homeland. The views of Chagossians, the Indigenous inhabitants of the islands, have been consistently and deliberately ignored and we demand full inclusion in the drafting of the treaty”...

Dutch feminists campaign for national monument to ‘witches’ (Guardian)

Three feminist campaigners in the Netherlands want to reclaim the insult “witch” and recognise the innocent victims of Dutch witch-hunts from the 15th to the 17th centuries with a national monument. Susan Smit, Bregje Hofstede and Manja Bedner, the chair and board members of the National Witches Monument foundation, have raised €35,000 (£29,000) for an official site of memory for about 70,000 people who died during a Satanic panic that swept Europe and the Americas. “It’s about creating more awareness around this history of, basically, femicide,” Hofstede said. “To this day a witch is still a comic figure. In the Netherlands, every year at the carnaval, people burn effigies of witches … but there’s hardly any knowledge of the actual history of people being burned at the stake”...

‘It’s path-breaking’: British Columbia’s blueprint for decolonisation (Guardian)

Awild experiment is under way in British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province: the government is rewriting its laws to share power with Indigenous nations over a land base bigger than France and Germany combined. Decades in the making, this transition entered history in 2019, when BC became the first jurisdiction on Earth to sign the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) into law. This means the regional government would share decision-making power over land management matters with First Nations, potentially affecting leasing and licences for forestry, mining and construction. The legislation is dauntingly complex, involving distinct negotiations with more than 200 First Nations and the dismantling of a system built to protect industrial profits over any other interest...

>69 John5918: Isn’t this a good thing? Astonishingly good!

>69 John5918: SO complex! My understanding is that indigenous rights are spelled out in treaties, often after wars in US. In Canada, treaties were negotiated every few miles it seemed north of Superior: rights were discussed in philosophical terms that while more comfortable to read than US stuff, details were left to Cdn govt and courts to figure out. e.g., while US "tribes" had fishing and even fish management rights in Great Lakes and were gathered into (two?) treaties that encouraged biological and mgt reps, there are ~60 (?) treaties on the north shore of L Superior, and fishing rights are cultural under Canada's constitution, the details of which have to be nailed down. Process is no less messy and nasty than in US, if Nova Scotia is any guide, and it will take much longer? Hope end results are worth it. (I assume BC treaties are similar to those farther east.)

From 2006, but I had never heard of it:
Lost document reveals Columbus as tyrant of the Caribbean

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/aug/07/books.spain

>72 2wonderY:

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN
Rethinking How We Celebrate American History—Indigenous Peoples’ Day
Dennis W. Zotigh and Renee Gokey | October 12, 2020

Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day! On Monday, more states, cities, and communities than ever will observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day in place of or in addition to Columbus Day. They’re part of a larger movement to see a more complete and accurate history of the United States taught in our schools and public spaces. Given research showing that the majority of state and local curriculum standards end their study of Native American history before 1900, the importance of celebrating the survival and contemporary experience of Native peoples has never been clearer.

... {2020} These states and the District of Columbia now observe Native American or Indigenous Peoples’ Day, in place of or in addition to Columbus Day. Most of them have followed the lead of their cities and smaller communities, a list that has happily grown too long to include here

▪︎ Alabama
▪︎ Alaska
▪︎ District of Columbia
▪︎ Hawai’i
▪︎ Idaho
​▪︎ Iowa
▪︎ Louisiana
▪︎ Maine
▪︎ Michigan
▪︎ Minnesota
▪︎ New Mexico
▪︎ North Carolina
▪︎ Oklahoma
▪︎ Oregon
▪︎ South Dakota
▪︎ Vermont
▪︎ Virginia
▪︎ Wisconsin ...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-american-indian/2020/10/12/...

Niger drops French place names to honour local heroes (BBC)

Niger’s military leaders have renamed streets and monuments bearing French names, in the latest move to cut links with the country’s former colonial power. Avenue Charles de Gaulle in the capital, Niamey, is now Avenue Djibo Bakary in honour of the Nigerien politician who played a key role in the West African country’s struggle for independence. "Most of our avenues, boulevards and streets... bear names that are simply reminders of the suffering and bullying our people endured during the ordeal of colonisation," said junta spokesman Maj Col Abdramane Amadou...

UK will not apologise for role in slavery at Commonwealth summit, No 10 says (Guardian)

The UK government will not apologise over Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade at next week’s Commonwealth heads of government (Chogm) summit in Samoa, Downing Street has said. Downing Street said on Monday that the government would not be paying reparations for slavery. News that neither an apology nor reparations are on the agenda could put Keir Starmer, who will attend the gathering, on a collision course with other nations. All three candidates to succeed Patricia Scotland as the Commonwealth secretary general have said they support reparations for countries affected by slavery and colonisation. King Charles is also due to attend the summit. Last year, he said he felt the “greatest sorrow and regret” at the “wrongdoings” for atrocities suffered by Kenyans during their struggle for independence from British colonial rule. However, he stopped short of an apology, which was criticised as a “miss” by human rights organisations in Kenya. An apology would have needed to be agreed upon by ministers. The UK government has confirmed to the BBC that even if the issue of historical links to slavery is raised at the summit, there are no plans for a symbolic apology...

>75 John5918: Not much honour among the combatants in the Seven Year (French & Indian) War,* but reading about Jeffery Amherst, I was glad Ontario island where we have summer place was NOT named for him: biological warfare (smallpox blankets), and pretty atrocious behaviour under his command towards Mi'kmaq and the (Acadian) French in Nova Scotia. I know one should be cautious in applying current standards against historical figures, but he was one nasty dude, IMHO.

* PBS made a pretty good try at being even handed in their series "The War That Made America": https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=The+War+that+made+America . One marvels at the violence in an area so peaceful today...

Why white working-class Britons should fight to secure colonial slavery reparations (Guardian)

The country grew rich from slavery, but those who directly benefited the most – and still do – were wealthy. They exploited everyone... The greatest trick white supremacy ever pulled was to convince working-class white people that they had a stake in it. That they shared in the spoils of the racial supremacy-laden economic exploitation of “lesser species”, such as slavery and the colonisation of Africans. In reality, working-class white people were actually the dispensable pawns of white supremacy. Or as Lyndon B Johnson put it: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best coloured man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” In Britain, pockets were royally picked...

> 77 Any discussion of reparations should lean more to truth and reconciliation? I mean, not only did most working-class whites not benefit (directly, at least) from slavery, some were collateral damage, e.g., Scottish clearances. Racism, however, is an ugly lingering stain that needs to be expunged...

No, Robert Jenrick, former colonies do not owe a ‘debt of gratitude’ for Britain’s legacy of brutality and exploitation (Guardian)

As a historian, the UK conservative party leadership candidate should know that the only debt owed is one of accountability and reparation...

Push for black and Asian soldiers’ input in world wars to be taught in UK schools (Guardian)

Politicians and community leaders are calling for the history of black and Asian soldiers who fought for Britain in the world wars to be taught more widely in schools to help tackle ignorance, racism and anti-Muslim prejudice. Speaking on the 110th anniversary of the first Muslim to be awarded the Victoria Cross, leading minority ethnic voices have said that raising awareness of black and Asian service men and women could help tackle racism and anti-Muslim prejudice after this summer’s riots...

How Maasai people were reunited with precious heirlooms (BBC)

The return of stolen objects is helping Maasai people to rediscover community bonds lost generations ago... reuniting Maasai residents of Kenya and Tanzania with precious heirlooms lost to their families, in some cases for over 100 years... Instead of East Africa, these items had been sitting in the Pitt Rivers Museum, an influential anthropology and archaeology institution that is part of the University of Oxford. It wasn't until 2017 that questions started to arise about their provenance... objects of inheritance, meant to stay within the family. They certainly cannot be sold or traded outside the Maasai nation... At the end of the week in Oxford, after some difficult conversations, the delegation ultimately decided not to seek return of their items. They felt that their stories would reach more people if the objects remained where they were. But they wanted some changes in how the museum treated the objects. The delegates asked the museum not to use euphemisms, such as those obscuring the violence of the way the items were taken. "They were not acquired. They were not collected," says Nangiria...

Study finds influential textbooks labeled American actions as imperialist, contradicting American exceptionalism (phys.org)

The ideology of American exceptionalism has long held that the United States is and has been exceptional throughout its history, not making the same mistakes or perpetuating the same evils of other world powers. Yet a new study from the University of Kansas has found that influential history textbooks have long argued that America acted as an empire, especially in the late 19th century. Stephen Jackson, assistant professor of educational leadership & policy studies at KU, has published a study in which he analyzed world history textbooks used in Texas high schools from the 1920s through 2016. He found the books commonly referred to American actions as imperialistic, which seemingly contradicts the concept of American exceptionalism...

The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power by Max Boot. It's been a while since I read this short book, but my recollection is that Americans sought not to be imperialists, but kept slipping into it. My Cdn military dad was surprised at the number of small
military adventures undertaken by our American neighbours...

Finally, the end of ‘the British empire’ – and maybe an honours system a modern country can live with (Guardian)

Reports suggest King Charles would not object to a move away from awards with ‘empire’ in the title. Not before time... Apparently Charles is ready – if Keir Starmer’s government is ready – to ditch the empire reference on OBEs, and ​presumably MBEs and CBEs. The E would stand for excellence instead. ​Or maybe, order of Elizabeth. Keeping the Es would avoid invalidating the experiences of those who have received an honour linked to empire, but it would also open the awards to so many people who currently feel, as a point of principle, that they cannot accept them...

>83 John5918: I like the idea that "British Excellence" would then be something different from Excellence :-) And so the British could believe that BE would be better than just E and the rest of the world would be thinking of British "Excellence" and everybody would be happy.

(Sorry, but I've been reading a bit too many of British mysteries lately where Lord This and Sir That litter the pages.)

The great remembrance divide: Britain fought for freedom in Europe, but against it in the colonies (Guardian)

While war raged against Hitler, people in places such as India were brutalised – despite their own sacrifices to the cause... while Britain fought the second world war to defeat Nazi Germany, putting its own existence as a free country at stake, it denied freedom to its colonies. Winston Churchill made no secret of his belief that “coloured” people had no right to be free...

Indian tribes seek to bring back ancestral skulls from UK (BBC)

Last month, Ellen Konyak was shocked to discover that a 19th-Century skull from the north-eastern Indian state of Nagaland was up for auction in the UK... among thousands of items that European colonial administrators had collected from the state... “To see that people are still auctioning our ancestral human remains in the 21st Century was shocking,” she said. “It was very insensitive and deeply hurtful”...

Decolonise how? The crisis is always past (The New Humanitarian)

One hundred and forty years ago, representatives from nearly all the countries of Europe as well as from the United States gathered in Berlin for 15 weeks to deliberate on the rules for what became known as the Scramble for Africa. Held from November 1884 to February 1885, it was an event that no African representatives were permitted to attend, and where the rights and sovereignties of African peoples were subjugated to European greed for their land and resources... The anniversary will pass largely unnoticed, though it should be of import for journalists trying to help audiences understand the roots of today’s interminable conflicts and humanitarian crises on the continent. There is a tendency to dehistoricise these and to essentialise them as peculiarities born of the inscrutable “African” condition. Yet the remaking of the continent to fit the imagination of Europe had devastating and long-lasting effects, many of which are still being felt today. It eviscerated Indigenous political, economic, and social structures across the continent, destroyed and re-created and hardened identities through divide and rule, invented traditions for the natives even as it cut them off from – and robbed them of – their past. It is no wonder that the shattered, manufactured countries that emerged from that traumatic experience umbilically tied to colonial masters have struggled to cope with the global political and environmental upheavals since, not to mention the congenital diseases such as corruption and tribalism that were the gift of their colonial heritage. None of this is to undermine the agency of Africans, but rather it is to understand that agency is exercised and influenced by the context within which it is practised, and that agency does not always presuppose free choices... Historically, reporting on crises has tended to construct a bifurcated and ultimately false version of the world, characterised by Western competence and non-Western precarity. But there is rarely much journalistic headspace devoted to enquiring about the causes of such precarity – it is almost taken as the natural order of things that Africans will starve, West Asians will fight, and the banana republics of Latin America will oppress. The reasons why these situations arose and became prevalent in certain geographies and not others are too often dismissed as the realm of history...

Fifty years after the discovery of Lucy, it’s time to ‘decolonise paleoanthropology’ says leading Ethiopian fossil expert (The Conversation)

On November 24 1974, renowned American paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson spotted “a piece of elbow with humanlike anatomy” poking out of a rocky hillside in northern Ethiopia. It was the first fossil of a partial skeleton belonging to “Lucy”, an ancient female hominin who took the story of human evolution back beyond 3 million years for the first time. This autumn also marks the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the “Taung child”, a fossilised skull in South Africa that was key in our understanding that ancient humans first evolved in Africa – something we now take for granted. Yet, despite largely centring on the African continent as the “cradle of mankind”, the narrative of hominin fossil discovery is striking for its lack of African scientists... many of the fossils that made western scientists famous were actually discovered by local Africans, who were only acknowledged at the end of a scientific publication... "For a long time, African scholars were never part of telling the human story; nor could they actively participate in the analysis of the fossils they found. Up to the 1990s, long after Lucy was found, we were only present in the form of labourers and fossil hunters"... "a major change in the support for African institutions and scientists is needed – in order to “decolonise paleoanthropology”...

'We knew Christmas before you' - the Band Aid fallout (BBC)

Forty years on from the original recording, the cream of British and Irish pop music past and present are once again asking whether Ethiopians know it is Christmas... The release of the Band Aid single, and the Live Aid concert that followed eight months later, became seminal moments in celebrity fundraising and set a template that many others followed. Do They Know It’s Christmas? is back on Monday with a fresh mix of the four versions of the song that have been issued over the years. But the chorus of disapproval about the track, its stereotypical representation of an entire continent - describing it as a place "where nothing ever grows; no rain nor rivers flow" - and the way that recipients of the aid have been viewed as emaciated, helpless figures, has become louder over time. "To say: 'Do they know it’s Christmas?’ is funny, it is insulting," says Dawit Giorgis, who in 1984 was the Ethiopian official responsible for getting the message out about what was happening in his country... "It was so untrue and so distorted. Ethiopia was a Christian country before England… we knew Christmas before your ancestors"...

South African anti-apartheid writer Breytenbach dies (BBC)

The renowned anti-apartheid writer and activist Breyten Breytenbach, jailed for his beliefs in South Africa in the 1970s, has died aged 85, his family said. He passed away in his sleep, with his wife Yolande by his side in Paris. The dissident poet, novelist and painter was "an immense artist, militant against apartheid, he fought for a better world until the end," a statement from his family read. Breytenbach's sharp intellect earned him widespread admiration, prompting the British satirical television puppet show Spitting Image to describe him as "the only nice South African” in a song during apartheid's darkest days...

I wasn't sure where to post this, but I just felt that Breytenbach deserves to be remembered, and apartheid and the collusion with it by so many western nations for so long certainly counts as being "dishonorable and inconvenient". If anyone is interested in the Spitting Imange song referred to in the text, it can be heard here (although I can't find the original video showing the satirical puppets).

Celebrating the king banished by the British (BBC)

The field outside the royal palace in the Ghanaian city of Kumasi was filled with an exuberant crowd, celebrating the return 100 years ago of an exiled king. Prempeh was the Asante king, or "Asantehene", of the late 19th Century who resisted British demands that his territory be swallowed up into the expanding Gold Coast protectorate. A British army from the coast marched about 200km (124 miles) to Kumasi in 1896, and took Prempeh as well as about 50 relatives, chiefs and servants as prisoners, and then looted his palace. The prisoners were taken to the coastal fort at Elmina, before being shipped to Sierra Leone, and, in 1900, on to the distant Indian Ocean islands of Seychelles. It was not until 1924 that the British allowed Prempeh to return home, by which time he was an elderly man who arrived in Kumasi wearing a European suit and hat. It is a tragic story, but also one of pride and resistance. "The British did all they could but they couldn’t break the spirit of Asante," shouted the master of ceremonies. The current Asantehene, Osei Tutu II, was paraded on his palanquin through the crowd, weighed down by magnificent gold jewellery, amid a glorious cacophony of musket explosions, drum beats and the blare of horns made from elephant tusks. Asante culture is alive and well...

Might be worth mentioning Zeinab Badawi's book An African History of Africa which covers events such as the British looting of Ghana through an African lens rather than the colonial lens with which we are more familiar.

The Mother of Thanksgiving (50 min)
Ramtin Arablouei, Rund Abdelfatah, Casey Miner, Julie Caine, Sarah Wyman, Devin Katayama,
Anya Steinberg, Lawrence Wu, Cristina Kim, Irene Noguchi | November 21, 2024

The Thanksgiving story most of us hear is about friendship and unity. And that's what Sarah Josepha Hale had on her mind when she sat down to write a letter to President Lincoln in 1863, deep into the Civil War. Hale had already spent years campaigning for a national day of thanksgiving, using her platform as editor of one the country's most widely-read magazines and writing elected officials to argue that Americans urgently needed a national story. But she'd gotten nowhere – until now.

Five days after reading her letter, Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday. At the time, no one was talking about Pilgrims and Native Americans. But that too would change.

Today on the show: a Thanksgiving story you may not have heard, how it happened, and what it leaves out.

https://www.npr.org/2024/11/21/1214380338/mother-of-thanksgiving

Belgium apology for mixed-race kidnappings in colonial era (BBC)

Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel has apologised for the kidnapping of thousands of children born to mixed-race couples during colonial rule in Burundi, DR Congo and Rwanda. The "métis" children born to Belgian settlers and local women were forcibly taken to Belgium and fostered by Catholic orders and other institutions. About 20,000 children are believed to have been affected. Most fathers refused to acknowledge the paternity of their children. The children were born in the 1940s and 1950s and taken to Belgium from 1959 until the independence of each of the three colonies. Some of the children never received Belgian nationality and remained stateless. Speaking in the Belgian parliament, Mr Michel said the country had breached the children's basic human rights, seeing them as a threat to the colonial system. It had, he said, stripped them of their identity, stigmatised them and split up siblings. "I vow that this solemn moment will represent a further step towards awareness and recognition of this part of our national history," he said in his statement...

Belgium found guilty of crimes against humanity in colonial Congo (Guardian)

The Belgian state has been found guilty of crimes against humanity for the forced removal of five mixed-race children from their mothers in colonial Congo. In a long-awaited ruling issued on Monday, Belgium’s court of appeal said that five women, born in the Belgian Congo and now in their 70s, had been victims of “systematic kidnapping” by the state when they were removed from their mothers as small children and sent to Catholic institutions because of their mixed-race origins. “This is a victory and a historic judgment,” Michèle Hirsch, one of the lawyers for the women, told local media. “It is the first time in Belgium and probably in Europe that a court has condemned the Belgian colonial state for crimes against humanity”...

‘We’re devastated’: anger as Madrid backtracks on museum plan for site of Robert Capa’s famous civil war photo (Guardian)

Campaigners are urging Madrid city council not to abandon plans to ­create a museum on a site ­immortalised in a Robert Capa photograph that captured the aftermath of a fascist bombing raid in the early days of the Spanish civil war. On his second trip to Spain towards the end of 1936, the Hungarian-American war photographer came across a bomb-damaged house in the working-class Madrid neighbourhood of Vallecas, its roof and facade torn with shrapnel and the street outside peppered with debris. The picture he took of 10 Peironcely Street that winter day contrasts the devastation inflicted by one of the German or Italian bombers that were aiding General Franco’s coup with the children sitting smiling on the pavement outside, and the ­beaming woman who watches over them. Capa, not for the first time, had found the humanity amid the horror and the ordinary amid the extraordinary. While the picture appeared in the contemporary US, Swiss and French press, laying bare the _targeting of civilians and becoming one of the most abiding images of the civil war, it has enjoyed a long afterlife...

Britain returns archival data to Kenya (Nation)

more than 2,500 archive files and and 300,000 images were handed to Kenya from its former coloniser. Contained in its files are intelligence dossiers touching on Kenya's first crop of post-colonial leaders, details of the Mau Mau resistance, and talks that led to Kenya's first constitution, among others...

For more than 50 years the BBC’s Somali service has been broadcasting an anti-colonial message – without realising it (Guardian)

The British Broadcasting Corporation’s Somali service theme tune is one of the most popular and recognisable sounds for people in Somalia and the diaspora. With a whistling rhythm and melody, it is authoritative and catchy. The words that follow the music haven’t changed for more than 60 years: “Halkaniwaa BBC – this is the BBC.” Hiding in plain acoustics, however, is the fact that the lyrics originally written – although not used – for the music are deeply anti-colonial, and deliberately designed to be remembered by Somalis every time they listen to the British radio station’s instrumental. In essence, the theme is an anti-colonial free ad on the coloniser’s airwaves, a fervent proclamation and calling to attention for the public...