‘We shall each travel the river together, side by side, but in our own boat. Neither of us will try to steer the other’s vessel’. This definition of sovereignty by the chiefs of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in North America is unrivalled.
Sovereignty is having your ship of State, and steering it yourself. A tougher proposition than it seems at first glance.
Sovereignty is an abstraction and conviction rolled into one. It is the certainty of the latter that grants the former its seemingly concrete nature. In other words, to be sovereign, one must first believe, then assert that belief.
Before it is capable of independent action, a country must first proclaim its sovereignty. That is why declarations of independence and proclamations of establishment are foundational in any country’s history.
It is in defence of that sovereignty that the State exists and is imbued with authority and grandeur. Millions of human beings have died for that idea. Ultimately, every action taken by a sovereign country must be service of its right to independent action.
It is with consideration of the above that I have been thinking of European museums and the Nigerian artefacts they hold, as well as our artefacts and what our museums should be.
Ideas are strengthened by the actions of its believers. Sovereignty is no exception. One such action is a coherent means of maintaining a connection between past, present and future. Public museums were one of the institutions created to serve that function.
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Public museums are a European invention. They replaced the earlier norm of private collections rarely accessible to the public. This marked a transition from the conception of a sovereign space as the property of its Crowned Heads to being the property of a collective called ‘the Nation’.
Museums are collective ‘treasuries of memory’. They detail the past, present and future of a nation. Its curiosities, defeats and victories are displayed in a range of thematic collections, from Art to Zoology. As befitting a great people, the Europeans bedecked their museums with trophies claimed in conquest.
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V.S. Naipaul, the Nobel laureate, wrote in his novel A Bend in the River that, ‘The Europeans, could do one thing and say something quite different; and they could act in this way because they had an idea of what they owed to their civilisation. It was their great advantage over us. The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves. Being an intelligent and energetic people, at the peak of their powers, they could express both sides of their civilisation; and they got both the slaves and the statues.’
Today, the question of those slaves and statues has incited angry debate over there. That has even led to earnest calls to pull their statues down and send the trophies of their victories back from whence they came. The statues’ fate need not concern Nigerians. However, the calls to return and accept the looted artefacts must. Our response must be, ‘keep what you have; we have enough’.
Esau and Jacob are linked forever in the minds of many. The former, of course, as the simpleton who got robbed of his birthright by the wilier Jacob. Esau’s story ends with a terrified Jacob awaiting him. He hoped to buy his brother’s forgiveness with a gift. Esau demurred, he said: ‘I have enough, my brother; keep what you have for yourself.’
At that moment, he bent fate to his will. In that one moment, he was his brother’s superior, again. However, he reverted to type and later took the gifts. So having once traded his birthright for pottage, he now exchanged his dignity for herds. He took; he did not reciprocate, and so he completed Isaac’s prophecy: Jacob became his lord.
Karl Marx reminds us that, ‘world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice…the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.’ Having once been side-characters in a previous European story with epochal implications; we are invited to reprise that role, this time with the Europeans demonstrating their kindness and lack of foibles like pride. That role once demanded grunting savages and malevolent barbarians. Now it calls for obliviousness to the claims of dignity.
It should not be so. Nigerians ought to have greater ambitions than a perpetual past, present and future as side-characters in the European story. We do not exist to make Europeans feel better about themselves. If they now find their loot inconvenient, they should auction it; better that we buy it back than be given. We must not be the storage closet for a history they now find inconvenient. An even more superior action would be for Nigeria to better control its domestic antiquities market.
Smashing the multi-billion-dollar illicit trade in Nigerian antiquities would increase our crime-fighting abilities. It would also fill our museums and be a worthy subject for Nigerian museums dealing in contemporary events.
Museums, as the treasury of our collective memory, should tell the truth. Nigeria has never been conquered or colonised. However, it was created by foreigners. That is because its pre-European precursors failed to harness the tools of modernity to expel an alien challenge. Let empty spaces signifying the looted artefacts stand as silent reminders to the perils of stagnation. Outside those unfilled spaces, there should be mementoes of all we have and will achieve. That is how to express sovereignty with dignity.
Reject the passivity implied by the European offer. Instead, let us strive to be protagonists of our own story.
Emmanuel-Francis Nwaolisa Ogomegbunam is a Nigerian by conviction
