Colonial Archive: Ambivalence, Identity, and Art

Chikaogwu Kanu

The exhibition [Re:]Entanglements: Colonial Collections in Decolonial Times marks the culmination of a ground-breaking research project that has been revisiting the legacies of a series of colonial surveys in Nigeria. [Re:]Entanglements, which opened last year on June 22 and runs until April 17 at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, is the latest in a number of project exhibitions, including shows in Nsukka, Benin City and Lagos.

The research project has been led by Professor Paul Basu of SOAS University of London alongside Dr George Agbo of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Professor Basu and his team have been retracing the journeys made by Britain’s first “Government Anthropologist”, Northcote Thomas, between 1909 and 1913 in what was then the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria. During these tours, Thomas and his assistants took thousands of photographs, made hundreds of sound recordings and amassed large collections of artefacts and botanical specimens.

For the first time in over a century, the project team has been re-engaging with these materials, and returning copies of the photographs and sound recordings to the communities in Nigeria whose heritage they document. As well as working with community members, the project has involved multiple collaborations with Nigerian artists, musicians and storytellers, who have responded to the collections through their creative practice. The [Re:]Entanglements exhibition brings this contemporary work into conversation with the historical photographs and artefacts on display.

Despite its arresting aesthetics, [Re:]Entanglements is not a celebratory exhibition. At its heart, it is an inquiry into the colonial context of Thomas’s anthropological surveys, and concerned with the status of their archival legacies in the present. Both explicitly in the exhibition texts, but also through the contemporary creative responses, questions are continually posed: What is this? How and why was it collected? What does it tell us about colonialism then and the prospects of decolonisation now?

Objects have been selected for display that speak of the violence of past injustices and the possibility of repair. One installation features a decorated clay pot, bearing the figure of the deity Olokun. The pot was purchased by Thomas in Benin City in 1909, but was shattered while being shipped to Britain. It has been repaired especially for the exhibition using innovative conservation techniques, but in a manner that does not hide the trauma it has experienced. It is displayed along with the shards of other broken pots collected by Thomas, and with a newly commissioned brass replica, made using the traditional cire perdue method by Mark Ihama in Benin City’s famous Igun Street.

Juxtaposed with the Akh’Olokun display, is a remarkable installation by the Nsukka-based ceramicist Ozioma Onuzulike. Here we are confronted with a heap of fragmented fired-clay faces and other body parts. Like the shattered remains of pots collected by the colonial anthropologist, Onuzulike’s fractured bodies bring to mind the pain endured by generations of Africans, through slavery, colonial oppression and continuing inequalities. In an accompanying film of Onuzulike making the work, the artist elaborates on this sense of Africa as a continent broken into pieces.

Incidentally, on each of the text panels accompanying the installations there are links to related online resources, so even if one cannot visit the exhibition in person, one can experience it remotely.

One of the most controversial installations in the exhibition is a massed display of some of the thousands of “physical type” portraits made by Thomas. These are full-face and profile photographs of individuals from different locations included in the surveys. The photographs were part of a dubious anthropological project to map “tribal” differences. They evoke the violence of the “colonial gaze”, seemingly reducing people to nameless specimens to be collected and compared.

This reading of the photographs is complicated, however. Firstly, the display is accompanied by a film called Faces|Voices in which West African participants are interviewed about what they perceive in these portraits. Where one respondent sees a victim of colonial oppression, another sees pride and resilience. This challenges the idea that the photographs can be reduced to any singular meaning.

Secondly, we learn that Thomas recorded the names of many of those he photographed and that the [Re:]Entanglements researchers have been able to identify many of their descendants as they have retraced the anthropologist’s itineraries. Photographs taken as part of a colonial project have given community members the opportunity of ‘meeting’ their ancestors for the first time. In these encounters, the coloniality of the images falls away, and the photographs are received with joy and cherished as precious relics.

Many of the portraits taken in Igbo-speaking areas show men with facial scarification marks known as ichi. Like so many traditional arts, the practice of ichi scarification came to an end as a result of colonial influence. The paradox is that the colonial authorities were rigorous in documenting the worlds that they were also responsible for destroying. Those documents – including Thomas’s photographs of ichi scarification – are now vitally important resources for recovering our own cultural heritage and are being been embraced as such by communities, artists and academics.

In our decolonial times, to curate an exhibition that is ostensibly concerned with the archives of a series of colonial surveys would seem to be an anachronous and risky venture. Thanks to the curatorial ingenuity of Paul Basu, and the contributions of his many collaborators, whose voices, perspectives and creative interrogations are incorporated into the exhibition, [Re:]Entanglements demonstrates why this history is so relevant and important today.

Rather than delivering a lecture, Basu uses artefacts, archive images, audio-visual media, and contemporary artworks to pose difficult questions, to provoke thought and to invite the visitor’s own responses. Colonialism had a devastating impact on our culture. The prospect of re-entangling ourselves in that history may not be enticing. Yet, as [Re:]Entanglements shows, we can revisit its archival legacies in the present, and find there something valuable for our future.

•Kanu, a PhD student of art hisory at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, writes from Lagos.