The EconomistFebruary 15th 2020 Britain 512 200 or so top members of the Irish Repub-
lican Army that they would not be prose-
cuted. But last December a court over-
turned that assurance in the case of John
Downey, who is awaiting trial for the kill-
ing of two part-time soldiers. That case has
given momentum to the dup’s demand for
other prosecutions, and police have said
that some may be imminent. Sinn Fein,
meanwhile, is anxious to seek judicial re-
dress for what it calls “state killings” and to
demonstrate that the army and police
worked in collusion with loyalist paramili-
tary groups to kill ordinary Catholics.
As part of the deal that restored power-
sharing last month, it was announced that
a raft of legacy-related institutions, first
agreed to in 2014, would be established un-
der a law that Britain vowed to introduce
within 100 days. The most contentious of
the proposed agencies is a powerful new
Historical Investigations Unit which
would function outside the police (critics
call it a parallel police force) and work to
reopen unresolved cases. Whatever the
original intention, the unit is now widely
seen as an instrument for investigating the
behaviour of British security forces during
the Troubles. Arlene Foster, the dupleader
and first minister, has proposed that its re-
mit should be curbed, whereas her deputy
Michelle O’Neill, from Sinn Fein, wants it
to be robust and wide-ranging.
Boris Johnson is said to feel “blindsid-
ed” by the legacy aspects of the power-shar-
ing agreement, and his concerns are re-
ported to be behind the sacking of Julian
Smith, the Northern Ireland secretary, as
part of a cabinet reshuffle on February 13th.
The government has promised to protect
old soldiers who served in Northern Ire-
land from “vexatious” prosecutions related
to historic incidents. It wants, in other
words, to minimise the number of cases
like that of “Soldier f”, the only paratrooper
charged in relation to the killing of 13 civil-
ians in Derry-Londonderry in 1972.
Denis Bradley, a former Catholic priest
who has played an important role in legacy
debates, shares the widespread fear that
clashes over dealing with the past could
wreck the fragile new experiment in pow-
er-sharing. “The past has always been a
mucky field, and it now risks turning into a
swamp,” he says.
Given that the dupand Sinn Fein face
opposing pressures from their voters, the
best hope of a constructive approach to the
legacy issue lay in London and Dublin con-
tinuing to play an active role in balancing
truth discovery with vindictiveness, says
Mr Bradley. But if Sinn Fein becomes a
partner in the Irish government, as looks
possible after the election on February 8th,
and if the British Conservatives are deter-
mined above all to protect their soldiers,
the two governments’ ability to act jointly
as honest brokers will diminish fast. 7
I
n the oak-panelled Bookbinders Ale
House, a group of Maasai tribespeople
gathers the day before returning to Tanza-
nia and Kenya, to sip cappuccinos and bit-
ter and to chew over the results of a two-
week visit to Oxford. Despite the vile Febru-
ary weather, they are satisfied with their
trip, for they are closer to getting back sa-
cred objects that are held by Oxford’s Pitt
Rivers Museum.
Former colonial powers have tended to
take a defensive attitude to requests from
formerly subject peoples for the return of
objects that may have been stolen. In Brit-
ain, France and elsewhere, laws prevent
museums from letting stuff go.
But in 2017, Emmanuel Macron, the
French president, said that he wanted to
see the return of pilfered artefacts to Africa
within five years. Since then, the move-
ment for restitution has gathered steam.
Universities are not constrained by the leg-
islation that binds national collections,
and several have started to return objects.
The Pitt Rivers, which holds the univer-
sity’s archaeological and anthropological
collections, is in the vanguard. It has re-
turned 28 objects, all of them human re-
mains. But Dan Hicks, curator of archaeol-
ogy at the museum, believes that the
movement needs to accelerate, for “muse-
ums are sites of colonial violence”.
Rather than deal with national govern-ments, which can make for tricky politics,
the Pitt Rivers is engaging directly with in-
digenous peoples. The Maasai visit came
about after Samwel Nangira, a Maasai from
Tanzania, visited the Pitt Rivers when he
was at a conference. He questioned the la-
belling of some of the objects in the muse-
um: “what does ‘collected’ mean? Like
when you find something in a forest, so not
donated, and not robbed?”
One of the problems with restitution
claims is establishing provenance. The
Maasai have come at the invitation of Laura
van Broekhoven, director of the Pitt Rivers,
and InsightShare, an ngo, to establish
where and when the objects were taken. To
that end, they have brought Lemaron ole
Parit, a laibon—a spiritual leader with mys-
tical powers. His family has been providing
spiritual leadership for generations. The
most famous of his forebears is Mbatian,
his great-great-grandfather, who is re-
membered for foretelling the British arriv-
al. Nick Lunch, InsightShare’s organiser, is
impressed that Mr ole Parit has been talk-
ing with his father, Mokompo ole Simel,
who holds ultimate spiritual power in the
tribe but stayed at home, “not just on
WhatsApp, but also through his dreams.”
Sitting on the floor of Mrs van Broekho-
ven’s office, Mr ole Parit breathes into an
enkidong vessel packed with stones and
snuff tobacco. He then shakes out the
stones, whose patterns reveal the artefacts’
history to him. “I’ve identified the circum-
stances under which objects were taken,”
he explains. “The times when they were
taken, and how many hands they went
through.” Out of the 188 artefacts Mr ole Pa-
rit viewed, he has identified only five he
thinks are culturally sensitive enough to
warrant a return.
Artefacts matter to the Maasai, in part
because they represent the continuation of
a dead person’s life. Mr ole Parit says an isu-
rutia—a necklace—was taken from a wom-
an who was killed while she was carrying
her baby. “If somebody dies, we treat the ar-
tefacts as equally as important as a dead
body,” says Amos Leuka, a member of the
delegation. If an object has been taken viol-
ently from somebody, their spirit cannot
rest. The Maasai’s ancestors are therefore
said to be joining the negotiations.
So is Oxford’s vice-chancellor, Louise
Richardson: once the Pitt Rivers has ap-
proved a claim, it is sent to her. Her attitude
to this unusual method of establishing
provenance has not yet been divined. But
Mrs van Broekhoven says that the way
knowledge systems are judged needs to be
liberated. “Real decoloniality is to see each
other’s knowledge systems as equal.” Brit-
ish colonial catalogues, she points out, are
not models of accuracy. “All we have are la-
bels with question-marks. It would be
quite disingenuous to say, ‘Your knowl-
edge system is inferior to ours’.” 7OXFORD
British museums have started to give
back colonial artefactsRestitution of cultural artefactsSpears and spires
New light on old objects