Kmflett's Blog

Historical Amnesia: Museums & Statues. Gary Younge on why statues must keep coming down.

On Radio 4 on Thursday 27^th August Gary Younge presented a programme looking at the exhibits in some of Britain’s Museums including the British Museum. He noted that numbers of exhibits had in practice been looted by the British in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century and sought to find out in the light of the Black Lives Matter movement what was being done about this.

Younge argued that after Edward Colston it was important that statutes continue to come down, addressing what he suggested is an historical amnesia about British history

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000lyyd

A case in point is the statue of a slave trader at the Museum of  the Home in Hackney. The Museum held a consultation with the local community about whether the statue should stay or come down. The view was that it should come down but this was ignored.

It now transpires that this was after an intervention by the Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden who argued in e-mails to the Museum that his view was that British history was as it was and therefore the statue must stay.

Oliver Dowden & the Museum of the Home

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/museum-of-the-home-robert-geffrye-statue_uk_5f480bb2c5b6cf66b2b4ed4c?ncid=other_twitter_cooo9wqtham&utm_campaign=share_twitter

Emergency demo: GOVERNMENT TOLD MUSEUM “Keep your slaver Statue UP!” – 11.30pm Saturday, 29 August 2020, The Museum of the Home, Geffrye Almshouses, 136 Kingsland Rd, London E2 8EA.