The homes of European families have long gone unexamined as sites for the construction of colonial and post-colonial memory. But in recent years, a small group of young historians have turned their attention towards these intimate spaces.
As western countries grapple with their colonial histories - how to discuss them and how these legacies endure today - these material objects found in homes, and not museums, provide an important, though often neglected, starting point.
Some items were proudly displayed. Others had been stored away from view in attics and cupboards. There were lion and leopard skins, many ivory ornaments, and elephant feet used as wastepaper bins. There was a machete shattered by a bullet, taken from the body of a slain Land and Freedom Army (“Mau Mau”) fighter in Kenya in the 1950s. Some interviewees had devoted “Africa rooms” in their homes, or other ways of consciously using the techniques of museum curation and display, such as labelling and glass cabinets.
Consider the pith helmet, a symbol of exploration and expansion - and a fashion accessory worn by Melania Trump. Does it still carry meaning or is it old hat?
A classic pith helmet, a symbol of colonial exploration and expansion.
The Practice of Taking Trophies
The practice of taking human remains as trophies was common within European military history during the 19th century, according to Danish historian Kim A. Wagner. Wagner adds: "Head-hunting is one of the most emblematic practices associated with savages. And yet when we look at it historically, it’s the white man who is the head-hunter.”
Read also: Experience Fad's Fine African Cuisine
Around 25,000 colonial officials returned to Britain during the mid-20th century alone as formal colonial rule came to an end. Many others who had lived and worked in British colonies outside of any government role came back too, and they brought all kinds of stuff with them.
Memories of Empire
Jeppesen and Longair interviewed more than 30 elderly former colonial officials in their own homes across the United Kingdom and found that the world of their youth - often memorialised through domestic ornaments and furniture - was frequently fondly remembered as a time and place of family and friendship, of personal ambition and adventure, of love, hope, pleasure, desire, and loss.
These conversations offered a way of understanding how the colonial period is perceived in domestic settings, as well as a glimpse at the anxieties attached to the passage of such heirlooms between generations, as the meaning they once had becomes increasingly tenuous.
One gentleman who agreed to talk with me was born in Nyasaland in 1939, and has kept a range of tables, stools and other furniture that carry memories of Malawi and especially of his father, who was a colonial administrator, working on agriculture and natural resources. “I’m hoping it’ll stay in the family when I go,” the 80 year old told me. “I’ve requested in my will that it do so.
It is apparent from what has been written by these historians that for the families who inherit these colonial relics, these items are simply a part of their memories.
Read also: The Story Behind Cachapas
Astonishing ignorances can be produced and sustained by the stories that families tell themselves about the “exotic” objects within their family collections. But these need not be permanent. Colonial memories can be addressed, and even remedied, depending on the response of successive generations.
A notable example comes from what Schilling calls the “extra-colonial” generation - younger men and women who are re-encountering stories of colonialism following the widespread forgetting that has taken place in Germany in the past 50 years.
Laetitia von Trotha, born in 1976, learned nothing about German colonialism at school, nor from her family. This prompted von Trotha to screen the film for her extended family at their gathering in 2001.
They, in turn, resolved to engage in a process of reconciliation, meeting with the supreme chief of the Herero people, fundraising for charitable causes in Namibia, and visiting the country, where they made the following statement: “We, members of the Trotha family, are ashamed of the horrible events that took place here one hundred years ago. the gruesome and unjustified death of thousands of men, women and children.”
The Story of Mlozi
According to accounts I have been able to find - most based on British colonial sources - Mlozi had been a powerful and divisive Swahili-Arab figure within east Africa’s slavery economy and its adjacent ivory trade.
Read also: Techniques of African Jewellery
British commercial and missionary interests allied closely in seeking to monopolise the ivory trade in the region and control of land and religious beliefs of the local population during the last decades of the 19th century. in 1895.
Afterwards Mlozi was beheaded, his body hung by the ankles for several days, and his skull taken to Scotland as a trophy by mercenary Walter Gordon Cumming. Cumming also took the skull of one of Mlozi’s fighters whom he’d killed in the battle, intending to use both remains as bookends.
The intended ornamental use of Mlozi’s head exemplifies how the extreme violence of European colonial conquest has routinely sat alongside its cultural and scientific achievements as symbols of refinement and status.
The Man-Eating Lions of Tsavo
The infamous man-eating lions of Tsavo on display at the Field Museum.
In March 1898, the British started building a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya. But the project took a deadly turn when, over the next nine months, two maneless male lions mysteriously developed a taste for humans and went on a killing spree.
Crews tried and failed to scare the lions away, forcing people to flee the area and halting construction on the bridge. Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson, the civil engineer at the helm of the railway project, took matters into his own hands so that work could continue on the railway.
The lions’ reign of terror ended when Colonel Patterson shot and killed them in late 1898, and the railroad was completed a few months later.
He later told the story of the lions, and the hunt that eventually took them down, in his book The Man-Eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures. Patterson reported that the lions’ feeding frenzy took the lives of 135 railway workers and native Africans. Later research by Field Museum scientists drastically reduced that estimate to 35.
Patterson turned the fearsome felines into trophy rugs from his hunt, and they remained harmless floor ornaments until 1925, when he sold them to the Field Museum during a trip through Chicago.
Museum staff restored the lions to their former glory-minus the appetite-by mounting them as taxidermy specimens and displaying them in a diorama.
The Man-Eaters Of Tsavo - Full Documentary
Using archival documents, Assistant Collections Manager Tom Gnoske and Adjunct Curator Julian Kerbis questioned whether the lions had eaten as many people as initially reported. In 2008, a team of scientists including the Field's Bruce Patterson helped discover just how many people they ate.
The scientists examined the lions’ skeletons and pelts-specifically, their bone collagen and hair keratin levels-to get a more accurate picture of what the lions had been eating in the months leading up to their death. This research revealed that the lions ate closer to 35 humans-about 100 fewer than Colonel Patterson’s original estimate.
Using state-of-the-art technology to research the lions’ skulls, they found that the wear patterns on their teeth resembled those of zoo lions, which eat soft foods and do not crack bones. Previous X-ray imaging of the lions' remains found that they suffered from severe dental issues, including a root-tip abscess in one lion’s canine.
Researchers now believe the lions of Tsavo-as well as the Mfuwe lion also on display at the Field-switched to humans for practical reasons: they were easier to catch and chew.
Research continues today. After rediscovering the cave deemed the "Man-Eaters' Den" in 1997, Gnoske and Kerbis continue to explore the mysteries of the Tsavo lions, including studying hairs from various prey the lions ate.
The lions of Tsavo drive home the fascination and importance of museum collections. Bruce Patterson says:"It’s astonishing that, [more than a hundred] years after their death, we can be talking about not only how many people they ate, but differences in the behavior of two animals, all from skins and skulls in a museum collection.
Repatriation and Reckoning
Major treasures, as well as the remains of anticolonial martyrs, in grand national museums have come to be the focus of much anxiety about ongoing colonial legacies and what to do about them. They are now the best-known venues through which histories of colonialism and the possibility of redress is debated within the public discourse of old European powers today.
This debate often suggests that repatriation provides absolution. That by returning things - and bodies - taken through colonisation, what was lost can be restored; accounts can be settled.
Robertson isn’t wrong, but as Mlozi’s story illustrates, it isn’t always possible to simply put back what was taken. According to its custodian, Mlozi’s descendants have been uncontactable, and the government of Malawi has shown little interest in seeking the repatriation of Mlozi’s remains.
I contacted Mwayi Lusaka, principal ethnographer in the cultural history department of Malawi’s Department of Museums and Monuments, who says a “convincing argument” for the return of Mlozi’s skull would need to be made to a sceptical Malawian public, who may pose questions such as: “Why should Malawi repatriate a figure who terrorised and haunted local communities through slavery?
But the themes that drive the lived experience of such nostalgia are not straightforward. This is one reason why documentation and discussion of the crimes and violations of colonialism can feel like a personal attack. The stubborn attachment to empire that plays out at the national level has personal, intimate roots.
The Question of What to Do
So what do we do with these colonial objects? Where the associations are intimate, their meaning bound up with personal histories, and many of the items themselves are at risk of becoming merely household clutter, these are difficult conversations to have.
Part of the reason why the museum, rather than the home, has been a focus for post-colonial reckoning is the museum’s institutional nature. Here, questions of identity ("what do our actions from the past say about who we are today?"), of plunder and historical violations can be broached without needing to attribute these actions to individuals.
A proper reckoning with colonialism through the private sphere is urgent and necessary. It also feels like an increasingly remote possibility. It is easier to trace the lineage of colonialism’s leading architects and to expect the sort of acknowledgment the von Trotha family demonstrated.
At its violent end, the vast majority returned to their countries of origin - and to other parts of the world - taking with them mementos and memories. With each new generation, how can this family memory be held up for public scrutiny?
Similarly, the idea of repatriating these objects - no matter how inappropriate the display of them seems - can seem absurd. Who do you send lion skins to, or even skulls that come with no notes to indicate who the person may have been?
What can be expected is that those who inherit the material legacies of colonialism should know the true and often gruesome history of those objects, not just the quaint sanitised stories of intrepid relatives with a love for nature.
In the west, colonial history today is part of who we are. As the expression goes: it is part of the furniture.
