Hello and welcome back to our series on objects of crisis.
In this moment of pandemic we decided to look at objects in the collection of the
British Museum to learn about how people in the past have faced major challenges, how they have prevailed
and how they have come on top of it. Today it's my great pleasure to welcome
author, playwright, broadcaster, political commentator, critic, former deputy chair of the British museum
Bonnie Greer and I can't wait to hear which object you have chosen.
I've chosen, Hartwig, the object that I fell in love with when I came to the Museum and got into
big arguments about which is the Akan drum. The Akan drum was found in what is now Virginia
and it was found in about the 18th century, mid-18th century, and up until
maybe 70/80 years ago it was thought to be an indigenous object because the skin is deerskin
which is from virginia and so it was treated as that and thought of as that
and put in the Americas section of the British Museum and then because the British Museum did
what it does and what all museums do it started to just look, test and realise
that the wood and the cork which holds up the skin across the... of the drum
is actually from West Africa so it can't be an indigenous American object.
It is actually a West African object, which was amazing to discover and then
the next thing they pieced together, the scholars, the curators was how did it get to Virginia well the
only explanation of it getting to Virginia and in the collection of Hans Sloan
eventually was that it must have crossed over on a slave ship
with my ancestors so then the next story that you do is you ask yourself how? and why?
which is what museums do.
Well; the why had to be that it was a kind of comfort
also an exercise object because the the enslaved weren't going to be of
any use if they were sitting around for that voyage and stressed out by the time they got them to the
places where the y were going to be sold if they were all stressed out
yeah i wasn't going to work so the drum becomes or people are surmising
that the drum became an exercise uh um instrument get people up also
in my sort of uh understanding, my feeling and I want to talk a lot about feelings
because I'm not a formal scholar so everything comes from there,
my feeling is that it becomes a object of crisis when people began or thought
'Am I gonna get up and move?' because you had three options
or three options if you're a woman because the men were chained down
your three options you're gonna fight this thing and women did and women turned slave
ships around, women fought all the way across, you're gonna die you know just lay down be depressed and die
or you're gonna get up and move around and live
and so the the Akan drum for me, as a dramatist, becomes this instrument
in which people have to ask these questions what am I going to do and the answer to
the question makes you a new person.
Well the drum is a symbol perhaps for what happens on that passage when
you say 'you stay alive'
you turn your back
to where you come from and you face
a completely unknown and extremely hard future but you decide
I live, we are going to live.
So the drum reminds me of that courageous
transcendental moment when my ancestors and all of us who are in the so-called diaspora, word I don't use,
but all of us decided to live so the drum is funny because uh when I
first saw it in gallery 26 and it's low lighting and you know me being an american from
Chicago i'm like that needs to be lit up and i was rushing around screaming about this
and of course I had to be schooled the drum is still alive, the deer skin,
everything, the wood is still alive, so if you turn on the klieg lights you can kill it.
So to see it in this half light surrounded by other objects of the
Americas, North America, has now become a very moving testament for me.
It has become a more very moving dialogue for me.
It reminds me like the Benin bronzes of the erasure and my struggle as an African-American,
as a black woman, as a creator, as an artist to constantly try and remember bits if I can, if I can remember.
And perhaps we could go for a moment back to Virginia because you mentioned
that the drum was taken there and it was
taken as a means as far as we know to keep African-Americans
from doing their music and through that music
asserting their identity, not only asserting their identity but as we know
from from various occasions also communicating and coordinating
their struggle against oppression. So that the drum actually becomes
also an instrument in that sense an instrument of struggle.
I wonder I wonder.
Most of us just want to stay alive that's that's the game.
If you read a lot, if you listen to the blues which is my cultural music
my dad was a Mississippi share cropper we grew up in Mississippi in the 30s
during high segregation a lot of the Blues is just about
survival it's just you know you want to stay alive
because everything around you is set up to make sure you stay alive as long as you're useful
and then you're gone. So the civil war in America happens
mainly because without this slave labour there is no GDP in the South there's not the South is
nothing without without having my ancestors work the cotton fields the South can't exist
so what Lincoln does, which is an act of genius, he does an executive order called
the Emancipation Proclamation and tells the Union soldiers
my ancestors are collateral, we're war collateral so when you go into a plantation
you release these black people not because they need they're not gonna be free or anything
they're collateral so get them off of that plantation as fast as you can because the minute my
ancestors are off there the economy collapses and and you know
we mustn't romanticize this, it's vital that we don't. This was
completely about dollars and cents and because we've been christianized that
was one way of creating fantasy for us we're made to believe that it's
you know we make songs about the North star and about going to heaven you know keeps
you alive but this was a 100% money situation in which what Europe did cleverly was in
order to keep the money flowing it created us as subhuman... and that is the underlying rationale of racism...
Absolutely; we're not humans, we are you know, we are three-quarters human as the
African-American I mean as the United States says we're three-quarters human when you know Jefferson Davis
who is captured president of the Confederacy he he said 'don't tie me up like a person without a soul'
i.e a black person and so, you know, we make we again being insouciant we create soul music.
We create this thing called soul music. Part of what i'm interested in and part
of what Meta-Africa is interested in and part of my curation at the British Museum
called the Era of Reclamation that you and I and other colleagues are making
is to interrogate, we we must interrogate, we mustn't descend into fantasy,
we mustn't descend into any of that because the story of the transatlantic
slave trade is massively complex, it's massively about collusion, it's about
trade, it's about barter, it's about sacrifice, it's about genius,
it's about all of these things.
And I feel, I kind of, I agree with Samuel L. Jackson,
I mean he and I are the same age and you know we were teenagers in
in the 60s and we were in the streets in 1958 I mean '68 and you know we were
screaming Black Power and we were burning the cities and we were marching
on the police and I saw something Samuel said the other day on TV
he said 'You know you couldn't have told me 50 years ago that I'd be back at this place and you can't tell young people that either' I mean because we're not
available for that and you don't you don't do it all you can do as a person who is there
is to witness that is very powerful you observe but you also share what you've seen
what you've experienced that's what makes the witness. and the witnesses in a way the individual,
the one person that gives reality and as I stepped into the part of the witness
at this this afternoon or late afternoon in my life I think about what are museums for what
are global museums for like the British Museum like the museums of Germany, like the
Louvre, I would were these things for in relation to these questions
they have to be places of fluidity they have to be places where
ambiguity comes in they have to be places where questions are not answered because one of the geniuses Ithink
of the little bit of culture that I know in relation to Africa is a constant
mutation, the constant change the constant eliciting of the trickster Eshu
always you know to turn the thing over and look at it another way
not to lock anything down but the fluidity museums must become
fluid and part of it has to do with co-curating which means literally
which is what we're doing at the British Museum which is what my project is about,
bring people in and say yeah but that's what this is too and you don't
have to have an Ox-bridge degree to do that and this is happening but what are
they for therefore somebody like me who saw the Benin bronzes for the first time
and my whole history is about erasure and the fight to hold on
to see my face in this sculpture, to see my face to see my cousin's face is a defiance of erasure
it becomes the greatest thing that can happen to an enslaved person or
descendant of an enslaved person. Remembrance. So the the sculptures become transactional in that sense.
Now, whether they stay, whether they go, it's a matter for
the Nigerian people, as a matter for the Museum these are all things that have to be
worked out but i'm talking about myself alone standing there with the drum
and have it and remembrance and you remember in your body, you remember in your mind
you remember the things your grandmother told you the bits and pieces that she
was told and so to be Meta-Africa is a constant defiance of erasure a constant defiance of fantasy,
a constant defiance of a historicity, a constant defiance of politics,
in a sense where politics becomes locked in becomes behind slogans
or any of that what is so beautiful to me about Meta-Africa, the Caribbean, Spanish, French
English, Dutch, North and South America Central America, the incredibleness of Brazil
where in Jamaica for instance where people are able to run away and
create these realities that become places not necessarily a political defiance
because sometimes you can't defy politically ,you're mow down
but a rigorous insouciance, of rigorous ridicule, of rigorous messages in music of all of that and a deep, deep faith
in survival deep faith in survival because I am the descendant of a survivor
in a deep way everybody who is descended from enslaved people,
we're all survivors and if we return to anything is to that
moment when we decided to survive and that doesn't exist anywhere
except on the slave ship crossing the middle passage and so the drum is for me... it was very
funny because one of the curators who is now longer with the museum, he's with another museum, tweeted to me
the other day he said 'you don't know all the turmoil that was behind the
scenes of the British Museum in 2010' when I was supposed to do a program
about the the drum and I said what do you mean he said it was all kept down in a very
english way you know keep it all very quiet but they were afraid that I was going,
when the drum came on the table with me, that I was going to play it- of course
you can't play it because it'll be destroyed and I said what they didn't understand
was that the drum played me, the drum plays me, the drum is playing me, that's Eshu, that's what's in the Museum that's what's dancing around
the drum is playing me, the Benin bronzes again you know what people decide to do with
the Benin bronzes is a matter for people to decide but while they're there they're talking to me
all the time they're relating to me all the time, I see my eyes, I see my face
I had that conversation and a dialogue with them all the time
and so you know I grow up with a Kinte and everybody's saying you're Akan, I'm thinking
I look like I come from Benin actually I don't think I come from Ghana
and that becomes my slow remembering and that is the greatest act of resistance
that anybody who's a descendant of slaves can have.
Remember, remember, remember and the Akan drum for me is remembrance
and in remembrance is resistance.