Charlotte Higgins:
Today the British Museum is at a crisis point. It is not surprising that it should be. It is the British Museum after all.
The British Museum is everybody’s idea of a museum, but at the same time, it is hardly like a museum at all. It is more like a little state. The rooms you visit on a day out are the least of it: the museum is not the contents of its display cases. It is an embassy, a university, a police station, a science lab, a customs house, a base for archaeological excavations, a place of asylum, a retail business, a publisher, a morgue, a detective agency.
If Britain itself is searching for meaning in a postcolonial world then why should not its most resonant, its most celebrated museum?
I remember being in Nairobi in 2006 with Neil MacGregor, director from 2002 to 2015. I was reporting on the opening of an exhibition – it was the first time that objects from the BM had been lent to any institution in Africa.
I interviewed Idle Omar Farah, then the director-general of the National Museums of Kenya. “We feel this is going to be the central theme [of debate]: why are these objects, which come from here, kept in Britain?” he said.
When I put this to MacGregor, he replied, with unusual testiness: “Repatriation is yesterday’s question.”
RM* During the last couple of months, the museum has appointed many new top-officials, amongst them a new Director of Collections, Xerxes Mazda.
