Hicks makes three points:
- First, there is the question of the numbers of African people killed in nineteenth-century colonial conflicts. Lundén misrepresents the nuanced argument, which is put again and again throughout the book, about how these numbers were unrecorded or downplayed by official sources at the time.
- Second, Lundén states that “the reader of The Brutish Museums is repeatedly assured that the British looted 10,000…or more than 10,0000 objects…in Benin City.” 9 There is no suggestion of 100,000 objects in The Brutish Museums. Presumably this is a typo on Lundén’s part rather than a wilful distortion; but in any case what the book actually says is that: We must acknowledge that the total figure of what was looted may quite possibly be 10,000 bronzes, ivories and other objects – but also that any hope for a definitive or final number is futile – since there is so much hidden in private and family collections. There is an inherent lack of fixity in number here, an intrinsic instability.
- Third, Lundén makes an unevidenced attack on my use of primary material. There is “one glaring omission in The Brutish Museums,” he writes: that the book “hardly make any use of” “the administrative records from the Foreign Office and other governmental offices in the National Archives, Kew, in London.”
Dan Hick’s book was also reviewed by Elizabeth Marlowe.
Kwame Opoku has published widely about how the Pitt Rivers Museum and other western institutions and owners are dealing with Benin loot.
