Over a year ago BSWN was both wrapping up a National Heritage Lottery Funded project focused on Intangible Heritage and the role of decolonisation within museums in the Southwest, and preparing to lead a series of workshops with Bristol Culture on decolonisation and the museum. Then on June 7, 2020, we turned our televisions on and saw protestors dump the statue of Edward Colston, a man who the Bristol Museum website says was a "revered philanthropist/reviled slave trader", into Bristol Harbour.
Afterwards, the media, politicians, and others expressed their “shock” and “dismay” by the actions of those that day, and others around the country were taking to the streets to openly protest anti-black state violence. This was less of a shock to many of us because momentum had been building across the globe. In 2015, the Rhodes Must Fall movement which was originally directed towards a statue at the University of Cape Town commemorating Cecil Rhodes led to a wider movement to “decolonise” education across South Africa. In the US, protestors were taking down Confederate statues as an act of resistance to the legacy of slavery and its present day impacts on all American institutions. When that energy made its way to this island across the pond, the targeting and toppling of the statue of a man who once traded in African bodies for profit, was not a surprise. Frustration will build in a community after years, if not decades, of talks and committees and promises that yield no tangible change.
Change is hard, but change is also the only thing that is constant in this world. If we expect people to change in order to “move with the times” then we can, and should, expect the same from institutions. And in the aftermath of Colston, many Black, Asian and Minoritised communities in general, and Black communities in particular, continue to speak out about the need for cultural organisations and institutions to begin to enact a real praxis of change, moving beyond conversations and into sustainable action. Mainstream organisations say they are committed to change, yet oftentimes this comes with a number of strings attached that really means only slight tweaks, maybe hiring a Black or Brown person, and then going back to business as usual. Change in this context is short, superficial, and ends up requiring those at the margins to be the ones to have to change… in order to “fit” into the institution. So change then comes to mean assimilation.
This is not the change we are talking about. Change must come from all sides. This does not mean just adding more “diversity” to a table. For change to happen in a way that won’t just reproduce the status quo we need to change the types of questions we ask and the types of actions and outcomes we dream up. We need to ask and begin to answer new questions around race, racism, Blackness, heritage, community, and the decolonial as a way forward.
Our work at Black South West Network is as a race equality organisation committed to racial justice. Over the past ten years, we have engaged in both community-based research projects with the support of the National Heritage Lottery Fund and policy reform within the city and the region - one helping to inform the other. Long before Colston came down, Black communities have repeatedly called for more inclusive and equitable spaces within educational and cultural organisations and institutions. Our latest NHLF project on Intangible Heritage in the South West and the role of decolonisation within cultural and heritage organisations reiterated this sentiment.
Major questions have come out of this work. Can museums as they are constructed now actually hold and tell the stories of Black people? Do their walls understand the different tones and voices and perspectives and movements that come with Blackness? Can we trust these spaces that for so long could not and would not see us?
We focus on museums as a way to engage heritage because these are the locations that house the stories of the nation - weaving a narrative of who does/does not belong and why. For a long time these spaces centred one collective story and voice, filtered through a lens of whiteness. And this lens produced a whitewashed version of who and what the UK is. However, a country created and sustained over centuries via imperialist conquest cannot maintain a history that only sees itself in the light. Only sees itself as white. The descendants of those who were once colonial subjects are now asking, demanding that accountability be had for the actions of the past that continue to influence the present. As that past is always present, memorialised in the names we put upon buildings and the people chosen to be immortalised via state-sanctioned statues.
The lack of knowledge and acknowledgement of the impact and influence of Black, Asian and ethnically minoritised heritage in general, and Black heritage in particular, is troubling at best because we know the UK would not be the UK without these communities, their indigenous land and resources, and histories. Therefore, we are in a time of re-imagining who we are as a nation, and as communities within the nation, through a more expanded lens. A lens that centres Blackness, Black people, and allows us to honestly engage the histories of enslavement, race and racism, migration and immigration so we can then be honest about where we can go. This is where we invite others to re-imagine with us.
Let us imagine what could be if we do not bind ourselves to how things are, because that is how they always have been, and instead give ourselves permission to create alternative spaces, third spaces, that sit in between what is and what can be. For BSWN, one of our key strategic objectives is to build a Black digital decolonial museum that does this work. It may not even be called a museum, this is the language we have now to describe these types of spaces but when our language also confines us maybe it is time to let go of the confining parts instead of trying to fit inside a tiny cramped space.
Borrowing a quote from the great Toni Morrison, “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.” We say, if there is a space you need that can hold and understand your full humanity, but it does not exist, then you must build it. Thinking beyond museums allows us to think beyond a narrowed view of humanity and the human experience, incorporating different ideologies, perspectives, and cosmologies. This work is really about reclaiming humanity and we cannot do that in spaces that for so long were committed to dehumanising practices. This is not stated for shock value or to be controversial, but rather as a statement of truth from the perspective of people who only became Black once they stepped onto these shores, which then removed their individuality, culture, history, family and replaced it with a static and narrow understanding of who they are through a white lens.
Heritage is about humanity and we are calling on all of us to reclaim our humanities by reimaging what could be. So please, dream with us as we start this timely discussion.