Reinterpreting the African Collections of the World Museum Liverpool

Notes

• Annie Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 129. See also Tony Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (London: Routledge, 2004); and Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn, eds., Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum (London: Routledge, 1998). For a more detailed analysis of collectors' projects in relation to the World Museum Liverpool collections, see Louise Tythacott, “From the fetish to the specimen: The Ridyard African Collection at the Liverpool Museum, 1895–1916,” in Collectors: Expressions of Self and Other, ed. Anthony Shelton (London: Horniman Museum, 2001).
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• J. Withers Gill, Handbook and Guide to the African Collection On Exhibition in the Public Museums Liverpool (Liverpool: Corporation of Liverpool Libraries, Museums and Arts Committee, 1931), 31. For a brief overview of the World Museum Liverpool's African collections, and of the history of their display, see Louise Tythacott, “The African Collection at Liverpool Museum,” African Arts 31, 3 (Summer 1998).
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• See J. B. Wright, Bushman Raiders of the Drakensberg, 1840–1870 (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1971); and Andy Smith, Candy Malherbe, Mat Guenther, and Penny Berens, The Bushmen of Southern Africa: A Foraging Society in Transition (Cape Town: David Philip 2000), Chapters 6–10.
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• Coombes, Reinventing Africa, 3.
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• The renamed World Museum Liverpool opened its doors to the public at the end of April 2005, after a long-awaited refurbishment. The new Africa displays feature as part of the World Cultures Gallery. See: http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/wml/humanworld/worldcultures/africa/.
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• See Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory; Barringer and Flynn, Colonialism and the Object, 11–27; and Boris Wastiau, Exit Congo Museum (Tervuren: Royal Museum for Central Africa, 2000), 18.
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• Laura Peers and Alison K. Brown, eds., Introduction to Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader (London: Routledge, 2003), 4.
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• Michael Ames, “Cannibal Tours, Glass Boxes and the Politics of Interpretation,” in Interpreting Objects and Collections, ed. Susan Pearce (London: Routledge, 1994), 99.
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• Susan Hiller, ed., The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art (London: Routledge, 1991), 186.
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• Goldwater wrote: “Museums of art…have begun to widen their aesthetic horizons to include works from primitive cultures around the globe…Moreover, museums concentrating on the primitive arts have been founded in Zurich, New York, and Paris. Thus the artistic creations of the primitive cultures have entered fully into the world history of art, to be, like those of any other cultures, understood and appreciated on their own merits. Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (enlarged edition) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986 [1938]), 13.
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• See African Arts 29, 3 (1996) for the context and discussions around this exhibition.
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• Tom Phillips, ed., Africa the Art of a Continent (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1995), 11. These problems were mitigated to an extent by the hefty exhibition catalogue that included write-ups on individual exhibits by numerous experts.
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• Ian Hodder, “The Contextual Analysis of Symbolic Meanings,” in Pearce, Interpreting Objects, 1.
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• Guy Brett, “Unofficial Versions,” in Hiller, The Myth of Primitivism, 115.
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• I wish to thank Sandra Warriner and Dmitri van den Bersselaar for their contribution to the research and writing of the flipbook on Archdeacon Dandeson Crowther, and Susan Goligher for her research towards the flipbook on Mensah Sarbah and Peter Awounor-Renner.
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• Wyatt MacGaffey, “The Eyes of Understanding: Kongo Minkisi,” in Astonishment and Power, Wyatt MacGaffey and Michael D. Harris (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1993), 47.
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• Bishop Crowther grew up in a Yoruba village but was captured as a slave in 1821 and taken on board a Portuguese ship. Released at Freetown, Sierra Leone by the British navy, he was educated by CMS missionaries and then at the Church Missionary College in London, and was eventually chosen to be bishop for the Niger Mission as part of a CMS plan to develop a “Native Pastorate.” See J. F. Ade Ajayi, Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841–1891: The Making of a New Elite (London: Longmans, 1965); and E.A. Ayandele, The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria 1841–1914 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1966).
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• Mayer Museum Stockbook 1913–1922. Unheaded note from D.C. Crowther, Archdeacon, Pastorate Mission, Bonny, probably to Arnold Ridyard (11 April 1914).
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• J. Mensah Sarbah, Fanti Customary Laws, (London: William Clowes & Sons, 1897).
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• Mayer Museum Stockbook 1895–1900. Letter fragment from Dr. Edward Mettle, probably to Arnold Ridyard (July or August 1900).
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• See, for example, Frederick Cooper, “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History,” The American Historical Review 99, 5 (1994): 1516–1545. Also Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
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• The best publicized case in point is that of the ivories and brass altar pieces looted from the Edo kingdom during the British Punitive Expedition against Benin City in 1897. For an excellent and up-to-date bibliography of published research on Benin City, see: http://www.cgore.dircon.co.uk/a1a.htm.
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