How Black Lives Matter makes Black Culture Matter

Thursday 9th June

How the Black Lives Matter movement has impacted, enlivened and refocused the debate on repatriating stolen African treasures

 

How the Black Lives Matter movement has impacted, enlivened and refocused the debate on repatriating stolen, sacred African treasures on display in the V&A, British Museum , Wallace Collection and other venues in America and the Far East

Michael Ohajuru Senior Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies ,presents how the Victorians plundered African treasures with a white – supremacist attitude based on their understanding of what they believed as their God given right – to ‘civilise’ a continent that they understood had no history. Systematically they plundered in the name of Christianity and when the real motive was capitalism – money and greed.

This talk exposes the hypocrisy in the European philosophy towards Africa – a continent which according to their philosophers and historians had no history , no art and no literature .

Hear how white male European intellectual elites and academics marvelled at the beauty and brilliance of the Benin treasures unable to believe that ‘barbarians ‘ could produce such wonders:

We were at once astounded at such an unexpected find, and puzzled to account for so highly developed an art among a race so entirely barbarous

Sir Charles Hercules Read (1857 –1929) British archaeologist and curator at the British Museum

Black Lives Matter is making the establishment think again – this talk shows how things are changing.

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