The British Museum might not have expected its “Black Lives Matter” tweets to be greeted with derision by global netizens, who asked the museum to return the exhibits that the UK illegally took from other countries over the centuries.
The British Museum wrote a post on Twitter on June 5, quoting its director Hartwig Fischer as saying “The British Museum stands in solidarity with the Black community throughout the world. Black Lives Matter.”
The post was soon greeted with criticism from global Twitter users who mocked its hypocrisy and called for the museum to give back the cultural relics and artifacts the former “empire on which the sun never sets” looted from Africa and other areas of the world during its colonial rule and invasions.
“The irony of one of the world’s biggest looters and thieves making this sort of stance LOL,” a user named MaikLeventis commented under the post. “You couldn’t make that up.”
Dan Hicks, a professor of contemporary archaeology at the University of Oxford, criticized the museum’s pro-Black tweets as being just “hollow claims” as it continues to deny requests for the permanent restitution of artefacts such as the Benin Bronzes.
“The (Benin Bronzes were) taken in 1897 in a military attack in which tens of thousands of Nigerian people were killed, and have been exhibited ever since as a monument to that ‘victory,'” Hicks wrote on Twitter.
With the US’ anti-racism movement has gone global, protests against colonialism have recently taken place in some of the world’s big cities including London. The British Museum’s Black Lives Matter tweets are also regarded as support for the anti-colonial protesters.
However, the museum itself has benefited from British colonists’ invasions in the 19th century. Most of its collections came from invaded regions including countries in Asia and Africa.
The museum has as many as 23,000 pieces of Chinese treasures, including paintings, prints, jade, bronze, lacquer and ceramics, according to the website of the museum. Chinese history experts said that most of them were looted or stolen from China.
The museum’s controversial tweets also drew attention from Chinese netizens. Some users of China’s Twitter-like Weibo asked the museum to return the Chinese exhibits.
“You robbed lots of things from our Yuanmingyuan Park, haven’t you considered giving them back to us?” wrote a user named Hathaway. Yuanmingyuan Park was a royal garden in Beijing that was burned and ransacked by British and French troops in 1860.
Another user named inmylife commented that instead of simply offering slogans, the museum should make actual changes and put anti-racism and colonialism into action. “We all know the bad things you did,” he wrote.
The British Museum Photo: VCG
