‘Shot two zebras. Played tennis’: Scarborough museum confronts  the legacy of colonial past 

Discovery of stuffed animals from central Africa and recordings from ‘human zoo’ inspires exhibition

It was when part of a Scarborough museum was being redeveloped more than a decade ago that builders found a blocked-up door. Behind it they discovered bags filled with asbestos and, under that, a collection of taxidermied animals that had been collected by a Victorian big game hunter and left to the museum.

Neglected, outdated and ethically problematic, the temptation may have been to shut the artefacts away again. Instead, the Scarborough Museums and Galleries opted to do something else with the archive bequeathed by Col James Harrison – some of it much more morally challenging than stuffed antelope heads.

The result is From Local to Global, an exhibition at Scarborough Art Gallery that engages head on with Harrison’s legacy and examines not only the items he collected but the way the museum and other institutions benefited from colonialism.

Harrison collected the ceremonial knives, ivory tusks and photographs on display, and wrote diaries detailing his daily animal hunts – “Out again at dawn. Shot two nice zebras ... Played tennis after tea.”

But he also brought home much more than animals from the Congo Free State, a vast area of central Africa that was at the time regarded by King Leopold of Belgium as his personal possession.

A stuffed pygmy antelope. Photograph: Richard Saker/the Guardian

In 1904, Harrison brought to Britain four men and two women from the Mbuti ethnic group, and toured them around the country in what the curator Dorcas Taylor described as “a human zoo”. The group performed at the Hippodrome in London for 14 weeks, appeared at Buckingham Palace and parliament and were seen by an estimated 1 million people in Britain.

One of the women, Amuriape, gave birth to a girl in Bedford in 1906 but tragically she was stillborn. Amuriape had been performing on stage until two days before, and the baby had been hotly anticipated by the papers as “the mighty atom”. However, neither the baby’s real name nor what became of her after her death was recorded.

These are important stories, but difficult ones to tell, says Taylor, and while some of Harrison’s photos of the Mbuti people can be seen in context on the museum website, they do not appear in the gallery. “We didn’t feel it was appropriate to subject them to that scrutiny again,” she said – although gramophone recordings of the members singing can be listened to at the exhibition.

Discussions about decolonisation are certainly not new in the museum sector, and Scarborough is far from the first institution to agonise over parts of its collection. Most recently the Wellcome Collection attracted criticism after closing one of its galleries that included colonial-era artefacts, calling it “racist, sexist and ableist”.

Hippo tusks. Photograph: Richard Saker/the Guardian

Defending the decision, Wellcome’s director, Sir Jeremy Farrar, said the exhibit had initially “made a choice not to focus on the people, often marginalised and excluded, who made and used the objects collected. We no longer consider this the right choice.”

Scarborough had also received criticism, said Taylor, “both from some people who think we’re not doing enough, through to other people who think that this is not British history, and we as a museum should not be getting involved in these sorts of issues. But it’s so important we don’t hide from these histories.”

Ceremonial knives. Photograph: Richard Saker/the Guardian

As well as soliciting input from present-day conservationists in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the exhibition includes voices of today’s Mbuti people, describing what is still a precarious existence. “Modernisation means that we are gradually losing our culture,” one young man says in a short film.

In Yorkshire, too, the museum has recruited more than 40 local “citizen researchers” to examine aspects of the collection and colonialism from their own areas of expertise. “The question that interested me was, what do we do with this material, which ethically we now realise as being wrong to collect?” said Jane Gill, a local lecturer in childhood education who has been looking at the exhibition in the light of how Victorian children’s literature shaped views of the time.

“Is it is it worse to destroy it and pretend this didn’t exist, than to actually look at it and consider it in the light of our understanding now?”

• From Local to Global is at Scarborough Art Gallery until 19 February 2023

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