Yesterday’s Sunday Times carried a shocking story by Christina Lamb OBE, the foreign correspondent and author.
Incredibly, not once but three times she refers to the outlawed practice of FGM (female genital mutilation) as “circumcision” of girls. That might be forgivable ignorance in a rookie male reporter, but for a writer of Lamb’s gender and experience there’s no excuse.
She reports that the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum’s is currently playing host to a group of Maasai women from East Africa in search of “sacred objects” taken from their ancestors. These include “an emonyorit – an earring worn by girls after circumcision” and “an isikira – a headdress worn by newly circumcised girls”.
The Museum’s enthusiasm for returning artefacts has been widely reported, and in the case of body parts such as shrunken heads, no-one but an idiot would oppose returning them to descendants. More controversial has been the long campaign by Pitt Rivers curator Dan Hicks to gift its superb collection of Benin bronzes to Nigeria.
As DS has reported repeatedly (here, here and here) various developments have derailed the ignorant campaign to return Benin artefacts in the last couple of years.
They were the private cult objects of a murderous line of kings, and never sacred to – or the property of – the Bini people. The greatest setback has been the Nigerian President’s shock decree that all returned Benin items would no longer belong to the Nigerian people (i.e., the National Commission for Museums and Monuments) but would be given to the current Oba of Benin, a private citizen. Similar fates have befallen other artefacts returned to Nigeria.
From 1991-2021, New York’s Metropolitan Museum held two Benin bronze plaques, provided by the British to Lagos Museum around 1951. After independence in 1960, they were looted by Nigerians and resurfaced in the USA. As Barnaby Phillips wrote in the second edition of his book Loot, the Met ignored his information until the first (2021) edition appeared, then caved in and returned the bronzes – not to the British, but to the Nigerians. If they were now safe in the National Commission for Museums and Monuments’ museums in Lagos or Benin, they would be recorded today on Digital Benin, but they’re not – they’ve disappeared.
The Smithsonian Museum’s National Museum of African Art suddenly lost its South African director in March 2023. She’d assured its Regents (trustees) that the RSG’s (Restitution Study Group) argument that the museum’s Benin bronzes were cast from brass bracelets used to buy slaves from the Benin kingdom was untrue. But it was true, as the Smithsonian’s own magazine was about to reveal in its archaeological report on ships wrecked on their way to West Africa. The Museum’s Director Ngaire Blakenberg had to go – and fast.
The Smithsonian secretly handed over 20 bronzes to the National Commission for Museums and Monument anyway (where are they now?) and wants to send nine more. But the RSG currently has a petition before the USA’s Supreme Court, arguing that the Smithsonian has acted unconstitutionally by setting its own restitution policy without the statutory consultation.
The above photo shows RSG director Deadria Farmer-Paellmann visiting the British Museum this month; she’s holding a copy of the Supreme Court petition and had been supposed to meet with a BM curator and a head of department on her visit from the USA – both were unavailable after all, one suddenly taking annual leave – to discuss the BM’s display captioning. Increasingly, museums are seeing the force of RSG’s arguments: that the brass manillas used to buy slaves and then cast the bronzes were “Blood Metal”; that the Obas of Benin were despots who enslaved other West Africans and either sold them to European traders or sacrificed them as ancestor-worship in appalling numbers.
Tens of millions of today’s Americans, Brazilians and Caribbeans are descendants of those slaves. So, says RSG, those “stolen souls” (or rather, their descendants) have a better claim on Benin artefacts than the Obas’ descendants on these “stolen goods”. The RSGs want Benin collections to remain in world museums with accurate descriptions of their origin, to honour the stolen or murdered slaves – among other things, nailing the lie that the 1897 British expedition, which finally deposed the murderous Oba and his regime, also killed thousands of his subjects.
Historically truthful descriptions would also be helpful at the Pitt Rivers Museum, as well as in articles by writers like Christina Lamb. Female genital mutilation is no longer something to be coyly referred to as “circumcision” or tolerated as ceremonial and sacred. It’s the deliberate maiming of defenceless young females, many of whom, if not killed by shock, infection or loss of blood after this torture, suffer lifelong pain. It’s still done in Africa – generally by older female relatives of the same family or tribe – and even, allegedly, in secret in the U.K., where the NHS identified nearly 12,000 victims in 2022.
Stop Press: The U.S. Supreme Court gets over 7,000 petitions a year, asking it to grant a writ of certiorari, and typically accepts only 100-150 of them for hearing. Whether the RSG’s petition against the Smithsonian Museum will be among them is due to be decided this week and presents the court with an interesting challenge to its impartiality. The Smithsonian’s Regents voted in April 2023 to hand over the museum’s Benin bronzes to Nigeria (not the Oba): these trustees include Vice President Kamala Harris and the Supreme Court’s own Chief Justice, Honorable John G Roberts Jr. – neither of whom were present for that vote, as it happens.
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Don’t we call it gender reassignment over here when our Doctors under the say so of politicians do it to young women. in fact we go further don’t we? we lop off their breasts and chemically make them infertile. I wonder in years to come will our instruments used to perform this appear in museums.
You can return all of this crap as far as I’m concerned, good riddance to the rubbish!
But its female mutilation not circumcision, no excuses for it, its abuse and illegal in civilised nations as it should be
This so called reported should be ashamed of herself trying to excuse the savages that do this!
I’d go one stage further – our museums should stop buying this crap. It’s ridiculous that it can be looted, sold to the West, returned/repatriated and looted again.
You see, this is a good example of one of the paradoxes of human behaviour in the context of religion. Male circumcision is another. I’m not religious myself but I find it so idiotic and nonsensical that people believe that ‘God’ supposedly created man and woman in a perfect form but somewhere along the line they must be deemed ‘imperfect’ because someone’s holy book says little babies and infants need to be mutilated. Make it make sense! And people always think of Judaism but there’s loads of Christians in other cultures who also circumcise male babies. Why?? How do they reconcile the obvious contradiction? So ‘God’ didn’t, in fact, create the male and female form perfectly, it’s faulty and only deemed perfect once kids’ genitals have been mutilated?? This is a nonsense, and yet another reason I’m glad I opt out. All babies ( unless they’re of the few that are born deformed or with a physical disability ) are born in a perfect form, and that should be appreciated by grateful parents, as opposed to taking it upon themselves to then go interfering and damaging their perfectly healthy baby for life. Honestly, ”the madness of crowds”…It really is a cult mentality and nobody will persuade me otherwise.
It would be better to find out what Christianity teaches and then comment on it. I don’t know about “Christians in other cultures who also circumcise male babies.” I guess this comes from the “other cultures” not from Christianity.
See for yourself under ‘Modern Christianity’. It’s practiced in Egypt, Eritrea, Kenya, Cameroon, Congo, Ghana, Nigeria…the list goes on and on. The only time a scalpel should be taken to a child is when it is medically necessary, so to mess around with kids’ genitalia as in the context above, just because somebody’s religious teachings or customs deem it a requirement is sick and wrong on every level. This is religion or culture legitimizing child abuse, pure and simple, and should be outlawed as such.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_and_circumcision
I believe Jews have a ritual of expecting the parents of boys to get them circumcised early in life, I’m sure they are generally Christians?
It’s predominantly Jews and Muslims that have their sons circumcised, though in the wiki link below it explains there’s certain Christian denominations across the world that also practice it, but more for cultural as opposed to religious reasons, I think. I just think it’s all very unnecessary and unethical as there’s no justification at all. Unless there’s a medical reason than don’t do it, basically.
Moral Relativism.
Gad Saad. The Parasitic Mind. Chapter 8 “Call to Action” page 176
Sam Harris recounted an anecdote that perfectly summarizes the moral blindness that cultural relativism engenders. It centred around a conversation he had with an appointee to President Obama’s Council on Bioethics
She said, “How could you ever say that forcing women to wear burqas is wrong from the point of view of science?”
I said, “Well, because I think it’s pretty clear that right and wrong relate to human well-being, and it’s just as clear that forcing half the population to live in cloth bags and beating them, or killing them when they try to get out, is not a way of maximizing human well being.”
And she said, “Well, that’s just your opinion.”
And I said, “Well, okay, let’s make it even easier, Let’s say we found a culture that was literally removing the eyeballs of every third child, ok, at birth. Would you then agree that we have found a culture that is not maximizing well-being?”
And she said, “It would depend on why they were doing it.”
So after my eyebrows returned from the back of my head, I said, “Okay, well say they were doing it for religious reasons. Let’s say they have a scripture which says, “Every third should walk in darkness’ or some such nonsense.”
And then she said, ‘Well, then you could never say that they were wrong.”
I’m going to give Christina Lamb the benefit of the doubt here ( maybe she’s given her rationale elsewhere ) because ”female circumcision”, often interchangeably used with ”cutting”, is how FGM is referred to when you look at older articles and academic papers on this subject. So I’m going to assume she’s just using outdated terminology, as opposed to using cultural relativism to minimize something that no sane person would view as less than a barbaric and inhumane abuse of a child. I think the term ”female genital mutilation” is a newer term, but this is certainly how it should be referred to because it’s 100% accurate and people should move with the times.
I think this is one example of a horrendous abuse of females which cannot be blamed exclusively on Islam because Christians and people who practice local customs and traditions also have their daughters go through this as infants and it’s often women who perform this sadistic abuse, which just boggles my mind, to be honest, because they’ve obviously suffered it themselves as young girls, and I’m sure many have endured lasting damage from it.
Just another example of the abused becoming the abuser. Another one off the top of my head would be those vile ‘Morality Police’ ghouls in Iran, who are often women, who spend their time on the prowl looking for women and girls not wearing the hijab. Women and girls have died as a result of these evil, traitorous witches assaulting them. But as we see routinely now in the West, there is no solidarity or loyalty to others who are the same gender. Not when you’re the member of a cult. The cult always come first.
She ought to use a more realistic term, but the use of the “female circumcision” term doesn’t necessarily mean she is attempting to minimise the gravity of the act. So I agree with your comment.
Looks like I’ve offended a religious zealot who’s in denial that Christians would practice such barbaric procedures on infant boys and girls. Wiki to the rescue again;
”Despite the absence of scriptural support, women and girls within Christian communities, including in Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania, do undergo FGM. It has been found among Coptic Christians in Egypt, Orthodox Christians in Ethiopia, and Protestants and Catholics in Sudan and Kenya. A 2013 UNICEF report identified 17 African countries in which at least 10 percent of Christian women and girls aged 15–49 had undergone it. In Niger, for example, 55 percent of Christian women and girls had experienced it, against two percent of Muslim women and girls.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_on_female_genital_mutilation
The euphemism hides the brutality.
Circumcision implies removing supposedly ‘excess’ skin as with the male situation (arguably not excess, but that’s a separate topic.)
But as I understand, FGM is mainly/often(?) an operation without anaesthetic to excise the clitoris, a procedure as violent and painful as removing the glans.
Send it all back so we don’t have to hear any more about it.
Seems to me that we could two birds with one stone here – some people want to pay “reparations” to descendents of slaves, why not auction these benighted bronzes and use the cash to create an international fund for slave descendent reparations.
When it’s finished it’s finished.
Obviously it spares long suffering english taxpayers from forking out injustly on this manifest bollocks and solves the problem of what to do with these mostly rather unpleasant statues.
Woof.
You don’t want to be chopping a clit off or sewing a vag up. To do that to deny sexual pleasure to someone else says more about your own insecurity than anything else in my view. No real confident self-assured man would want to do that to a woman.
The sort of continence that we show in the west in that we don’t stare at an attractive woman or approach them or make them feel uncomfortable. Not everywhere is like this.