It’s not often that a major institution fesses up to utter failure. Last month, the Royal Ontario Museum quietly apologized for its 1989 exhibition Into The Heart Of Africa, acknowledging that the exhibit had perpetuated what it sought to expose. The ROM expressed its “deep regret for having contributed to anti-African racism.”
That apology was two years in the making. The Coalition for the Truth about Africa approached the ROM four years ago, and the museum embraced the idea of collaboration, developing a new Oh Africa show in 2014 and a symposium, which set the groundwork for the apology.
The original exhibit nearly three decades ago saw the Black community protesting in the street and denouncing the museum as the Racist Ontario Museum. The demonstrations ended in violent encounters between police and protesters that resulted in arrests, injunctions and criminal charges. It was not a pretty scene.
Poet/historian Afua Cooper, James R. Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies at Dalhousie University, was there with her two children on Saturdays outside the ROM, and at the ROM last month. She remembers the controversy as “a classic example of white people not listening to what Black people were saying, of knowing what’s best for Black people.”
Into the Heart of Africa was meant to be a critique of 19th-century colonial attitudes, a deconstruction of racism. Instead it was experienced by many as a glorification of racism. The artifacts had come to the museum from white Canadian missionaries and soldiers who brought them back from Africa. As a result, their stories dominated the narrative, while Black Africans, there in absentia and in photographs, were silent and unnamed.
Moreover, the racial violence embodied in the imagery and the language was overwhelming. No amount of good will or curatorial irony could get past it. The wall-size illustration of Lord Beresford on horseback plunging his sword into a Zulu warrior caused the Toronto District School Board to restrict attendance by the city’s schoolchildren.
We need to acknowledge the extent of the alienation the show engendered. Individuals lost their jobs, were put in jail, were blacklisted, left the city, even the country. People were physically injured, and a community was humiliated.
“It was a cultural watershed. It opened eyes in the Black community to the intransigence of the ROM and its lack of understanding of the cultural misrepresentations inherent in the exhibition,” says freelance writer/blogger Neil Armstrong (North American Weekly Gleaner). “The top-down ‘we-know-how-to-do-it-and-you-don’t attitude.”
Last month’s apology was made (and accepted) at a gathering of ROM officials and members of the CFTA, which had organized the protests and had tried to persuade the ROM to make changes. The Museum flatly refused on the grounds of academic freedom. The CFTA then called for the exhibit to come down, and that’s what happened. Seeing the mess in Toronto, the institutions that had booked the show cancelled.
The controversy has since become famous, the subject of analysis and discussion in museum circles. The ROM itself put considerable effort, and some self-analysis, into understanding what went wrong.
But apologies of this sort only work when they are the product of a process, and when they begin another. Reconciliation with the Black community leading to even greater collaboration is what needs to happen from here. That applies to events and projects, but equally to staff and board appointments.
Torontonians need allies in cultural institutions like the ROM that as organizations continue to resist serious diversity on their boards and at senior management and curatorial staff levels.
I am pleased that there has been an apology, but I wish more had been made of it for the general public. The ROM should be commended – and its feet should be held to the fire.
Credit the CFTA for changing the narrative of Into The Heart Of Africa.
Susan Crean is the author of The Laughing One – A Journey To Emily Carr (2001). Read Taking The Missionary Position, her controversial essay about Into The Heart Of Africa, in Racism In Canada (Fifth House).
art@nowtoronto.com
