Word is out: the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA Cambridge) has, under a long-term loan agreement, returned 39 traditional artifacts that were looted from Uganda by the British army and missionaries during British colonial rule.
To give this act a befitting description, I am forced to borrow some words from Luganda since the British’s crooked language cannot describe it well. ‘Akamanyiro akasuse’ a muganda would say. The highest level of contempt mankind has lived to witness.
The British find it courteous to lend us items they looted from our ancestors during the time they colonized our country, yet they murdered our forefathers in cold blood in order to rob these works of their ingenuity.
The 39 objects they have loaned us represent an insignificant fraction of about 1,500 ethnographic objects looted from Uganda that Cambridge has owned for a century, in addition to millions of other undocumented items that are distributed across British museums.
What is more appalling is that it was not only the soldiers who participated in the looting but also those who preached ‘do not steal’. As shown by the records at Cambridge University, among other missionaries, Reverend John Roscoe, a British Anglican missionary who worked in Uganda, looted most of the artifacts that are at the university.
The British went on to make millions of pounds from the loot by organizing exhibitions and enriching their museums’ stock.
The other day, when I saw them sanctioning former Ugandan ministers for stealing iron sheets, I couldn’t help but wonder where these looters get the moral authority to sanction an alleged thief. As a matter of fact, the British are the greatest looters of all time, having plundered resources from the entire universe for decades, and now they have added contempt to the mix by lending the same items to those they looted from.
The least they can do is return all the loot to the respective owners and compensate them for having made millions of pounds off their forefathers’ resourcefulness; otherwise, lending items to those they stole from does not only provoke them but shows how much the British disregard them.
