(Art) History x Human Rights
How did anticolonial movements/postcolonial states address the issue of universal human rights in the period of the late 1940s to 1970s? And how did their critique reflect on the question of restitution
Decolonization can be understood as a process that still prevails today in the former colonized states, rather than a single and past moment in time. The emancipation of oppressed people, the liberation of colonized territories and the formation of formally colonized states has been at times peaceful and at times achieved only after a protracted revolution. The decolonial struggle continues till today.
After World War II, european countries lacked the wealth and political support to suppress revolts and maintain domination in foreign territories. The slow process of decolonization coincided with the Cold War between the soviet union and the USA, and with the early development of the newly founded United Nations. Between the late 1940's and the 1970´s, the number of member states grew from 51 in 1945, to 152 by the end of 1979.
The colonies had provided access to raw materials and labour force, which economically benefited colonizing imperialist states for up to four centuries and especially during the decades of industrialization. These brutal exploitations of resources also included military conscripts, such as during WWI and WWII. Arbitrary boundaries which had not existed before were created in the colonies, dividing ethnic and linguistic groups and natural features. These artificial boundaries laid the foundations for the creation of post-colonial states which lacked geographical, linguistic, ethnic and political affinity.
Statements on universality of UDHR, 1947-48.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was seen as a global effort to secure peace, detail the basic common rights and freedoms of individuals and commitment to recognize all human beings as `born free and equal in dignity and rights… nationality, place of residence, gender, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, language, or any other status´ , and is seen as a milestone document for its universalist language, which makes no particular reference to a particular culture, religion or political system.
The UDHR was finally adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 10 1948, which consisted by then of 58 member states, as a non-binding agreement. The UDHR was however pivotal because it forms the foundation for international human rights of the later drafting and adoption of the International Bill of Human Rights (1966/76) and incorporated into many subsequent human rights treaties, national constitutions and human rights instruments.
The drafting committee of the declaration included representatives from all continents but notably omitted representatives from colonized territories. This can be best illustrated by a comment from René Cassin, an original member of the drafting committee, who `also defended the integrity of the French empire as crucial for the universal destiny of les droits de l'homme ( … ) From Cassin's perspective, there was no inevitable correspondence between les droits de l'homme and national self-determination.` This mirrors the 1941 Atlantic Charter in which “The Right of people to choose the form of government under which they live” was not extended to colonies.
The drafting of the UDHR took place over the course of two years, wherein members of the international community were invited to make statements, comments, interpretations, and propose amendments, in an effort towards the universality of the declaration. Though there reads an agreement on the necessity for a universal document of peace and respect, the statements demonstrate a divergent understanding on how and what these rules of international conduct should be. Most are also quick to voice a rejection of the western paradigm as a biased basis on the understanding of universal human rights, continuing in their statements to outline the rights of man/communities though their historical, often religious, and cultural perspectives. A perspective that, should be noted, had indeed been often subdued through colonial oppression.
For example Chung-Shu Lo, a Chinese scholar, offered centuries-old Confusion philosophy and the importance of the duties of man for the strength of the state and the respect of the rights of the gegenüberliegende, as well as the need for three basic, yet all-encompassing claims:-
`(1) the right to live, (2) the right to self-expression and (3) the right to enjoyment. […] The right to live is on the biological and economic level. The right to self-expression is on the social and political level. The right to enjoyment is on the aesthetic and spiritual level. When man can enjoy the rights at all levels, he attains a full life.`
Humayar Kabir, an Bengali-Indian, Oxford-educated educationalist and politician, advocated early in his statement the early Islamic claim of a non-racially-discriminatory theory and practice of democracy, at the same time denouncing the Western divergence to the original intent of democracy. Based on the anti-discriminatory islamic doctrine, Kabir outlines four fundamental requirements´ for human existence - food and clothing, housing, education, medical and sanitary services - and lays clear the necessity for a political democracy - the voice of the people - to decide the degree of state interference and control over the provision of these fundamental rights.
And S.V. Puntambekar, an Oxford-educated hindu Indian academic specializing in politics and foreign policy, offered a haunting description of one of decolonization most true till today, offered a 10 point `freedoms and virtues which are the fundamental values of human life, and conduct [= freedom from violence, freedom from want, freedom from exploitation, freedom from violation or dishonour, freedom from early death and disease / absence of intolerance, compassion or fellow feeling, knowledge, freedom of thought and conscience, freedom from fear and frustration or despair] ´. Most notably, he returns continuously to the need for self-determination of India as a fundamental wish, as well as the freedom from civil warfare, before being able to even start administering his fundamental 10 points.
It is clear that after the adoption of the UDHR and the beginning of the Cold War, that `throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as the UN grew more 'cosmopolitan', with its rapidly expanding member states and African and Asian representation, the French jurist (ed. Cassin) grew more insistent on the very point of a Western, European, liberal tradition of human rights. By then, the real rift was not between Paris and Peking intellectuals, but the West and East of the Cold War, and a new North-South axis - polarities that were in turn defined by an ideological distinction between individual and collective rights.´
Decolonial movements
`The creation of so many new countries, some of which occupied strategic locations, others of which possessed significant natural resources, and most of which were desperately poor, altered the composition of the United Nations and political complexity of every region of the globe.´
Bandung Conference 1955
Despite advances from the Western states to practice post-colonial power with the lure of aid packages, technical support and even military intervention, as well as advances form the Soviet Union to join the communist bloc with promises of a non-imperialist economical and social ideology, the newly decolonized African and Asian countries defied being drawn into the Cold War, and with the Bandung Conference of 1955 agreed on a non-aligned movement focussing on internal development, peace and decolonization.
It should be noted that the Bandung Conference final Communiqué demonstrated full support of the UDHR as a common standard of achievement for peoples and nations, as well as the fundamental principles on Human Rights set out in the UN Charter. Additionally, the communiqué takes note on the UN´s resolution to the rights to self-determination as a prerequisite to the fulfillment of Human Rights, and highlights that `subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation constitutes a denial of fundamental human rights´, which was adopted into the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples by the General Assembly in 1960.
Anticolonial movements - from universalism to cultural relativism to development as a human rights exception
The normative power of Universalist human rights adopted in the 1940´s and 50´s began to diminish throughout the 1960’s. Postcolonial governments began to reject `key elements universalism and advanced subversive, particularist schemes of regional, religious and traditionalist redefinition´ The South-North divide, the individual-collective divide, became prominent in the developmental dictatorships championed by many of the first postcolonial states, beginning with Ghana under authoritarian Nkrumah, rejected many human rights principles in favour of “collective freedom”.
The rise of human rights critique by transnational NGOs on these sovereign post-colonised state regimes led to a growing dismissive rhetoric of neo-imperialism. The Cold War, and the prolonged destitution of newly formed sovereign states and the global rift on the understanding of human rights coincided and at times was at odds with the similarly complex ambitious project of development of postcolonial sovereign states and redistribution of global economic power.
The early 60´s presented a period of revision of universalism, where the validity of human rights would eventually be achieved and variations on the understanding of the feasibility of human rights in combination with patience and time. This notion of Developmental Exception was first encountered by the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), whilst examining the relationship between rights, the postcolonial state and the problems of development. Future leader of the ICJ Vivian Bose supported this modified universalism by urging:
`“close and sympathetic consideration of the problems special to those countries” that were emerging from colonialism. There was, he insisted, a vital requirement for “understanding the plight of those that accept our principles and ideals but who, whether they be right or wrong, feel it their duty temporarily to reject certain matters in which they also have ultimate faith.” It was not a surrender, but a tactical retreat so “the things in which they believe and we believe can be preserved and ultimately restored in a cleaner and newer form.”
Notwithstanding, the ICJ Conference of 1961, held in Lagos, predicted the demise of liberal anticolonial movement towards authoritarian developmental exceptionalism. Despite the conference´s attendance by prominent liberal rising stars, the authoritarian logic presented by figures such as Senegal's Minister of Justice Gabriel d’Arboussier and Liberia´s Chief Justice Dashwood Wilson formed the basis for seduction of the Third World towards postcolonial nationalism.
With the numerical advantage of new states at the UN by the end of the 1960´s, Third World priorities had become an annual feature on the human rights agenda. Issues such as racist discrimination (and aprtheid in particular) and residual colonialism were given priority to over the development agenda. Whether consciously or subconsciously, the UN welcomed this focus as it posed less of a threat to the UDHR than development. A constituency for autocratic modernization specific to the Soviet Bloc, present at the time in the UN, which formed the fertile ground upon which the developmental exception swept across the mid- and late-1960´s.
The notion of developmental exception crystallized in the epochal World Conference on Human Rights in 1968 revised the IDHR’s indivisibility, and faith in universality was diminishing rapidly.
While the critique on universality of the 1960´s were defined by nation-building, the 1970´s were replete with critique on universarsality that invoked tradition, culture and identity. Evidenced in the UN Seminar of Dar Es Salaam report in 1973, “the UN's human rights treaties `were alien to the African Reality´”. In the 70´s we find a descent to particularism, where we find evidence of states such as Saudi Arabia and South Africa forming alternative human rights better adapted to their regimes in the name of “identity” in a defensive attempt to dismiss growing pressure and critique from (predominantly western) iNGOs about the state´s violations towards individuals. Universality saw a retreat into regional and national forms of realization of rights in the form of Regional Conventions. Anticolonialism can be seen not as a human rights movement but rather as a “collective liberation from Empire” firs (ch. 3)t
Restitution and the multiple varieties of the vernacular of art and human rights
These multiple human rights vernaculars, though at times used to promote the power of individuals over others, also demonstrates the plurality of chronologies of not only post-war human rights rights history, but the narration of, and ultimately liberation from, colonial history itself.
An important process of decolonization is also the restitution of art and artefacts stolen during the centuries of colonial rule. By the 1970´s we see a large part of the UN is made up of newly founded postcolonial states. Part of the cultural emancipation in the human rights vernacular that took place in the 1970´s accelerated the 1978 establishment of UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin or its Restitution in case of Illicit Appropriation (ICPRCP).
As I have mentioned before, the colonies were rich in valuable raw materials and labour force that benefitted the imperial states economically. For the exploitation of the colonised territories, the colonizers employed a myriad of dehumanizing tactics onto the colonized people. Some of these were brutal punishment, as in the case of Belgium and the immediate amputation of hands if labourers at cocoa plantations in Congo were to appear with too little wares, or the use of punitive iron face masks on slave-labourers in the Americas. Segregation of indegenous communities was (and still is) a subversive use of power. And the imperialist act of pilfering artefacts of cultural importance is a form of dehumanisation as it inevitably erases visual and haptic history of peoples.
Carl Heinrich Heydenreich denounced the assimilation of colonial artefacts as a “crime against humanity”, as an act by the conqueror conditioning his victim into a “thing”, by depriving him and future generations of the foundation of their humanity and simultaneously strengthening certain societies..
The recovery of artefacts of cultural heritage therefore is paramount to defending the `personality and tending to the flourishing of new branches of its culture´. Access and experience to the richness of culture, creativity and spirituality from other eras is of great importance to former colonised peoples, as they have a right to their artistic and cultural heritage and legacy.
Western museums, particularly ethnological museums, store and hoard an incredible amount of artefacts. Even the word “artefact” is disputed: what western anthropological museums interpret and display as an artefact is in many cases interpreted as an art object, object of worship or objects of daily use in its place of heritage, or indeed of ancestral heritage in the form of human remains. The act restitution of these pieces therefore opens up “profound reflection on history, memories, and the colonial past”, a gestural attempt at putting things back in order, a “pathway toward establishing new cultural relations based on newly reflected upon ethical relation.”
There is not only an intellectual and aesthetic appropriation involved in the confiscation of these objects, but also an economical appropriation at various levels of the colonizing empire: stolen artefacts are displayed in public space in cities, at collectors homes, in museums, and acquire a market value that benefits only the colonial power.
By the late 19th century, plundering cultural heritage became systematic in war tactics to the point of accepted legality, with museums even participating in punitive expeditions. Even today, museums are still being challenged with their involvement in war, made placative in Hito Steyerl´s performance lecture “is the Museum a Battlefield”.
Examples of the cultural devastation of colonial accumulation of artefacts include dynastic treasures from the royal palace of Benin City (in present day Nigeria) dating as far back as the 15th century and are made of wood, ivory, and bronze; manuscripts and sacred art objects from the libraries of Timbuktu dating back to the 14th century; and a spectacular golden head from Asante culture. It was only until 1899 with the “convention with Respect to the Law and Customs of War on Land and its annex: Regulations concerning the Laws of Customs of War on Land” that the pillaging, destruction and willful damage to private property was formally prohibited. Private property was specified in a renewal of the Convention in 1907 as “property of municipalities, that institutions dedicated to religion, charity and education, the arts and sciences,” and specified “institutions of this character, historic monuments, works of art and science”
In 1973, leading anthropologist Claude Lévi Strauss stated that his discipline was “born out of an era of violence”. However, there was little interest in raising this question by the institutions involved, the old colonial power appeared inflexible towards the many efforts by newly formed states on the restitution of their art objects. By the late 1970’s the pressure became too big to ignore, and UNESCO, headed by Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow pleaded in favour of rebalancing global heritage and committing to restitution by approving the ICPRCP.
Conclusion - a new story in old clothes
The artefacts in european museums exceed the tens of thousands. There is the question of preservation of these objects, on the one hand whether the museums are capable of conserving, preserving and restoring all these objects or contribute to the demise of memory of entire peoples; and on the other hand and as an anxious and sublimely racist counterargument from the museums, whether the objects can be conserved, preserved and restored in their places of origin. This latter argumentation is a blatant block to the emancipation and decolonial efforts of formally colonized countries.
Recently, there has been an accelerated public interest in the restitution movement which goes beyond the delayed restitution of artefacts by private owners and public institutions as outlined by the ICPRCP. The process of decolonization, memory and cultural re-institution is now also being directed towards the cultural representation of colonization and oppression in the form of the forced removal of memorial statues of colonizers, conquistadors, slave-traders et al, as well as the authorized vandalization of memorials such as is the case with the Karl Lueger memorial in Vienna and the erection of monuments that allow for untold histories. The decolonial process is a process of profound reflection on history and memories, a gesture of recognition of illegitimate historical acts, and opens pathways to legitimate claims of preservation of cultural heritage and cultural identities. It is the most important process in establishing social justice. History, and the representation of history via the exhibition of objects as anthropological curiosities or historical heroes, omits aspects of truth that lead to the adoption of false narratives on identity and heritage, both for descendants of colonial powers and the descendants of colonized peoples. Let´s succumb to this process.
