The Rumble Beneath the Lesson

Today, on this cool holiday afternoon, I put on a documentary about Africa’s looted art.

I was not undertaking a research project, nor was I preparing to write anything. I was simply watching a well-referenced documentary account of historical facts first presented to me in another YouTube video earlier this year.

I was incredulous when the Berlin museum raised a concern about returning objects violently looted more than a century ago:

What if they later appeared back in Europe?

I stared at the screen.

Ah! So that is the worry?

Not necessarily that the objects might be sold, but that somebody other than the original looters might sell them. Somebody African, and outside the network which had orchestrated the authentication of violently removed belongings into catalogued and tradable “artefacts.”

Ouch oh!

The museum’s anxiety seemed to say: We accept that these objects belong to you, but what if you exercise ownership in a way we have not authorised?

Are they serious?

Two things immediately surfaced in my mind.

The first was Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu’s This Is Why I Resist: Don’t Define My Black Identity. Not a particular quotation, but the force of its refusal: the refusal to let the same structures that produced and benefited from racial inequality continue defining the acceptable terms of Black identity, anger, resistance and repair.

The second was the museum scene from Black Panther. Killmonger stands before objects removed from Africa while a museum employee explains what they are and where they came from. He then forcefully takes an object without seeking the museum’s consent or cooperation.

The scene stayed with me because it reverses the presumed direction of authority. The institution that had not required the consent of the original owners suddenly encounters someone who does not recognise its authority to withhold what it possesses.

Consent and cooperation from the owners were apparently unnecessary when such objects entered these collections. Why do they become sacred requirements when the objects are demanded to be returned to their rightful cultural heritage setting?

Doesn’t return mean relinquishing control—including control over decisions one may dislike?

Something about this felt familiar.

Not the facts. The sensation.

A quaking of the earth beneath me. An unsettling rumble.

I traced it back to history lessons at school. I can remember being taught about the First World War, the American Civil War and the Cold War. When I try to remember what I was taught about the nineteenth century and the dawning of the twentieth, I draw a blank.

I cannot honestly reconstruct the curriculum now. Perhaps some of what I am searching for was mentioned. What remains is not the lesson but the feeling that something important was missing while the account presented to us was considered complete.

History seemed to arrive through wars, dates, prominent men and lines drawn across maps. Places elsewhere became visible when someone travelled to them, governed them, fought over them or extracted something from them.

I remember the ground beneath those lessons feeling unstable. I did not yet possess the information or vocabulary to explain why. I only knew that some questions opened a space the classroom did not know what to do with. The lesson continued. The questions became mine to carry.

Decades later, names and events arrive through documentaries, YouTube narrators and AI-generated images. Historical faceless figures I never encountered at school but I suspected were behind events we had to skim over are introduced in brisk voiceovers, already explained: a date, a journey, an intention, a conflict. The narration moves quickly enough to make interpretation sound like fact. Well certainly interpretation on the side of who was presenting the documented evidence of events.

One such name was James Phillips in Benin City.

By then, however, my question was older than his name.

Almost immediately, I became tired of reading about him. Every account seemed to grant him more space: what he wrote, what he intended, where he travelled, who accompanied him and what happened to his party.

I found myself asking a different question.

What was already happening in Benin City?

Then I learned that the approach towards Benin City coincided with Igue.

Historical Nigeria describes Igue as a sacred season in which kingship, ancestral presence and the wellbeing of the kingdom are renewed. The ceremonial objects later stolen and catalogued as “artefacts” had belonged to this living ritual and historical world.

What did Igue mean inside the city, beyond the palace? What were people anticipating? What responsibilities were children gradually learning to carry? What did the season mean before someone else’s approach became the event through which it was remembered?

I wanted to begin while Benin was alive.

The surviving British archive cannot be the boundary of everything that existed. Nor should one colonial official’s extensively preserved intentions occupy more of my imagination than the world his account refused to see.

So here I am 30 years later, behind a laptop, using a compromised instrument to help me examine a compromised archive.

That instrument is artificial intelligence. It has inherited many of the same imbalances as the material it searches: abundant biographies of officials, institutional catalogues and English-language interpretations; far less of the people whose lives did not enter those records on equal terms.

Transparency remains integral. But I do not presently have the patience, energy or inclination to research and reconstruct an entire historical world. Perhaps I do not need to.

For now, I am marking the rumble.

The documentary did not create it. Shola Mos-Shogbamimu did not create it. Black Panther did not create it. YouTube and AI did not create it. They gave words, images and contemporary form to something I had experienced much earlier: the moment when an authorised account failed to contain the questions awakening inside me.

I cannot remember the lesson clearly.

I remember the ground moving.