Egyptian novelist and Booker Prize nominee, Ahdaf Soueif, has resigned from the British Museum’s Board of Trustees, citing the Museum’s “immovability on issues of critical concern”. 

Soueif is standing down after serving as a trustee since 2012. Her resignation represents another high-profile protest at the Museum’s failure to recognise their moral responsibility to address pressing ethical and political questions.

Emphasising that her action was not a protest about one single issue, in a blog post for the London Review of Books announcing her resignation, she explained, “The world is caught up in battles over climate change, vicious and widening inequality, the residual heritage of colonialism, questions of democracy, citizenship and human rights. On all these issues the museum needs to take a clear ethical position”. 

Soueif has been particularly frustrated at the Museum’s continued refusal to disassociate itself from BP’s sponsorship (which she considers is “not unattainable elsewhere”), as well as the Museum’s refusal to hire workers following the collapse of service provider Carillion. 

However, Soueif also hit out at the Museum’s failure to take a lead with the repatriation of cultural artefacts. 

“Museums, state officials, journalists and public intellectuals in various countries have stepped up to the discussion”, she wrote. “The British Museum, born and bred in empire and colonial practice, is coming under scrutiny. And yet it hardly speaks”.

The Museum’s task, she adds, “should be to help us all to imagine a better world, and – along the way – to demonstrate the usefulness of museums. This would go some way towards making the case for keeping its collection in London”.

Soueif used her resignation to praise the British Museum’s work helping to train the next generation of curators through its World Training Programme and helping to found the Circulating Artefacts project, which helps track down stolen items when they appear on the market.

However, chair of trustees, Sir Richard Lambert, has sought to correct the impression Soueif was leaving about the British Museum and restitution. He insists the Museum does play an important role in the restitution debate. In particular, he cited the role the Museum is playing in the multilateral museum consortium, known as the Benin Dialogue Group, which is discussing the rotation of loans to the Benin Royal Museum in southern Nigeria. 

Photo: The British Museum, London 

Courtesy of PublicDomainImages from Pixabay