“By studying the museum as an artifact, reading collections as cultural texts, and discovering the life histories of objects, it has become possible to understand something of the complexities of cross-cultural encounters. In the same process, the intricacies of different cultural configurations are revealed in objects through which various African peoples have expressed not only their individual artistry but also their deepest communal concerns. Finally, by placing in context the relationships, however brief, problematic, and painful, that developed as Canadian soldiers and missionaries travelled into the heart of Africa, it has become clear that the past is part of the present.” — Jeanne Cannizzo, epilogue to the catalogue for Into the Heart of Africa, 1989
The past indeed proved to be part of the present for one of the most controversial exhibits ever mounted at the Royal Ontario Museum. Defended as an ironic look at how museum holdings had historically been collected and criticized as deeply offensive to the Black community, Into the Heartof Africa ultimately changed how minority communities were consulted on museum projects and would go on to be cited in textbooks as an example of how not to put on a major exhibit.
Drawing upon the museum’s collection of African artifacts, curator Jeanne Cannizzo divided the exhibit into two halves. The first focused on the white Canadian soldiers and Christian missionaries who had brought back from their travels items that ended up in the ROM’s hands, while the remainder spotlighted the artifacts. The exhibit was scheduled to run from November 1989 to August 1990 in Toronto, then travel to Hull, Vancouver, Los Angeles, and Albuquerque.
The catalogue discussed issues surrounding anthropology, artifact collecting, and the roles museums play. “Museums are sometimes charged with cultural vandalism, represented by their collections of decontextualized objects, far removed from their original setting and meaning,” Cannizzo observed. “A corollary is the often-voiced fear that to be the focus of the collection process is a symptom of cultural decline. To single out particular museums or individual collectors is probably unfair. Museums are themselves social institutions, which cannot be divorced from the historical context in which they developed, and their collections occasionally reflect the violence and disruptive social forces characterizing the European colonization of Africa.”
Cover of the exhibit catalogue.
Members of the Black community had not been consulted during the two years of preparation. Prior to the opening, a Black publicist was hired for outreach work, and a PhD student was hired to program related lectures and performances. Focus groups from the Black community brought in at a late stage recommended that racist, stereotypical language such as “dark continent” and “mysterious land” be removed from the brochure, which was then reprinted. Group participants did not feel reassured by ROM director Dr. T. Cuyler Young’s response to anyone who raised content concerns: “It is not customary museum practice to consult or have anyone special from any ethnic community work on an exhibition related to their cultures.”
When the exhibit opened, early patrons had to cross a picket line of striking maintenance workers and security guards to access the museum. Mainstream media reviews were generally positive. The Globe and Mail’s Adele Freedman said that there was “an awful lot to think about” but that some of the artifacts were jammed too close together. The Toronto Star’s Christopher Hume felt it was “unusually well mounted” and edgy in its willingness to confront the cultural arrogance of those who’d collected the artifacts.
Backlash against the exhibit developed slowly. In January 1990, lawyer/activist Charles Roach was among the dozen leaders of Toronto Black organizations invited to see the exhibit. He noticed that some people were “so chilled” by the first section that they refused to see the rest of it. Several months later, Roach reflected that this reaction was due to “the presentation of African culture through the eyes of those who enslaved, colonized, and inflicted genocide on Africans. It has to do with the museum not telling the whole truth. It also has to do with the power of the ROM, one of the most respected shapers of minds and attitudes towards culture.” Roach concluded that the ROM should, as a “gesture of humility,” consult communities whenever it explored their cultural heritage.
Writer Susan Crean, a descendant of a soldier depicted in the exhibit, also felt uneasy. She was disturbed by the listings the indicated how the artifacts had passed from person to person before ending up at the ROM. “The names parade along like a nagging subtext, casting the artifacts as misappropriated byproducts of all that religious and military fervour,” she wrote in This magazine. “The lives of the white folks are featured, their stories personalized and connected to the larger stream of history while beside them, in photos and absentia, the Africans with whom they lived remain silent. And, with a couple of rare exceptions, nameless.”
By March 1990, a small group of protestors had started picketing outside the museum on Saturday afternoons to highlight their concerns about the exhibit’s depiction of Africans. Their signs read “Racist Ontario Museum” and “Into the Heart of Racism.” As Globe and Mail columnist Bronwyn Drainie observed, “what thoughtful white Canadians see as an ironic examination of our great-grandparents’ dubious and racist role in bringing Christianity, Commerce, and Civilization to the ‘dark continent,’ black Canadians see as a celebration of colonialism and an unambiguous demonstration of white superiority over native Africans and their cultures.”
“It’s like rubbing salt in a wound,” writer M. Nourbese Philip told Drainie. “I came out of that show physically dejected.”
Agenda segment, February 21, 2018: Reinventing museums
In an interview with Now, poet Ayanna Black, who had participated in the focus groups, said she believed that Cannizzo had good intentions but had underestimated the emotional impact. “Cannizzo wanted to humanize the museum and she failed. She wanted people to relive the experience but black people don’t want to go through that. The exhibition was developed from a white perspective for a white audience and it wasn’t developed from a black person’s point of view."
Two images were repeatedly singled out for their offensiveness. One was a photo taken in 1910 of a white female missionary providing “a lesson in how to wash clothes” to African women. While the curator may have intended the use of the image as a critique, others felt it reinforced stereotypes of helpless, ignorant natives who needed to be guided into modern civilization. The other was the cover of the September 6, 1879, edition of the Illustrated London News, which depicted British soldier Lord Beresford plunging a sword into a Zulu warrior.
Critics and visitors felt that the exhibits required more context and that criticisms levelled at imperialism and Christian evangelism were not sufficiently clear. One example that was frequently referred to: a video dramatization showing a missionary mocking African customs and applauding those who converted to Western clothing and religion. “I saw many people leaving through the video and they did not hear another woman come on at the end to say it was a fictional account of what a white missionary might have thought,” visitor Jean Langton-Smith told the Star. “For all they knew, it made it sound like it was just fine to ridicule this culture.”
Gradually, an association of activist groups formed under the banner of the Coalition for the Truth About Africa. The protests grew to reflect wider concerns among the city’s Black community, from a record number of police shootings of Black youth to racist comments from academic Philippe Rushton about Black people’s intelligence. They demanded that the exhibit be revised or closed immediately — the ROM refused to do either.
Following a May 5 incident during which two police officers were injured and two protestors were arrested, security was increased. The museum was granted an injunction barring protestors from coming within 50 feet of any entrance, then sued the coalition for $160,000 in damages due to lost revenue (money which, Young later claimed, they never intended to collect). On June 2, after police arrested protest leader Adisa Oji. Three officers were injured and eight protestors were arrested.
Museum works to repatriate artifacts looted from West Africa
Cannizzo offered her side of the story in June 5 Star opinion piece. She believed the exhibit “should help all Canadians understand the historical roots of racism.” She said that, because the collection itself was fragmentary and lacked chronological depth and geographical focus, it would not have been possible to provide an overview of the complexities of African history (which some felt the protestors were demanding) or an in-depth look at a particular culture.
The show, she added, was meant to depict the history of the ROM’s African collection and the nature of museums themselves. She defended the Zulu warrior images, saying that rather than promoting violence against Black people, it exposed “a rather brutal historical reality” and was clearly marked as an illustration from 1879. Exhibits that promoted critical thinking about the past, she suggested, were “vital to the health and future of a multicultural democracy.” In a piece for the academic journal Culture, Cannizzo wrote that she was concerned future self-censorship would lead museums to “become even less places of dialogue and critical discourse.”
The exhibit’s defenders felt that the show was being purposely misinterpreted and that criticisms of it were turning into a larger attack on academic freedom.
The coalition refused to speak to ROM officials until the exhibit was removed. Young, citing supportive letters and phone calls, said he believed the coalition did not represent the Black community and that the protests were increasingly aimed at other concerns. Coalition spokesperson Ras Rico countered that the group had to “articulate all of our concerns against racism” and that bad police behaviour was “directly connected with misrepresentations propagated in institutions like the Royal Ontario Museum.” The museum indicated it was unwilling to revise exhibit notes, and the coalition vowed to continue protesting after the exhibit had moved elsewhere.
After the show closed in Toronto in August 1990, officials at its next stop, the Canadian Museum of Civilization (now the Canadian Museum of History) demanded changes. They agreed with the criticisms about the lack of context and refused to include the clothes-washing photo and Illustrated London News cover.
In the end, though, the capital region never saw the exhibit: officials, citing the protests and the controversy, cancelled it in September 1990.
Acting ROM director John McNeill (Young, who had had two years left on his contract, resigned as the exhibit wound down) regretted the move, claiming the public had been denied the opportunity to view an “intellectually honest exhibition which is ground-breaking in its examination of the Canadian missionary and military experience in turn-of-the-century Africa." After consulting the community and realizing that raising corporate funding to mount the exhibit would be difficult, the Vancouver Museum (now the Museum of Vancouver)also cancelled it.
These decisions infuriated exhibit defenders such as Hume, who worried museums could end up tailoring their offerings to avoid controversy. When MacDonald noted that he had cancelled it because feedback indicated it did not tell the Black community’s story and would leave a bad impression on children, Hume asked a rhetorical question: “Does this mean that from now on all museum exhibitions will be aimed strictly at kids? Does it mean there's no room in our galleries and museums for subtlety or sophistication? The answers are not encouraging.”
Agenda segment, December 3, 2018: Museums — repatriation and ownership
In mid-October, Cannizzo took sick leave from teaching at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus due to harassment. Students interrupted her classes to accuse her of racism, screamed obscenities at her after class, and picketed and spray-painted her home. While the administration and faculty association supported her, members of student anti-racism groups felt that speaking out in class was appropriate.
In late November, both American museums scheduled to show the exhibit in 1992 cancelled it. Rico told the Globe and Mail that, while the coalition took no pleasure in the cancellations, it hoped this would “provide the ROM with a lesson and allow them to think twice before exploiting other cultures.”
The effects of the exhibit continued to reverberate. An advisory committee advising the ROM on a celebration of Caribbean culture planned for the summer of 1991 demanded an apology for Into theHeart of Africa. McNeill insisted it had done so in a March 1991 press release, when the museum had indicated it regretted causing offence. Talks between this committee and the museum were suspended for a month; the ROM issued a statement of regret that June.
While charges against most of the protesters arrested in the spring of 1990 were dropped, Adisa Oji and Devon Johnson went to trial in spring 1992. Johnson was acquitted of assault; Oji was sentenced to 90 days in prison on two counts of assault and one of escaping lawful custody during a previous protest. “The attitude of people was simply riotous and cannot be tolerated in this society,” Judge Michael Martin ruled. Oji wore a badge with the name of Rodney King, whose beating by police had triggered riots in Los Angeles that week. After the verdict had been announced, one person yelled out, “And you wonder why California’s burning!”
Some museum-studies textbooks later used Into the Heart of Africa as a case study for examining institutional cultural insensitivity. Subsequent generations of ROM officials found it, as African-programming curator Silvia Forni told the Star in 2014, “the elephant in the room.” For years, no major exhibitions there spotlighted Africa. Some of the objects resurfaced when the Shreyas and Mina Ajmera Gallery of Africa, the Americas, and Asia-Pacific opened in 2008; the emphasis was on the artifacts themselves rather than on those who’d collected them. During the 2010s, the museum presented Of Africa, a low-key curated series of events and exhibitions designed to promote African culture. A symposium was held for Into the Heart of Africa’s 25th anniversary at which there was a panel discussion.
The ROM’s Shreyas and Mina Gallery of Africa, the Americas, and Asia Pacific opened to the public on April 5, 2008. It was the first permanent home for more than 1,400 artifacts in over 30 years. (Peter Power/Globe and Mail/CP)
In November 2016, the museum held a reconciliation event at which it issued an official apology: “The exhibition displayed images and words that showed the fundamentally racist ideas and attitudes of early collectors and, in doing so, unintentionally reproduced the colonial, racist and Eurocentric premises through which these collections had been acquired. Thus, Into the HeartofAfrica perpetuated an atmosphere of racism and the effect of the exhibition itself was racist. The ROM expresses its deep regret for having contributed to anti-African racism. The ROM also officially apologizes for the suffering endured by members of the African-Canadian community as a result of Into the Heart of Africa.” Rico accepted the apology on the coalition’s behalf.
The failure of the exhibit wassummed up in a January 1991 Star opinion piece by M. Nourbese Philip: “So what went wrong? As long as institutions and individuals fail to understand how thoroughly racism permeates the very underpinnings of Western thought, then despite all the good will in the world, catastrophes like Into the Heart of Africa will continue to happen. Intentions, particularly the good ones, continue to pave the way to hell. And to Africa.”
Sources: Into The Heart of Africa by Jeanne Cannizzo (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1989); Voume 52 Number 1 of Anthropologica (2010); Volume 10 Number 2 of Culture (1990); the September 1993 edition of Curator; the November 17, 1989, March 24, 1990, May 12, 1990, May 16, 1990, June 20, 1990, September 21, 1990, October 17, 1990, November 29, 1990, and April 5, 1991, editions of the Globe and Mail; the March 29, 1990, edition of Now; the September 21, 1990, edition of the Ottawa Citizen; the February 1991 edition of This; the August 12, 1989, November 17, 1989, May 6, 1990, June 3, 1990, June 5, 1990, August 2, 1990, September 6, 1990, September 29, 1990, October 19, 1990, January 14, 1991, March 26, 1992, May 1, 1992, and October 23, 2014, editions of the Toronto Star; and the October 22, 1990, and January 17, 1991, editions of the Varsity.
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