The liberal elites are hypocrites in demanding our museums stop displaying mummies

Telegraph

14-03-2025

Despite the clear and present danger of being cancelled, I have to fess up that I'd never heard of the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) for Afrikan reparations until they called for a ban on Egyptian mummies.
To be honest. I wish I hadn't because I was so konfused by that unexpected 'k' in Afrika, I felt obliged to dob myself in for unkonscious racism.
It makes me feel uncomfortable, but I'm not sure why. It's somewhere on the same spectrum as international BBC reporters who insist on pronouncing words like 'Taliban' or 'Tehran' in an authentic Arabic accent when I've never once heard Clive Myrie refer to the French capital as 'Pareee'.
So that's me guiltily triggered, even before I wholeheartedly disagree with the proposition that it should be illegal to display mummies in museums because it's 'unethical' and is disrespectful towards the 'wishes of the ancestors'.
Come again? Lord knows what'll happen when someone tips MP Diane Abbott the wink that Europeans started grinding up mummies and consuming them as 'mumia' medicine in the 12 th century, a practice that continued right up into the Victorian era.
Votive cat mummies were so plentiful that in 1890, an English company bought a job lot of 180,000 and sold them off as fertilizer. Oh and the Pre-Raphaelites were particular fans of a pigment known as Mummy Brown, made from pulverized mummies.
By comparison, showing mummies in a museum setting – at the British Museum it's very respectful and sombre – seems entirely innocuous. The much-heralded 21 st century Grand Egyptian Museum on the Giza Plateau, next door to the Pyramids, is chock-full of them, as was the Egyptian Museum in Cairo when I visited.
Does that mean exhibiting them is ethical or not? The likely explanation is that it's only unethical in Britain, where we are expected to hang our heads in shame about the way our remote ancestors dissed their even more remote ancestors.
But the Egyptian death and the afterlife room is always rammed with visitors. People love looking at these artefacts and, yes, bodies. It's fascinating in a very human way, and I've never noticed anyone ridiculing them.
If by some quirk of chance the APPG does get its way, what is the museum supposed to do with these human remains? It is prevented by law from repatriating cultural items unless they are deemed to be duplicates, damaged or no longer of public interest.
And as it's fair to say public interest is as high as ever, that one won't wash. Which begs the question: why is this parliamentary group banging on about removing mummies from public view when they have zero chance of succeeding?
My hunch is that it's all about changing the narrative as they say; essentially instilling us with so much generalised guilt about colonialism, slavery and the rest that we set up a direct debit for £200 billion and let Jeremy Corbyn (oh yes, he's involved) distribute it as he sees fit.
So, with apologies to Africa and indeed Afrika, we'll be keeping our mummies where we can see them and respectfully sharing them with the world; after all, it's what our ancestors wished for.