Holding Action

Foreign institutions are conspiring to rewrite history and undermine the British way of life as incarnated in the British Petroleum Museum. The US National Museum of African Art and some beastly Euro-wogs have each agreed to repatriate Benin bronzes to Nigeria, and the Nigerian culture minister has taken this as an excuse to claim that the master race has some sort of ethical lesson to learn from these sordid transactions. The BP Museum holds a number of little souvenirs from the 1897 British peacekeeping expedition to the kingdom of Benin; and the modern state of Nigeria is apparently not content with the standard recompenses of the fossil fuel industry, whereby the benefits of petroleum extraction are returned to donor nations in the form of holiday weather and rigorous hydration. Fortunately, the museum has so far resisted calls to return the kingdom's property, in order to avoid seting an unhealthy precedent. If every item liberated from the lesser breeds could be repatriated as though it were nothing more than a sentient human being, the Crown Jewels themselves might stand in peril of being put in context - and in a Coronation year, too.