Encountering the natural world with uncertainty during Black History Month

Charlotte Wood reflects on how museum displays of nature often reinforce colonial narratives and hierarchies, urging us to embrace uncertainty and question what voices are marginalized, especially during Black History Month, as a way to challenge fixed ideas about both nature and history.

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Representing the natural world is perhaps one of the most ambitious narratives a museum can tell. With grand natural histories the question of what voices are omitted or marginalised is even more urgent. Thinking about nature during Black History Month, for me, is about eschewing the certainty provided by totalising narratives in favour of open-ended uncertainty.

I had the opportunity to reflect on open-ended natural histories when researching the history of Tanzanian collections at the Natural History Museum in London. Museums like national parks reflect nature as something static and apart from everyday life. Attempts at universal visions of nature separate themselves from their historical particularity. Though as ‘specimens’ they appear ‘out of time’, the vast collections of horned elands, giraffe necks and wall-mounted buffalo are nothing if not deeply historically rooted.

In Tanzania, game reserves were first established to sustain a crop of elephants for ivory exports. Later, reserves raised revenue by making the ability to cross conservation borders a privilege of paying hunters and tourists. Hunting with ‘advanced’ technology like rifles, sights and cameras (game ‘shooting’ preceded wildlife photography as the preeminent national park activity) was considered part of the scientific improvement of nature and so conversely also part of wildlife conservation. The colonial government saw pastoralists and subsistence hunters as comparatively ‘less developed’ and constructed the punitive category of ‘poacher’ to make less profitable forms of land use a criminal transgression. Collections of this time justified empire by reinforcing such hierarchies of civilisation, notions of inevitable progress and human domination over the natural world.

The collections I saw on display seemed to me slices of nature flattened into unsatisfying simulacra. They were more illustrations of preconceived ideas than tangible objects of encounter. A nineteenth-century ivory tusk for instance takes its place in a wider developmental narrative of proboscidean evolution (elephant-esque animals). The story of who hunted this elephant, how its remains were transported from Tanganyika to the island of Zanzibar and then traded hands through Europe and America before eventually reaching the museum nearly half a century later is not part of the narrative. The idea of replacing historical specimens in galleries with plastic models or text however seems equally unsatisfying. The most memorable museum interventions are those that bring nature and culture together in ways that highlight ambivalences and uncertainty.

One lion in the museum literally embodies uncertainty. The specimen itself was collected by an infamous British big game hunter and its features reflect the tastes of the time. Taxidermy emphasises life-like musculature and male characteristics like a full mane to point towards the strength of the hunter. The presence of real animal skin, hair and claws is further evidence of the successful hunter’s conquest. This specimen is interestingly also clearly aged. The agedness of the lion, allowing it to straddle the boundaries between specimen and artefact, makes it one of my favourites.

It is now pale yellow-white, clumpy-maned and saggy-skinned. A nearby label explains that the museum reuses ‘faded specimens’ to avoid sacrificing another animal for display. The acknowledgement that this is not a universal abstraction of the species Panthera leo but something deeply entangled with the particularities of history unsettles the authority of the hunter’s idea of nature. It makes us question the ideas and objects we inherit, whose views have been naturalised and what stories have been omitted. In this tangible encounter the lion’s faded skin and bones do really ‘matter’. Being able to observe the ageing of old ideas in the museum gallery lifts us out of the stasis of grand narratives and into the reality in which everything is inevitably subject to change – and shows us that certainty in change is also for the better.

Nature like the past can never be completely captured. Because the world is constantly refreshed and renewed it is elusive and a bit mysterious. Black History Month also periodically invites us to unsettle established narratives. It is an opportunity to look at our everyday landscapes with humility and question those things we consider ‘natural’. If we untether ourselves from fixed ideas of nature and the past, we begin to see the hidden histories at the margins of our present narratives. While sitting with uncertainty about the natural order of things can and should be uncomfortable, it also provides one certain hope: if nothing is written in stone, then the future is open.