Museums must do more to acknowledge Britain’s colonial past

The Life Between Islands exhibition at Tate Britain, London, which is curated by David Bailey, Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA

Hurrah for Tate Britain’s David Bailey (Curator of Tate Caribbean-British exhibition says UK museums must face up to past, 29 November). I recently went to the new Humboldt Forum in Berlin, where exhibits are presented as part of the environment in which they were collected.

Its Matter(s) of Perspectives exhibition uses school textbooks, sculptures and interviews to examine how German colonisers and the people of Cameroon, Namibia and Oceania saw each other.

Of the German colonisation of Cameroon, the museum says: “The outcome of German colonisation remained disastrous … The objects on display evince the societies and colonial history of Cameroon. The legacy of colonial rule affects Cameroon to this day.”

Let’s hope that the Tate exhibition will encourage other UK institutions to acknowledge how our colonisation and slavery has affected their collections.
Wendy Barnaby
Hurstpierpoint, West Sussex

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