Race is the counter-argument. Race is at its heart the belief that we are born different, deep inside our bodies, perhaps even in character and intellect, as well as in outward appearance. It’s the notion that groups of people have certain innate qualities that are not only visible at the surface of their skins, but are intrinsic to their physical and mental capacities, that perhaps even help define the passage of progress, the success and failure of the nations our ancestors came from.
Notions of superiority and inferiority impact us in deep ways. I was told of an elderly man in Bangalore, south India, who ate his chapatis with a knife and fork because this was how the British ate. When my great-grandfather fought in the First World War for the British Empire and when my grandfather fought in the Second World War, their contributions were forgotten, like those of countless other Indian soldiers. They were considered not strictly equal to their white British counterparts. This is how it was. Generations of people in the twentieth century lived under colonial rule, apartheid and segregation, suffered violent racism and discrimination, because this is how it was. When boys from my school threw rocks at my sister and me when we were little, telling us to go home, this is how it was. I knew even as I bled that this is how it was. This is how it still is for many.
Race, shaped by power, has acquired a power of its own. We have so absorbed our classifications – the trend begun by scientists like Blumenbach – that we happily classify ourselves. Many of those who visit the British Museum for the first time (I can tell you this from having spent hours watching them) come searching for their own place in these galleries. The Chinese tourists go straight to the Tang dynasty artefacts; the Greeks to the Parthenon marbles. The first time I came here, I made a beeline for the Indian galleries. My parents were born in India, as were their parents, and theirs before them, so this is where I imagined I would find the objects most relevant to my personal history. So many visitors have that same desire to know who their ancestors were, to know what their people achieved. We want to see ourselves in the past, forgetting that everything in the museum belongs to us all as human beings. We are each products of it all.
But, of course, that’s not the lesson we take, because that’s not what the museum was designed to tell us. Trapped inside glass cabinets, fixed to the floors, why are these objects in these rooms, and not where they were first made? Why do they live inside this museum in London, its neo-classical columns stretching into the wet, grey sky? Why are the bones of Africans here, and not where they were buried, in the magnificent tombs that were created for them, where they were supposed to live out eternity?
Because this is how power works. It takes, it claims and it keeps. It makes you believe that this is where they belong. It’s designed to put you in your place.
The global power balance, as it played out in the eighteenth century, meant that treasures from all over the world could and would only end up in a museum like this, because Britain was one of the strongest nations at the time. It and other European powers were the latest colonisers, the most recent winners. So they gave themselves the right to take things. They gave themselves the right to document history their way, to define the scientific facts about humankind. European thinkers told us that their cultures were better, that they were the proprietors of thought and reason, and they married this with the notion that they belonged to a superior race. These became our realities.
The truth is something else.
Are we one human species, or aren’t we?
FLANKING A ROAD dotted with the corpses of unlucky kangaroos, three hundred kilometres inland from the Western Australian city of Perth – and the other end of the world from where I call home – is what feels like a wilderness. Everything is alien to my eyes. Birds I’ve never seen before make sounds I’ve never heard. The dead branches of silvery trees, skeleton fingers, extend out of crumbly red soil. Gigantic rocks weathered over billions of years into soft pastel blobs resemble mossy spaceships. I imagine I’ve been transported to a galaxy beyond time, one in which humans have no place.
Except that inside a dark shelter beneath one undulating boulder are handprints.
Mulka’s Cave is one of lots of ancient rock art sites dotted across Australia, but unique in this particular region for being so densely packed with images. I have to crouch to enter, navigating the darkness. One hand is all I see at first, stencilled within a spray of red ochre illuminated on the granite by a diffuse shaft of light. My eyes adjust, more hands appear. Infant hands and adult hands, hands on top of hands, hands all over the ceiling, hundreds of them in reds, yellows, oranges and whites. Becoming clearer in the half-light, it’s as though they’re pushing through the walls, willing for a high-five. There are parallel lines, too, maybe the vague outline of a dingo.
The images are hard to date. Some may be thousands of years old, others very recent. What is known is that the creation of rock art on this continent goes back to what in cultural terms feels like the dawn of time. Following excavation at the Madjedbebe rock shelter in Arnhem Land in northern Australia in 2017, it was conservatively estimated that modern humans had been present here for around 60,000 years – far longer than members of our species have lived in Europe, and long enough for people here to have witnessed an ice age, as well as the extinction of the giant mammals. And they may have been making art at the outset. At the Madjedbebe site, I’m told by one archaeologist who worked there, researchers found ochre ‘crayons’ worked down to a nub. At Lake Mungo in New South Wales, a site 42,000 years old, there is evidence of ceremonial burial, bodies sprinkled with ochre pigment that must have been transported there over hundreds of kilometres.
‘Something like a handprint is likely to have many different meanings in different societies and even within a society,’ says Benjamin Smith, a British-born rock art expert based at the University of Western Australia. It may be to signify place, possibly to assert that someone was here. But meaning is not always simple. The more experts like him have tried to decipher ancient art, wherever it is in the world, the more they’ve found themselves only scratching at the surface of systems of thought so deep that Western philosophical traditions can’t contain them. In Australia, a rock isn’t just a rock. The relationship that indigenous communities have with the land, even with inanimate natural objects, is practically boundless, everyone and everything intertwined.
What looks to me to be an alien wilderness isn’t wild at all. It’s a home that is more lived in than any I can imagine. Countless generations have absorbed and built upon knowledge of food sources and navigation. They have shaped the landscape sustainably over millennia, built a spiritual relationship with it, with its unique flora and fauna. As I learn slowly, in Aboriginal Australian thinking, the individual seems to melt away in the world around them. Time, space and object take on different dimensions. And none except those who have grown up immersed in this culture and place can quite understand it. I know that I could spend the rest of my life trying to fathom this and get no further than I am now, standing lonely in this cave.
We can’t inhabit minds that aren’t our own.
I was a teenager before I discovered that my mother might not actually know her own birth date. We were celebrating her birthday on the same day in October we always did when she told us in passing that her sisters thought she had actually been born in the summer. Pinning down dates hadn’t been routine when she was growing up in India. It surprised me that she didn’t care, and my surprise made her laugh. What mattered to her instead