British Museum unveils major Sudan exhibit; scraps admission charge
By JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press Writer
LONDON, Aug 12, 2004 (AP) — The British Museum is scrapping the admission charge for a major exhibition of Sudanese artifacts to encourage people to help finance humanitarian efforts in the troubled African country.
Special exhibitions at the museum normally charge an admission fee of about $9 US, but museum director Neil MacGregor said Thursday that visitors to the show would instead be asked to donate to the charities Oxfam and Save the Children.
MacGregor said Sudan: Ancient Treasures had been planned for several years, but the recent conflict and famine in Sudan’s western Darfur region had made it ”more important than ever to think about the past of Sudan and what the implications of that past are for the future.”
It initially was planned to mark the centennial of Sudan’s first archeological exhibition and an anticipated peace treaty to end the country’s 21-year civil war. Negotiations on a permanent ceasefire made significant progress but ended last month without a final agreement.
The exhibition features hundreds of items loaned from the Sudan National Museum in Khartoum, ranging from a 200,000-year-old stone axe to delicate painted pottery and 18th-century swords.
Over the next few months the British Museum will also hold a series of talks about Sudan and will highlight Sudanese items from its permanent collection, including hand-woven baskets from the nomadic people of Darfur and quilted armour for cavalry and their horses.
The British Museum has the one of the largest collections of Sudanese artifacts outside Sudan, which Britain ruled for decades until independence in 1956.
MacGregor said that together the collections explored Sudan’s location at the crossroads of cultures from the Middle East, the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa.
The museum also will highlight the work it is doing, alongside archeologists from Sudan and other countries, to excavate sites in the Nile Valley that will be flooded in 2008 to make a reservoir for the Merowe Dam hydroelectric project.
Sudan’s archeological heritage has long been overshadowed by that of its neighbour, Egypt, which it once conquered. It also humiliated the Roman empire; among the artifacts in the museum’s collection is a bronze head of a Roman emperor, stolen and buried by Sudanese tribesmen after a raid.
More recently, Sudan has been in the news for its long civil war and for famine and fighting in Darfur, where an 18-month-old conflict involving government forces, their allied Janjaweed militias and two rebel groups has killed as many as 30,000 people and forced a million to flee their homes.
”Very few of us can understand what is actually going on on the ground,” MacGregor said. ”What is important is to understand there is a Sudan beyond the current crisis.”
The museum said it hoped to tour the exhibition to Europe and the United States after its London run Sept. 9 to Jan. 9.