Germany to return Portuguese Stone Cross to
Namibia
Published
17 May 2019
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48309694
The Stone
Cross was placed by the Portuguese in 1486 and features the country's crest
The German
Historical Museum has announced it will return a 15th century monument to Namibia
after it was taken during the colonial era.
The Stone
Cross is a Portuguese navigation landmark placed on the southwest African
coastline in 1486.
But when
the area was under German colonial control in the 1890s, the cross was taken
and moved to Europe.
Namibia
asked for its return in 2017 and on Friday, the Berlin museum formally agreed
to the request.
Germany has
pledged to return artefacts and human remains to its former colonies.
At a
ceremony, German Culture Minister Monika Grütters said it was a "clear
signal that we are committed to coming to terms with our colonial past".
Namibia's
ambassador to Germany, Andreas Guibeb, called it "important as a step for
us to reconcile with our colonial past and the trail of humiliation and
systematic injustice that it left behind".
A museum
press release said the cross would be returned in August.
Portuguese
explorer Diogo Cão first placed the 3.5m (11ft) stone cross - featuring the
country's coat of arms - on Africa's southwest coast during one of his
expeditions.
It became
so well known it featured on old maps of the area.
But a
German naval commander took the cross in 1893, during the country's control of
what became Namibia between 1884 and 1915.
The German
Historical Museum foundation's president, Raphael Gross, wrote in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the cross represented "the slow beginning
of colonial rule in present-day Namibia".
A number of
African nations have in recent years called on European museums to return
artefacts taken away during the period of colonial control.
‘Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global
Empire,’ by Roger Crowley
By Ian
Morris
Jan. 15,
2016
Afonso de
Albuquerque died 500 years ago, after spending a dozen years terrorizing
coastal cities from Yemen to Malaysia. He enriched thousands of men and killed
tens of thousands more. Despite never commanding more than a few dozen ships,
he built one of the first modern intercontinental empires. And this was just
the beginning: The next step, he said, was to sail up the Red Sea, destroy
Mecca, Medina and the Prophet Muhammad’s body and liberate the Holy Land.
Perhaps, he mused, he could destroy Islam altogether.
The 18
years between December 1497, when Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope,
and December 1515, when Albuquerque died off the Indian coast, were a pivotal
point in history, and in “Conquerors” Roger Crowley tells the story with style.
It is a classic ripping yarn, packed with excitement, violence and
cliffhangers. Its larger-than-life characters are at once extraordinary and
repulsive, at one moment imagining the world in entirely new ways and at the
next braying with delight over massacring entire cities.
Crowley’s
craftsmanship comes through most clearly in telling this story of relentless,
one-sided slaughter without glutting the reader with gore. At Mombasa in 1505 the
Portuguese killed 700 Muslims with a loss of five of their own men. At Dabul on
the last day of 1508 “no living thing was left alive.” At Goa in 1510
Albuquerque killed so many people that the city’s infamous crocodiles could not
eat them all. And on the conquerors went, year after bloody year; but Crowley,
the author of “1453” and other works of history, handles this grim tale with
aplomb, keeping a fast-moving narrative in the foreground while nodding just
often enough toward bigger questions in the background.
The biggest
of these is surely how a handful of Europeans managed, for good and ill, to do
so much. Crowley does not give us an explicit answer, but he provides more than
enough information for readers to make up their own minds. Some historians have
suggested that Albuquerque owed his success more to divisions within India than
to any European advantages, but Crowley makes it clear that infighting among
the Portuguese was even worse. The king’s court in Lisbon was a snake pit, and
Albuquerque’s captains repeatedly refused to serve under him; in 1514 an
attempt was made to poison him.
The theory
that Christian civilization was simply superior to Muslim and Hindu cultures
seems equally unconvincing. As Crowley describes it, Lisbon was less a model of
Renaissance reason than a precursor of the Wild West, and most Portuguese were
so ignorant about India that it took them years to work out that Hinduism was a
religion in its own right, not a provincial version of Christianity. When the
Europeans did finally grasp this, many also concluded — as one Italian merchant
put it — that India’s cultures “are superior to us in infinite ways, except
when it comes to fighting.”
Fighting —
or more precisely ships, guns and ferocity — does seem to be what it came down
to. Portuguese sailors learned to build ships that could plunge into the
uncharted Atlantic in search of winds to carry them around Africa’s southern
tip, all the while dying in droves from dysentery, scurvy and thirst. But
getting to India was merely a sufficient condition; without devastating guns,
the Europeans would have accomplished little.
Ships and
guns gave Europeans command of the seas, but even when Indians bought or copied
European weapons and hired European advisers — as they did by 1510 — they still
could not compete with what Crowley calls the Portuguese “berserker fighting
style.” From the humblest foot soldier up to Albuquerque himself, the Europeans
were simply ferocious, throwing themselves at their enemies with reckless
courage. Sometimes indiscipline brought on disaster, but often Africans,
Indians, Arabs and Turks turned and fled.
Portugal’s
leaders were deeply flawed, but they had strategic vision. By 1505 King Manuel
understood that a few Europeans could control the Indian Ocean’s spice trade by
seizing choke points at Aden, Ormuz and Malacca, and in 1510 Albuquerque saw
that Goa could anchor the whole enterprise (“If you lost the whole of India you
could reconquer it from there,” he told Manuel).
Manuel and
Albuquerque came close to pulling off the biggest strategic coup in history,
converting Portugal from the most backward fringe of western Eurasia to the
center of a global empire. It is only when we ask why they failed that
Crowley’s story perhaps fails too. But maybe that will be the subject for
Crowley’s next book; and if it is as good as this one, it will be worth waiting
for.
CONQUERORS
How
Portugal Forged the First Global Empire
By Roger Crowley
Illustrated.
368 pp. Random House. $30.
Ian Morris’s latest book is “Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Val
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