Of the many eccentric and centenary rituals who have maintained or maintain the different faculties and schools of the University of Oxford, few exceed that of drinking wine in a glass made with the skull of a slave. For decades, the professors and professors of the Worcester College used for their most formal dinners that container, exquisitely sawn, polished, decorated on the edge with a silver edge and with a stem and base to give it a cup shape. When he began to filter the wine, due to the deterioration of their continuous use, they used the macabre container to put chocolates.
Professor Dan Hicks tells him in his book Every Monument Will Fall (All monuments will fall), A detailed complaint of all the benefits and privileges, derived from the colonial plundering of the British empire, of which the most famous university city in the world has enjoyed centuries. The newspaper The Guardian It has been the first to point out the finding. Hicks teaches archeology in Worcester College and is the commissioner of the Pitt Rivers Museum, of the center. It was the faculty itself that commissioned the academic to investigate the origins of a skull that is now already a good collection and hidden in the eyes of the public, out of respect for its alleged owner.
“Throughout the twentieth century, the Cup was sometimes exposed next to the silver dishes of the faculty, and even used as a table dishes. There is no record of how many times this happened, but it was drastically restricted as of 2011. 10 years ago, the Cup was definitively removed from that collection,” said Worcester College in a statement.
Exposed past, hidden
It is difficult for any pedestria to travel the High Street, in the Oxford center, pay attention to the small statue that crowns the entrance of the Oriol College. This is Cecil Rhodes, a businessman and politician from South Africa who represented in his person all racism, colonialism and white supremacism of an era. Rodesia (Rhodesiain English), the British state created within that country, bears its name.
Despite the campaign in favor of the withdrawal of the statue, the university alleged financial and logistics reasons to keep it on the facade. In return, they installed on one side of the entrance a small poster where it was explained, in rather generous terms, the detailed controversy around the historical character.
The problem, as Hicks points out in his book, is that the statues are just the most visible and less offensive part of a past that accumulates remains and gestures of human denigration.
It has not been possible to precisely detail the identity of the person whose skull was used in the libations of academics, but the carbon-14 test points to an age of 225. And because of the size and other circumstantial evidence, the professor suggests that human remains come from the then British Caribbean, and most likely were those of a slave woman.
What is known with certainty is who and when he donated Worcester College the Cup. It was George Pitt Rivers, an alumnus, in 1946. His name is registered in the silver trim. He was an defender of the separation of races and medical and political intervention to preserve genetic purity, to which the British government kept arrested during World War II for his support for Oswald Mosley’s fascist party.
The Cup had previously belonged to his grandfather, the archaeologist and soldier of the Victorian era, Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers, which founded in 1884 the museum that Professor Hicks directs today.
“It is sick that Oxford professors, from their privilege position, in an institution enriched over the centuries for a process of colonial violence and plundering, they would dedicate themselves to drinking from a human skull that could have belonged to a slave person, so little valued as to turn their remains into that object,” said Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the president of the Interparliamentary Commission of the Interparliamentary Commission. Repairs in Africa.
The decision to stop using the Cup had more to do with a slow process of discomfort and restlessness on the part of some members of the academic community, who requested their withdrawal, than with a definitive recognition of their error by Worcester College. Only in the end, the institution began a certain path of redemption, when commissioning Hicks to investigate the origins of the skull, while definitely withdrawing it from any public exhibition. “In a respectful way, access (to the skull) is today completely vetoed. As Professor Hicks recognizes in his book, the Faculty has addressed this issue in an ethical and reflective way,” said a spokesman for Worcester College.
“The dehumanization and destruction of the identity of the victims was also part of the colonial violence, Hicks writes, which denounces in his book all the remains of human beings, or all the fruits of his work, that the spirit of an era decided to erase.