2023届高考英语报刊阅读能力提升学案(5.17)

第一篇 In February, fine red dust borne by winds from the far-off Sahara coats everything in Foumban, a town of about 100,000 in Cameroon. In a month the spring rains will start, but for now every day feels the same—hazy sun, dry heat, and on the main road through town, a cacophony of honking horns and buzzing motorcycles. For a few decades this part of Africa was a colony of Germany, whose brief but brutal rule lasted from 1884 until 1916. Like other colonial powers, Germany established ethnological collections to conserve, study, and display cultural artifacts from its new colonies. Though collecting is an impulse with deep roots in human history, museums as we know them are mostly a 19th-century invention, designed to share the fruits of European exploration and conquest. Colonialism turned collecting into something of a mania. Just as colonial powers didn’t send explorers to map new corners of the globe for pure love of knowledge, objects didn’t simply fall into museums. Anthropologists, missionaries, merchants, and military officers worked with museums to bring wonders and wealth back to Europe. Curators even sent wish lists along with armed colonial expeditions. In 1907, German officials gave a message to Sultan Ibrahim Njoya, ruler of Cameroon’s Bamum people. Perhaps, they suggested, a gift to Kaiser Wilhelm II for his upcoming 50th birthday would be a welcome gesture—specifically a precise replica of Njoya’s remarkable, elaborately beaded throne. An inheritance from the king’s father, the throne was known as the Mandu Yenu, after the pair of protective figures that adorned its back. Njoya had turned down many German offers to buy or trade for the throne, but in this case he agreed. If he wrote down why, those records are lost. Maybe it was a gesture of gratitude to thank colonial officials for sending troops to help him fight and defeat his neighbors. Or maybe Njoya was worried what would happen to his kingdom if he refused. One thing is certain: He asked his