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‘Restoring’ museum collections to decolonial ends: constraints and opportunities for disrupting racialized marginalization in Southern Africa

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posted on 2025-02-04, 11:04 authored by JoAnn McGregorJoAnn McGregor, Scobie Lekhutile, Gase Kediseng
This article discusses the challenges and possibilities of transnational collaborations to ‘restore’ African historic collections to their places of origin. It uses the case of a C19th Botswana collection donated to Brighton Museum by the missionary Rev Willam Charles Willoughby. Taking forward debates over ‘decolonization’ in practice, it asks what critical insights emerge through such initiatives, particularly from the perspectives of African museums in places where collections originated. We discuss collaborative provenance research and a display in Khama III Memorial Museum based on the new historical understanding, curated by Lekhutile and Kediseng. ‘Restoration’ is defined here (following AFFORD 2020) as re-historicizing, re-contextualising and revaluing African historic collections as part of the material archive of places of origin to enable claims for return. Calls for repatriation of such collections can assume that in places of origin, people will automatically identify with historic objects. But in Botswana, the initial reaction to the ‘restored’ collection was surprise – is this really Batswana heritage? The objects were often seen, not as pertaining to Batswana, but to marginalized minorities labelled Basarwa/San. To explain this reaction – and the value of restoration to disrupt it - we discuss how essentialized notions of ethnic and temporal difference persist as an enduring transnational colonial legacy, perpetuated in museum discourses on ‘source communities’, in some strands of decolonial writing, as well as in Southern African public spheres and teaching on culture. Nineteenth century collections, in contrast, can materialize mobile, changing, hierarchical and differentiated, cosmopolitan, transnationally linked nineteenth century African politico-social orders such as that of Khama the Great’s capital, Old Palapye. The new understandings of ordinary life and cultural cross-fusion at Old Palapye materialized in the re-historicized collection showed the political value of ‘restoring’ digitized object images, as they could evidence inclusive place-based public histories to challenge racialized marginalization. At the same time, the collaboration revealed the restrictive institutional realities of African community museums, frustrated from taking forward their own dreams for decolonizing.

Funding

Making African Connections: Decolonial Futures for Colonial Collections : AHRC-ARTS & HUMANITIES RESEARCH COUNCIL | AH/S001271/1

UKRI C19 Extension Fund (Title: Making African Connections from Sussex and Kent Museums: Decolonial Futures for Colonial Collections) : UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX | This award is p

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Published version

Journal

Third Text

ISSN

0952-8822

Publisher

Routledge

Department affiliated with

  • Geography Publications

Institution

University of Sussex

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes