Third Text
Issues
Volume 38, 2024
Issue 4–5
Number 189–190, September–November 2024, Special Issue: 'Decolonial Futures for African Collections: Making Connections and the Quest for Repair', guest edited by JoAnn McGregor, Napandulwe Shiweda and Nicola Stylianou
Decolonial Futures for African Collections: Making Connections and the Quest for Repair - An Introduction 389–403
JoAnn McGregor and Napandulwe Shiweda and Nicola Stylianou
Developing Digital Research Methodologies for Kenyan Collections Held in UK Museums 404–422
JC Niala and Juma Ondeng’
This article explores digital research methodologies for Kenyan collections in UK museums, emphasising decolonial practices and community collaboration. The ‘Rethinking Relationships and Building Trust around African Collections’ project engaged Kenyan and Nigerian communities in provenance research, adapting to pandemic constraints by pivoting to digital methods. Using platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook, the project facilitated remote engagement, enabling community researchers to explore and document their material cultural heritage. Key outcomes include a collaboratively developed toolkit for navigating museums and museum databases, enhanced metadata for collections, and diverse research outputs, including essays, documentaries and artworks. The project underscored the importance of epistemic justice by valuing community knowledge systems and highlighted challenges such as technological barriers and the need for equitable partnerships. This article contributes to the limited literature on collaborative projects between African heritage scholars in the diaspora and those on the continent, advocating for continued exploration of digital methodologies to address the legacies of colonialism in museum practices.
More Process, Less Product: The Making of the Making African Connections Digital Archive 423–436
James William Baker
Reflecting in 2014 on the transformative impact of digitisation on access to and the study of African collections, Terry Barringer and Marion Wallace argued that whilst there had been positive change, in some respects African collections were just as – if not more – hidden than ever. It is in this context that the Making African Connections project sought to make a digital archive whose ends were to investigate – and make investigable – our process of making a digital archive, what we did in the making rather than the outputs of that making. This article explores key aspects of that work – forgoing detail, foregrounding multivocality, collapsing hierarchies, digitising with care – and documents what we found as principles became actions, as product succumbed to process, as tensions and conflicts arose in the making of a ‘decolonial’ digital archive.
The Possibilities and Limitations of ‘Returned’ Digital Images: Insights from Textile Art Creation at the University of Namibia 437–451
Maria A N Caley
Access to the Making African Connections’ (MAC) Digital Archive created possibilities for art students at the University of Namibia (UNAM) to engage with historic African museum collections held in UK museums. This article highlights both the possibilities and limitations of using digital archives in art practices. The limitations concern the textual and haptic qualities of objects that are lost in digital images, yet these are crucial in textile art when creating meaning and sensibility. To discuss the possibilities, the article draws on students’ use of MAC digitised object images to create textile art in the light of debates over decolonial approaches to colonial archives, and Namibian artists’ creative approach to working with colonial photographs. Students consulted the archive while working on a textile project entitled ‘The Return’, which aimed to foster new textile artworks inspired by cultural objects accessible via the MAC archive. The article discusses students’ use of the MAC digital archive and the textile art they created, drawing on interviews with the students, their reflections on design, their art and the original objects themselves. Engaging digital archives in art practice presents a unique way of confronting the colonial past through enabling artistic ‘voices’ and furthering restitution and decolonising dialogues, by including ‘descendent communities’ in processes of reclaiming heritage histories.
Repositories of Sound: ‘Pre-history’, Performance and Pan-Africanism at London’s Limpopo Club 452–470
Etienne Joseph
It has been suggested that a decolonised African archive must be living in nature − accommodating performances, philosophies, sounds and orality within its conceptual frame. This article explores this idea, activating oral sources encountered through research of the Limpopo Club, an African musical space at London’s Africa Centre – an Africa-focused organisation active in the UK since the 1960s. The Limpopo Club, was an African-led oasis of Pan-African musical performance in the heart of London, founded by Walton ‘Wala’ Dangarembizi and Kwesi Asare − themselves a Pan-African partnership hailing from Zimbabwe and Ghana respectively. Beyond sharing memories (and the ‘pre-history’) of this seminal club, this article also underlines the importance of the consideration of orality, embodied memory and affect as integral to a (re)emergent Pan-African archival methodology.
The Tomb of the Sudanese Mahdī: Desecration, Dispersal and Rediscovery 471–494
Fergus Nicoll and Osman Nusairi
Following the premature death of Muḥammad Aḥmad al-Mahdī in Sudan on 22 June 1885, less than four months after his capture of the Ottoman-Egyptian colonial capital at Khartoum, a domed tomb was constructed over his burial place. The imposing and innovative structure featured a tall central dome, four slender corner towers and three arched doorways let into each of the building’s four sides. Inside, a simple tomb of painted wooden panels was surrounded by iron railings. Over the following fourteen years, the shrine in Omdurman became the emblem of a new nation: a rallying point to which the Mahdī’s successor called his followers. So the tomb was a priority target when British invasion forces reached the town by land and river in early September 1898. Severe damage was inflicted by Kitchener’s small flotilla of Nile gunboats. In the aftermath of the British victory, parts of the ruined tomb were stripped off by victorious British soldiers and taken back to Britain as personal souvenirs or regimental trophies. Several museums and private collections in the UK still hold artefacts from the Mahdī’s tomb. The structure itself remained in ruins for more than sixty years and it was not until 1947 that the Mahdī’s son achieved its restoration. The tomb is today an important focus for the large community of followers who remain loyal to the Mahdī’s political and spiritual dynasty. As well as being one of Africa’s most powerful symbols of colonial desecration and dispossession, the rebuilt tomb and the now scattered fragments of its original structure tell a powerful story of religious faith, community cohesion and anticolonial struggle that still resonates strongly.
‘Restoring’ Museum Collections to Decolonial Ends: Constraints and Opportunities for Disrupting Racialised Marginalisation in Southern Africa 495–518
JoAnn McGregor, Scobie Lekhutile and 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 nineteenth-century Botswana collection donated to Brighton Museum by the missionary Rev Willam Charles Willoughby. Taking forward debates over ‘decolonisation’ 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 the Khama III Memorial Museum based on the new historical understanding, curated by Lekhutile and Kediseng. ‘Restoration’ is defined here (following AFFORD [African Foundation For Development], 2020) as rehistoricising, recontextualising 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 marginalised minorities labelled Basarwa/San. To explain this reaction – and the value of restoration to disrupt it − we discuss how essentialised 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 materialise 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 materialised in the rehistoricised collection showed the political value of ‘restoring’ digitised object images, as they could evidence inclusive place-based public histories to challenge racialised marginalisation. At the same time, the collaboration revealed the restrictive institutional realities of African community museums, frustrated from taking forward their own dreams for decolonising.
Agency and Erasure: Alternative Interpretive voices in the Powell-Cotton Museum 519–541
Nicola Stylianou and Napandulwe Shiweda
In March 2020, Tchiliwandele, a soba [headman] from Huambo province in Angola was the subject of a temporary display at the Powell-Cotton Museum in Kent, England. The display explored Tchiliwandele's role in helping create the Museum's extraordinary collection of artefacts from 1930s southwestern Angola and northern Namibia. His name is also associated with objects currently held in the British Museum, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, the Marischal Museum in Aberdeen (now closed), and elsewhere. Tchiliwandele is one of many such figures whose roles in museum collecting are usually erased. He was one of the many African middlemen, hosts, assistants and makers whom Diana and Antoinette Powell-Cotton relied on to help collect around five thousand objects and document what they understood to be a vanishing way of life in the Angola/Namibia borderlands. Half of the collection remains at the Powell-Cotton Museum, which bears their family name and was founded by their father; the other half of the objects were donated or sold to other prominent ethnographic museums across the UK and Europe.
Apathy Meets Activism: How African Diasporic Campaigners Challenged the Terms of the ‘Repatriation Debate’ 542–556
Helen Mears
After many years of campaigning by countries of origin and by diasporic activists, 2023 appeared to mark a watershed moment in museum responses to claims for the return of cultural property. As increasing numbers of returns are agreed, this article highlights the important work of an earlier campaigner: Bernie Grant MP and the organisation he founded, the African Reparations Movement, as well as its impact on a contemporary organisation, AFFORD. In discussing the activities of these agents, I argue that while these brought greater visibility and a sense of urgency to the repatriation debate, recent attitudinal shifts within the sector continue to fall a long way short of the systemic change sought. Indeed, in contrast to the radically transformative work sought by activists like Grant, in which repatriation forms one part of a wider process of reparative justice, the repatriation debate as it is being deployed by UK museums and ministers continues to perpetuate a myopic focus on the technical, legalistic elements of the return of cultural property.
THIRD TEXT is published in print and online by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group