[This article is based on a report by Eva Namusoke, the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Senior Curator of the African Collections Futures project, and has been shared by the author with the Round Table.]

The African Collections Futures report was launched at Cambridge in December 2024. The launch event drew colleagues from across the University museums, Botanic Garden and libraries, as well as academics, students, and members of the public who came together in much the same way that the report itself draws from a range of disciplines and collections. Dr Neal Spencer introduced the Collections Connections Communities (CCC) Strategic Research Initiative under which African Collections Futures sits. CCC is a research initiative that is using collections to address the pressing social challenges we face today. I introduced the report, summarising its structure around four major categories (covered in an earlier blog), and exploring the key findings, including unpacking the estimated total figure of 350,000 artefacts from Africa at Cambridge, and the countries that featured most prominently in the collections. I also offered some reflections on my experience working with difficult language, stories of physical, sexual, and epistemological violence throughout this research, an unavoidable feature of collections that were largely assembled during the period of British colonisation.

Dr Njabulo Chipangura, then at Manchester Museum, provided a response to the report and discussed his own work with African ethnographic collections. His job title – ‘Curator of Living Cultures,’ includes the term used for the ethnographic collections from Africa, Australia and Asia at Manchester Museum and is an acknowledgement that these artefacts take on meaning when people engage with them today. Njabulo talked about his development of a decolonial care for collections, a methodology built on sustained relationships with diaspora and originating communities, and one that challenged exclusions and othering in ethnographic museums. Care for people and artefacts is at the heart of this methodology. Pro-Vice-Chancellor (University Community and Engagement) Kamal Munir concluded with remarks on what this report means for the University, including an overview of the current opportunities for African scholars to come to Cambridge as students or researchers. Questions from the audience touched on approaches to repatriation and restitution, the challenges of working with African collections, and ways of improving access to the collections for African scholars. In all, the event was a welcome opportunity to reconnect with the many members of collections staff across Cambridge that had opened up archives, searched dense catalogues, and shared hard-to-find information that made a report of this kind possible.

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Dissemination and accessibility to the report were key topics discussed from the very beginning of the project, and specifically how to make the report accessible to African audiences across the continent and in the diaspora. As a result, the report is available in three digital formats, all found on our website and free to download and share. The first is the full report, which includes the most detailed exploration of the collections across the four categories, an exploration of the University’s history of repatriation and restitution, and a chapter on the human/ancestral remains at the University. The second is an HTML version of the full report for use with screen readers. Third is a summary report which is around a third of the content of the full report, with graphic design by Emma Hall; this report has been optimised for reading on a phone screen.

There are also a small number of printed summaries of the report which will be made available to institutions across the UK and Africa. We are open to requests to post copies of this free report to institutions in the UK (museums, libraries, community organisations, archives etc.) so please get in touch if you would like a copy.

Now that the report has been released, a new and challenging phase of this work has begun. The report concludes with a series of recommendations in areas ranging from staffing to engagement with African communities, with opportunities to develop a more meaningful and inclusive approach to engaging with the African collections at Cambridge.

If you have questions, and would like to get in touch with us email us at: acf@ccc.cam.ac.uk

Eva Namusoke is Senior Curator, African Collections Futures project, The Fitzwilliam Museum.

Related articles:

Introducing Africa Collections Futures

African Collections Futures – University of Cambridge

Uni finds 350,000 African artefacts in storage – BBC