Alistair Hardaker | Image: [Front] Portia Tremlett, Curator World Cultures [Back] Sandra Bauza, Assistant Curator, World Cultures (David McHugh)
Exhibition opening 27 May will trace artefacts’ journey from 1890s missionary collection to return to Serowe.
Brighton & Hove Museums has announced the planned repatriation of 45 cultural artefacts from its collection to Serowe, Botswana.
The return is part of a partnership between Brighton & Hove Museums and Khama III Memorial Museum in Botswana.
The museum said relationships were established through the ‘Making African Connections’ project led by the University of Sussex, which undertook collaborative provenance research in 2019 to 2021.
In 2022, Khama III Memorial Museum formally requested the return of the artefacts originally acquired in the late nineteenth century from the Gammangwato region of Botswana.
Objects include a collection of clothing, accessories, hunting implements and domestic items.
The request will be fulfilled with support from the James Henry Green Charitable Trust, a UK charity that preserves and provides access to Colonel James Henry Green’s collection of Burmese textiles, artefacts, and photographs, supporting research and education through Brighton Museum’s Green Centre for World Art.
Brighton & Hove Museums will fulfil this request and contribute to the development of a new permanent exhibition in Serowe, where the items will be displayed for the first time.
The exhibition will trace the journey of the artefacts from their acquisition in the 1890s by Reverend William Charles Willoughby to their return to Botswana. Willoughby, a missionary who lived in Old Palapye at the invitation of Kgosi (Chief) Khama III, worked closely with him as a translator and advisor.
The museum says the objects were likely collected as discards from African Christian families or purchased them from locals, artisans or storekeepers during a period of significant social and political change, before giving them to Brighton Museum in 1899.
In 1895 Khama III travelled to the UK with two other chiefs from the Tswana-speaking regions of southern Africa to petition the British government to maintain Botswana as a protectorate.
Willoughby accompanied the delegation at Khama III’s request.
Portia Tremlett, curator of World Cultures at Brighton & Hove Museums, said the repatriation “epresents an important step in reconnecting these artefacts with the communities, histories and knowledge systems that give them meaning”.
The artefacts are due to be returned in April 2026, with curators from both museums to develop a permanent exhibition to open 27 May 2026.
The opening will be accompanied by a two-day international summit hosted by Khama III Memorial Museum in collaboration with the University of Sussex and the University of Botswana.
A cultural festival inspired by the repatriation initiative will also take place in Serowe to celebrate Botswana’s identity, memory and creativity.
Gase Kediseng, Curator at the Khama III Memorial Museum, said the return of the objects is “an act of restoration”, adding “this process affirms dignity, identity, and material culture, empowering Batswana to tell their own story on their own terms through objects that represent who we were, and who we continue to be.”
