Image: The Ancient Egypt gallery at the Fitzwilliam Museum (University of Cambridge)
A research at the University of Cambridge’s eight museums has detailed around 350,000 African artefacts, alongside recommendations to better surface their history
Thousands of African artefacts have been recorded within the stores and archives of the University of Cambridge’s eight museums, library and gardens.
The new figures come from a report published today which explores African collections at the University, and makes recommendations for their future study.
The ‘African Collections Futures’ report explores Cambridge’s 350,000 African artefacts, stresses the need for provenance research, ethical returns, and collaboration with African communities. Recommendations focus on diversifying staff, improving access, and integrating collections into education and public engagement.
The collections under review cover the nine institutions– eight museums and the Botanic Garden – that make up the University of Cambridge Museums (UCM), the University Library, and less well-known collections such as those in various University departments and affiliated institutions.
The report is written by Dr Eva Namusoke, Senior Curator of African Collections Futures at The Fitzwilliam Museum, one of the university’s eight museums.
The peer-reviewed report was supported by a twelve-member Advisory Group representing different university museums and the Centre of African Studies; as well as archaeology and heritage specialists including individuals at the National Museums of Kenya, Iziko Museums of South Africa, and the Cambridge African Network. Cambridge curators, archivists, and collections managers provided key information.
The report calls the University’s African collections broadly colonial by the period, and labels African contributions to the collections in the form of creative, intellectual and physical labour “largely hidden or overlooked”.
Among the objects noted are nearly 200,00 manuscript fragments found in Egypt now housed at the University Library, an estimated 110,000 archaeological artefacts and 27,300 anthropological items in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Of these, around 17,400 are ancient Egyptian and Sudanese artefacts at The Fitzwilliam Museum. The modern countries with the greatest representation in terms of numbers, visibility, and research exposure in the University collections include Egypt, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, South Africa, and Kenya.
The report says most of the thousands of African artefacts were acquired during the period of British colonisation, using a variety of methods ranging from gifting to purchase, commissioning, excavation, and violent extraction including theft, confiscation and looting.
The report concludes with a list of recommendations informed by the findings of the research. The paper suggests allocating more resources for provenance and collections research, reviewing documentation and cataloguing backlogs of African material across the collections.
It says that over the last twenty years, The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Museum has received only a few claims for the return of artefacts.
ensuring museums and departments have a current repatriation policy and point of contact for enquiries.
The recommendations summarise that the University should “pursue, as much as possible, collaborations with African researchers and communities of origin, and enable opportunities for African people to engage directly with the collections.”
The full report is available to read here.
