Can museum visitors throw light on objects that lack a reliable history, description or provenance? Manchester Museum believes they can.

Part of the University of Manchester, the Museum has launched an innovative project space called Africa Hub, where visitors are invited to share any knowledge or perspectives they have on a selection of objects drawn from the Museum’s African collections, some of which have sat in storage for years.

The Museum holds more than 40,000 objects from across Africa, some of which were collected, confiscated or looted during the period of Empire. But like other regional and national collections, key details for some of these objects are missing. The name of the donor or source institution may be known, but museum records are worryingly silent about the object’s community of origin, date or cultural meaning. That’s where the organisers hope the visiting public can help. Manchester calls it taking ‘an honest approach’ to filling gaps in the Museum’s knowledge.

Take, for example, a carved and painted wooden figure of an ibis sitting on a horse included in the exhibition. Curators know it was donated to the Museum in 1976 by Mrs M A Bellhouse. But nothing is known about its maker, what the carving represents and even where it comes from.

Curators hope that visitors willing to share their knowledge and life experience of objects such as this carving of a horse will help kick-start a process enabling the Museum to better understand it’s African collections. This may lead to further requests for restitution; it will certainly result in more positive engagements with diaspora communities. This way, the Museum can develop new ways of sharing and celebrating the cultural heritage of these objects with wider communities.

“Unlike most galleries or exhibitions, which represent the culmination of years of research and collaboration, Africa Hub is the beginning,” said Lucy Edematie, the Museum’s Curator–African Collections from Colonial Contexts. “It builds on work the Museum has already been doing to engage with both diasporic communities and communities in Africa but provides an opportunity to extend this even further. It is a chance to do our thinking in public, with honesty and transparency, and to involve people in that process from the start.”

The Museum hopes visitors will share their feedback and knowledge on any of the objects in the Africa Hub space either directly with Museum staff or by providing written feedback.

Africa Hub draws on the Museum's already impressive experience of co-curation, seen recently with the development of its South Asia Gallery, created in partnership with the British Museum.

In its new African Hub space, the Museum illustrates exactly how greater collaboration with a community of origin can serve to enrich the visitor’s experience and help connect them to the objects on display. So, alongside the unidentified African artefacts in the space, the Museum is also displaying items connected to the Igbo heritage of southeastern Nigeria, items that have been co-curated with Igbo Community Greater Manchester (ICM).

“This collaboration reflects a shared vision rooted in ICM’s dedication to preserving, promoting and sharing the rich cultural heritage of the Igbo people through meaningful cooperation and inclusive engagement,” said Mr Anene Chiegboka, Chairman of ICM.

Manchester’s Africa Hub follows the latest initiative, announced last October, of the Powell-Cotton Museum’s recruitment of new members for its Community Advisory Group. In this second instalment of a museum-wide reinterpretation project, the Powell-Cotton Museum in Birchington, Kent is also seeking out community knowledge and perspectives to create new presentations of Zulu art and artefacts collected by Percy Powell-Cotton in 1935.

Advisory Group members work alongside the Museum’s own team to refresh how Zulu objects in the collection are interpreted, displayed and shared with the public. Njabulo Chipangura, assistant professor of African Anthropology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth is one of the specialists attending their Advisory Group sessions.

Like the curators in Manchester, the Powell-Cotton Museum describes their initiative as just the beginning, with other reinterpretation projects firmly in their sights. Also like Manchester, they are committed to ensuring that community voices continue to shape their Museum’s work. Both initiatives demonstrate the wider benefits of greater collaboration with diasporic and source communities.

Photo: Wooden horse with ibis on its back. Origin, maker and date unknown.

Courtesy of Manchester Museum