“Bring the Objects out of the Basement!”: The Wellcome African Collection at Manchester Museum

Abstract

Manchester Museum (MM), like most museums caring for works from Africa, includes objects with some provenance, but many others that have no collection information at all. MM holdings include more than 300 anthropological objects from Africa that came from the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum (WHMM) dispersal in 1982. The museum is part of the University of Manchester and contains approximately 15,000 African cultural heritage objects that were collected at the height of colonization and wholly connected to the expansion of the British empire to Africa. Further, there are more than 1,000 objects from Africa that are not provenanced.1 These unprovenanced objects do not have any contextual information on where they were collected, apart from labels that only indicate “Africa?” The accompanying question mark on these labels is problematic—and is testament to absent provenance information. Typically, this shows colonial appropriating practices in which collectors did not prioritize context and communities.

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