Relational care in reimaging meanings of African Heritage Objects at Manchester Museum
Wednesday, 15 April 2026
09:30
STIAS, Auditorium
Abstract
The Manchester Museum which is a part of the University of Manchester holds approximately 35,000 ethnographic collections mostly dispossessed from local communities and ordered and categorized according to geographical regions of Africa, the Americas, Oceania, and Asia. The African collection is the largest with over 15 000 provenanced objects and an estimate of 1500 unprovenanced objects. In this paper – I will look at what it means to relationally care African collections from colonial context in view of collaborating with and giving access to diaspora African communities as part of decolonisation. An empirical practice of decolonisation informed by notions of relational care and the disobedient museum will be presented drawn from my own practice and positionality having been the curator of this collection between 2022–2025. I argue that curating with care is not only a way of work but is a theoretical perspective that challenges structural discrimination, sexism, racism, systematic injustices and colonial legacies in museums. Care is also extended in this discussion to look at what it means to care for each other’s pluriversality of epistemologies and ontologies by subverting epistemicides that are still embedded in museums. I will use examples drawn from an object handling workshop that I hosted at Manchester Museum as part of the ‘Being Human’ festival in November 2024. The aim of this workshop was to collaborate with communities in Greater Manchester of African heritage to gather new information about objects of African origin in the collection of Manchester Museum. Thereafter, meanings were reimagined transcending usual anthropological discourses that traditionally treat African objects as timeless representations of cultures of the “other”. Using this workshop as a contact zone of engagement - I present curating as a space of social care that facilitated dialogue and building of active relationships with diaspora communities.
Biography
Dr. Njabulo Chipangura is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology with an interest in empirical ways by which museum practices can be decolonised through epistemic and aesthetic disobedience benchmarked by undoing earlier ways of knowledge production particularly looking at African collections and their representations. He has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, an MA in Museums and Heritage Studies, from the University of the Western Cape, South Africa and a BA Hons in Archaeology , Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies from Midlands State University, Zimbabwe. Njabu has published several research papers that looks at ongoing debates around the coloniality of museums and associated knowledge production and representation practices, to imagine a decolonised museum in Africa. His first co-written book entitled Museums as Agents for Social Change: Collaborative Programmes at the Mutare Museum was published by Routledge in April 2021. Njabu sits on the editorial board of Museum International a widely read journal on museum practices and theory which is published Routledge in collaboration with the International Council of Museums (ICOM). He is also a managing editor on Museum and Society published by University of Leicester Open Journals. Njabu is currently working on a co-edited volume entitled The Museologies of Africa: Rethinking African Museums, Community Inclusion, Living Cultures and Decolonisation which will be published by Routledge in 2026.