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


    Chipangura, Njabulo, Everest, Sophie, Hawkin, Abigail, Chipangura, Patricia and Mashizha, Raymond (2025) “Bring the Objects out of the Basement!” The Wellcome African Collection at Manchester Museum. African Arts, 58 (1). pp. 10-25. ISSN 1937-2108

    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.
    Item Type: Article
    Keywords: Wellcome African Collection; Manchester Museum;
    Academic Unit: Faculty of Social Sciences > Anthropology
    Item ID: 21510
    Depositing User: Njabulo Chipangura
    Date Deposited: 07 May 2026 13:54
    Journal or Publication Title: African Arts
    Publisher: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press
    Refereed: Yes
    Related URLs:
    Use Licence: This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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