350,000 African artefacts found in University of Cambridge collections

The University of Cambridge uncovered an estimated 350,000 African artefacts and manuscripts within its collections, including those held by its eight museums, library, and gardens. These items also encompass human remains, photographs, and natural history specimens.

BBC News, Museums + Heritage, and Varsity Online reported on the research, among other news outlets.

Dr. Eva Namusoke, the senior curator of the Fitzwilliam Museum's African Collections Futures initiative, spent over a year working with the university's curators and archivists to uncover these artefacts. Her research highlights the need for provenance research and ethical returns.

"It is fairly common for large museums not to display most of their collections," Dr. Namusoke said, according to BBC News. "But it was still surprising to see this scale and diversity from the entire African continent and some there for decades and decades."

The project revealed that the majority of the artefacts were acquired during British colonization. Items were found across the university's eight museums and the Botanic Garden, as well as in the University Library and lesser-known collections within various departments and institutions. Despite the vast number of items, the majority of the Africa-related artefacts are not on display.

The artefacts range widely, from Maasai armlets donated by a colonial administrator to a small mammal collected in a Boer War concentration camp. The collections also include medieval Jewish manuscripts and early photographs of African people from the 1860s. Some artefacts were gifted, bought, commissioned, or excavated, while others were stolen, confiscated, or looted.

One significant item is a gold necklace from Ghana held by the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, thought to have been looted from Asantehene Kofi Karikari's palace during the Third Anglo-Asante War of 1873-4. Egypt is the best-represented African country in the university's collections, with tens of thousands of archaeological items and manuscripts. This includes nearly 200,000 manuscript fragments found in Egypt now housed at the University of Cambridge Library.

Dr. Namusoke's report notes how "frustratingly little" is recorded about the skills, expertise, and local knowledge deployed by African workers in gathering the specimens or artefacts, labeling their contributions as "largely hidden or overlooked," as reported by BBC News. She emphasized the significant role of African labor in collecting these items. "There's an example I give from Cameroon from the 1930s where it is clear there is a huge amount of African labour involved," she said. "They tracked and hunted the animals, including Cameroonian men lying on their stomachs for hours on end with test tubes to gather spiders and snails."

Research found that only 1% of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology's estimated 137,000 artefacts are on display. The museum holds an estimated 110,000 archaeological artefacts and 27,300 anthropological items. Additionally, it cares for more than 29,000 photographs, including early images of African people.

The museum returned 39 artefacts to Uganda, as reported by Varsity Online. Trinity College, Cambridge also returned four Aboriginal spears in a repatriation ceremony earlier this year.

The project is part of the University of Cambridge's recent work attempting to address questions about its relationship with colonization and enslavement, including previous exhibitions exploring financial links to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It is also part of Collections-Connections-Communities, a research initiative at the university.

This article was written in collaboration with generative AI company Alchemiq