Njabulo Chipangura

My current research interest centres around engaging with the binary of ordering and disordering knowledge within ethnographic museums by critically questioning colonial practices of dispossessing, collecting and containing dislocated ethnographic objects from Africa. I am interested in tracing the mobility of cultural objects from Africa and how they were collected  from their original contexts as a result of colonial violence finding  their way into European ethnographic  museums. I look at how European colonialism was an epistemic project bound up with Enlightenment notions of reason, progress, and modernity, which imagined Europe as the global site of scientific knowledge and set about creating the non-Western world as its mirror. Colonial knowledges produced colonial practices of ordering, which drew upon Linnaean classification, and informed scientific racism, educational curricula, and legal and administrative frameworks. Ethnographic museums in the global north took shape as global repositories of these extracted objects, sites of ordering them according to colonial knowledge, and spaces where the public could acquire knowledge of (and control over) colonised peoples and cultures.  Methodologically, in line with decolonial approaches to knowledge production - I deploy practice in co-production, and co-curation and in building active relationships with, and taking guidance from diaspora and originating  communities. My approach to decolonisation is premised on collaborative provenance research and co-curating exhibitions with diaspora African community members. As such,  I am currently undertaking biographical research on a collection of cultural heritage objects at Manchester Museum that came from Namibia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, South Africa, and Zambia collected by Sir Henry Wellcome in the early 20th C. The objects were distributed by Wellcome Medical History Museum in 1949 and include knives, arrows, mbira, headrests, drums, beaded gourds, marimba, baskets, mortar and pestles, clay pots, sweeping brooms, axes, snuff boxes and beaded baskets. Elsewhere, although other researches have been grappling with decolonising the museum, which has become synonymous with the restitution of objects – my own approach is different, as I posit that restitution is only a small area where the museum needs to be severed from its colonial ties. Instead ethnographic museums must also rethink the colonial knowledges that led them to collect particular objects and to order them in particular ways.

I have carried out collaborative provenance research with a colleague at Ditsong Cultural Museum, Pretoria, South Africa in which we looked at traditional Zulu beads at Manchester Museum collection. The first part of the research saw Motsane Seabela  (Curator of Anthropology at Ditsong Cultural Museum) coming to Manchester Museum in 2022 and we analysed 93 pieces of beads in the living cultures collection. This collection was appropriated from source communities in KwaZulu Natal by different collectors between 1887 - 1930’s and deposited in the museum devoid of context nor meaningful biographies. During the second part of the research, we travelled to Nongoma in KwaZulu Natal for ethnographic research with source communities in August 2022. We were able engage different communities who are still making and using similar beads and by so doing – the spiritual, ceremonial and ritual stories were recorded with a view of filling in absent biographies. A co-curated exhibition was developed as an outcome of this fieldwork which is now showcasing a complete biographical story of the beadwork at Manchester Museum.  Meanwhile, together with colleagues from Kenya and Uganda - we are currently conducting collaborative object biography research on collections with colonial contexts from East Africa that are at Manchester Museum. 

I am also interested in the praxis of decolonising museum materialities by reconfiguring colonial knowledges that led to the collecting of humans remains and their subsequent classification in accordance with tropes of race. I have previously worked at Manchester Museum which part of the University of Manchester as a Curator of Anthropology for 3 years and at the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe (NMMZ) as a curator of archaeology and head of department for 11 years. At NMMZ during this period of my curatorial service I was involved in the Accession Africa Project which was provenance research project of objects that came from Africa and are found in European museums. This collaborative research project was between museums in Namibia, Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe in cooperation with museums in Sweden, Germany, Finland and Switzerland. The other major curatorial project that I undertook working for NMMZ was premised on the discursive analysis of ethnographic objects which were collected and placed in museums during Zimbabwe’s colonial period (1890-1980) devoid of their social biographies. Thus, between 2014- 2016 - I led a team in putting up a new permanent exhibition at Mutare Museum focusing on the traditional aspects of the Eastern Shona people which were conspicuously absent ever since this museum opened in 1964. The production of this exhibition was made possible by a grant that was provided by the Beit Trust which enabled us to carry a 4 months’ ethnographic research towards the making of this new display.  In developing this exhibition – we used an inclusive, participative and experiential approach which was undergird by collaborations between museum curators and the community. Thus, there was shared authority in knowledge production and exhibition development. 

My other research draws from an ongoing anthropological study called “Nursing Nostalgia:  Archival Traces and the Social Lives of Zimbabweans." This is a collaborative research with colleagues at Hull University,  University of Oxford and the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe. This research explores embodied archival practice and traces of material that constitute migrant life specifically, through Zimbabwean nurses in the UK, whose mobilities are shaped by their work and whose lives serve as sites of negotiating black life and hostility. Together we are examining how objects they carry reflect their ideas and experiences of return, and the circulation of the material and non-material in this process. Materiality - in the sense of objects that people carry, is often not considered an important aspect of mobilities in migrant stories. These objects represent how migrants wish to shape their memories of ‘home’; creating a sense in which home is extended and continued in the elsewhere, anchoring and bridging the duality of being here while simultaneously being rooted there. Therefore, we deliberately focus on materials – not as a substitute for human activity but to emphasise ways in which objects extend human activities which enables an examination of how objects are  embed  in experiences and  how they provoke particular responses.