African Collections Futures

MAA cares for the largest and most diverse collections of African artefacts, estimated at up to 137,000 individual items, from two-million-year-old stone tools to twenty-first century artworks. Fifty of the 54 nations in Africa are represented in the collections, but less than 1% of the collections, from only eight of these countries, are on display, which is a little below average for the museum as a whole.

Most of the African objects were acquired by the museum during the British colonial period with much of the material arriving at MAA in the early-mid 20^th century.

The collections include material of high research significance, including the Hierakonpolis Main Deposit material from southern Egypt, critical to understanding early pharaonic kingship. Other significant sites include Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania which has become key to understanding human evolution.

African collections at MAA come from over 700 named collectors, donors or vendors. One of the largest collections, made by Northcote Thomas, a Trinity College graduate and British Government Anthropologist, includes over 3600 objects, mostly from Nigeria, and almost 9500 photographs (including over 7800 unique photographs).

Other major collections were made by Ernest Balfour Haddon who spent 25 years in colonial administration in Uganda; members of missionary societies; and Major Arthur John Newman Tremearne, an Australian soldier and police officer deployed in British military campaigns in South Africa, Nigeria and Ghana.

Some objects have a recorded history of violent acquisition, the best known being the Benin Bronzes at MAA. There are 116 objects linked to the British-led punitive campaign and looting of the Benin Kingdom in 1897 at MAA, making this one of the largest such collections of these artefacts in the UK.

The report also highlights examples from other parts of Africa, some of which require further research. A gold necklace from Ghana is thought to have been looted from Asantehene Kofi Karikari’s palace during the Third Anglo-Asante War of 1873-4, before being purchased in London by a graduate of Girton College, Cambridge, whose family later donated it to the museum in 1918.

There are artefacts associated with the 1868 British punitive expedition to the mountain fortress of Maqdala in Ethiopia at both MAA and the UL. The UL holds a number of manuscripts  including an Abyssinian Bible donated by the widow of Amharic scholar and British colonial officer, C.H. Armbruster.  A note accompanying the bible reads ‘Taken from King Theodore at the storming of Magdala by the officers of H.M. Madras engineers … June 1868.’

Many items at MAA from South Africa are recorded as having been collected as part of the Anglo-Zulu Wars (1879-96) and Eastern Cape Wars of Dispossession (1779-1879).

MAA cares for 180 objects identified as made by Maasai people, among which are six orkataar, or armlets, donated in 1920 to MAA by Sir Frederick John Jackson, a colonial administrator who worked in Kenya and Uganda. These orkataar are passed down from father to son and never removed, sold or given away.

An estimated 100,000 African specimens are held by the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge; while the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences has over 41,000 African rocks, minerals and fossils; and the Cambridge University Herbarium’s ‘World’ collection, which is even more under-researched than other collections, could include up to 50,000 African specimens.

Much of the Zoology and Sedgwick Museums’ material was acquired by British scientific expeditions of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

The Museum of Zoology contains specimens ranging in size from tiny marine molluscs up to the largest African object in the entire University collection – a complete African elephant skeleton.

In 2021, a member of the public helped the Museum of Zoology to establish that a British captain, Gerald Edwin Hamilton Barrett-Hamilton, had collected a specimen of a springhare while deployed at a Boer War concentration camp in what is South Africa today, in 1901.

The Sedgwick Museum’s biggest single contributor of African palaeontological material by far is the Somaliland/British Somaliland Petroleum Company, which accounts for almost half of catalogue records. Most of this material, which includes fish and invertebrate fossils, was acquired in 1930.

The Cambridge University Botanic Garden collections include over 1000 plants endemic to Africa, with many living African plants growing in its glasshouses. Among these are a rare water lily (Nymphaea thermarum) from Rwanda that was reported to be extinct in the wild until last year.

MAA cares for more than 29,000 photographs taken in Africa, including early images of African people from the 1860s. One records a group of women returning from a cemetery in Tlemcen in Algeria.

Over 8800 photographs (including 5720 unique images) linked to Nigeria form part of the collection assembled by Northcote Thomas, some of which featured in an award-winning 2021 exhibition at the Museum.

The ‘return’ of artefacts encompasses loans, repatriation and restitution. Both repatriation and restitution are highly complex processes. University museums like those at Cambridge are not national museums and therefore have greater freedom to repatriate artefacts. Loans of artefacts back to museums in countries of origin, particularly short-term loans of a few years, have been more common types of return from Britain to Africa.

Over the last twenty years, MAA has only received a few claims for the return of artefacts from countries or communities around the world. Since 2017, the Museum and the University have been working towards the repatriation of Benin Kingdom artefacts to Nigeria.

MAA has also signed an accord with a major museum in development, the Edo Museum of West African Arts (opening mid-2025), and will be the first international lender to MOWAA’s exhibitions.

As part of its involvement in the ‘Repositioning the Uganda Museum’ project, in June 2024, MAA returned 32 artefacts and the sacred remains of seven people to the Uganda Museum on a renewable three-year loan, to support collaborative research and consultation on their history, and their future care. The artefacts include spears, drums, pottery, shields, headdresses, and objects used for spiritual practices.

The seven relics, called balongo, are the remains of former ba Ssekabaka (Kings) from the Buganda Kingdom and members of their royal households, and are sacred to the Baganda. In February 1903, the missionary and ethnographer Reverend John Roscoe wrote to the Cambridge anthropologist William Ridgeway:

‘… it must not be known to the public, a man robbed them from one of the houses in which the kings are kept that is the relics, the jaw bones and these bits of the umbilical cords. There has been a row about them and I had great difficulty in clearing the man who did the deed...’

The Uganda Museum is preparing to transfer the balongo to Wamala Tombs in Kampala, which is managed by the Kingdom of Buganda, where the traditional keepers can care for them according to Baganda custom.

The report and wider project encourages researchers, museums professionals and members of the public to ask more questions about the enormous and under-researched African materials at the University of Cambridge.