Paper short abstract:

This paper uses the southern African archive at the Horniman Museum and Gardens to expose how colonial knowledge is still present in displays of African people. It will focus on social justice and decolonial frameworks to argue for new ways to engage with archives, physical and digital.

Paper long abstract:

The Horniman Museum and Gardens holds a vast collection of material culture and animal specimens. The museum opened in 1890 as the vision of Frederick Horniman as an education museum for an impoverished council of London to be taught of the empire and their place within it. While the museum is currently open about their colonial past and focus on community projects they still rely on knowledge gathered during the colonial period when working with the material culture in their collection. This failure can be traced directly to the museum archive – an archive filled with degradation of southern African people, ominous silences and harsh taxonomies that straddle paper and digital archives. I am currently undertaking a Collaborative Doctoral Studentship with the Horniman to find the path of colonial violence in museum archives to museum displays and to propose new ways of engaging with the museum archive with a focus on their South African collections. My work seeks to unpack what the colonial archive is – not a monolithic institution against which we work but fallible and fractured human made attempts at control which can be dismantled. I have now turned to the experimental work of social justice archives, as seen in South Africa and Canada, to build up a malleable museum archive which is accountable to its silences and holds space for differences. This is particularly important to the museums digital archive. This is a work in progress, and I hope to be inspired and challenged by this panel.